The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory

T H E S I T E S O F RO M E

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The Sites of Rome Time, Space, Memory

Edited by DAV I D H . J. L A R M O U R A ND DIANA SPENCER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Oxford University Press 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–921749–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To my mother, Betty Larmour, who from my earliest years taught me how to look at landscape and architecture, and my sister, Liddy, who accompanied me on my first trip to Rome (David Larmour).

To my mother, Maureen Spencer, who first took me to Rome and made its sights a part of my mental furniture, and to Gideon Nisbet, in whose company Rome’s sites live (Diana Spencer).

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Contents Preface Acknowledgements List of figures Abbreviations Notes on contributors Introduction—Roma, recepta: a topography of the imagination David H. J. Larmour and Diana Spencer 1. Rome at a gallop: Livy, on not gazing, jumping, or toppling into the void Diana Spencer 2. ‘In the name of the father’: Ovid’s Theban law Micaela Janan 3. ‘I get around’: sadism, desire, and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal Paul Allen Miller 4. Holes in the body: sites of abjection in Juvenal’s Rome David H. J. Larmour 5. Victim and voyeur: Rome as a character in Tacitus’ Histories 3 Rhiannon Ash 6. The Gates of Janus: Bakhtin and Plutarch’s Roman meta-chronotope Jason Banta 7. Staging Rome: the Renaissance, Rome, and humanism’s classical crisis Jacob Blevins 8. Sizing up Rome, or theorizing the overview Caroline Vout

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61 102

138 168

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271 295

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Contents

9. Ancient Rome for little comrades: the legacy of classical antiquity in Soviet children’s literature Marina Balina 10. The sites and sights of Rome in Fellini’s films: ‘not a human habitation but a psychical entity’ Elena Theodorakopoulos Bibliography General Index Index of Passages Discussed

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385 419 431

Preface The subject of this volume is the topography of Rome, in its broadest sense, as it (re-) appears in time, space, and memory—Rome as the ultimate subject of and model for reception. The play upon ‘site’ and ‘sight’ in the title is intentional, and indicates the central theme of this volume, one which is discussed in detail in the introductory essay: how the visible components of the city function as both ‘sites’ and ‘sights’ of Rome. The Sites of Rome takes the position that attempting to understand ‘Rome’ requires us to think in terms of polyphony (the teeming masses, the declamation, the multiplicity of meaning that a city generates) and paradox. It also conjures up the city as palimpsest—a continuously overwritten ‘document’—and the simultaneous threat, anonymity, and display of the panopticon. The texts that form the basis of the assembled readings exhibit a broad chronological sweep that reflects Rome’s persistence as an object and location of interest, and the introductory essay examines the implications of this approach in some detail. The volume covers ground from the undifferentiated landscapes and already intensely urban wildernesses imagined by Livy and Plutarch, to the teeming streets and monumental vistas conjured up by Horace and Juvenal, and the ironies of Ovid’s disturbing rus in urbe. They also dig into the psychological depths of the imperial city through the contemplation of more ostentatiously alternative cityscapes, such as Ovid’s Thebes, Plutarch’s Numan Rome, and Juvenal’s Troy. Moving into the Renaissance and Modern periods, the essayists consider the self-conscious overtones of vistas and map-making from the hills and on stage, of Peter the Great’s love of Rome, of the monologic experiments of Soviet education, and of the film-maker’s lens. The Sites of Rome is intended as a contribution to several areas of scholarly enterprise, such as Classics and the Classical Tradition, Reception Studies, the literary history of Rome, and Cultural Studies, but also to the growing body of research which ties identity, subjectivity, and memory to physical space and, in particular, to urban topography. Its interdisciplinarity has been enhanced enormously

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Preface

by discussions with, and feedback from colleagues in non-classical subject areas, from architects and art historians, through to specialists in modern languages. This also holds true for our dialogue with our contributors, and we would like to thank them all—they have engaged enthusiastically and imaginatively with our purpose in putting this volume together.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce published information: the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY (Fig. 6); the Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery (Figs 10 and 11); the British Film Institute (who helped us to source Figs 15–17); and Metro Goldwyn Mayer (Figs 15 and 17). We are especially fortunate to have had professional assistance in drawing up our maps—from Henry Buglass (graphic artist, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham) and Sharada Price (M.A. student in Classics, Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Texas Tech University). Additionally, we wish to thank Barbara McManus and the Vroma Project (<www.vroma.org>) for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Lacus Curtius (Fig. 4), and Genevieve Nehrt, for going to St Petersburg, and presenting us with a wonderful set of photographs (Figs 12–14). Also, we are indebted to Gideon Nisbet for the seemingly thankless task of proof-checking, in particular of the texts, translations, and biblogrphy; and to OUP’s readers, for acute and astute feedback throughout. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Hilary O’Shea, Jenny Wagstaffe, and Kathleen McLaughlin, alongside all those who helped us at OUP. Hilary’s efforts were instrumental in gaining financial support for the photographic illustrations, and Jenny’s prompt and detailed email responses frequently left us speechless with admiration. David Larmour would like to thank: Peter Barta for his stimulating on-site tours of such cityscapes as Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Vienna and for sharing his theories of urban space; l’UFR de Latin, Paris IV, for allowing him access to the library on several occasions; and Jacqueline Dangel, Miche`le Ducos, Luc Duret, and Alexandre Grandazzi for generously offering their insights into Roman topography and culture. Finally, he is grateful to President Jon Whitmore, Provost William Marcy, Dean Jane Winer and Frederick Suppe, Chair of the Dept. of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, all at Texas Tech University, for facilitating the research necessary for this project through research funding and sabbatical leaves.

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Acknowledgements

Diana Spencer would like to thank: Rem Koolhaas, for allowing the unpublished ‘R/OS_MM’ manual to be cited, and enabling a copy to be at hand; Indra Kagis McEwen, for conversations on the intellectual and theoretical grounding of this project; and Nicholas Olsberg for his polemical and thought-provoking site-visit to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles—a highlight of the US National Committee for the History of Art’s 2006 conference Past Perfected which, via the Getty Foundation, generously funded her transatlantic visit and participation. In addition, a research travel support grant and a term’s research leave, both provided by the School of Historical Studies at the University of Birmingham, were invaluable in kickstarting this project and keeping up its momentum. Finally, Diana is indebted to Siobhan McElduff for an inspiring road-trip to that new Rome: Las Vegas.

List of figures Fig. 1 Ancient Rome: a synchronic overview (Henry Buglass).

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Fig. 2 The Forum Romanum, Palatine, and Capitoline hills—late first century bce/first century ce (Henry Buglass).

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Fig. 3 Forum Romanum: overview. Photo: Diana Spencer.

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Fig. 4 Lacus Curtius: a possible reconstruction (courtesy of the VRoma Project: <www.vroma.org>, accessed 28 February 2007).

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Fig. 5 View NW from the Lacus Curtius. Photo: Diana Spencer.

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Fig. 6 Ernst Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz (1914). Copyright and image source: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 7 Juvenal’s city sites/sights (Sharada Price and Henry Buglass).

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Fig. 8 The Campus Martius—Augustan era (Henry Buglass).

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Fig. 9 Adaptation of a view of Rome by Ligorio. Photo: after Braun (1575: no. 49).

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Fig. 10 Samuel Palmer, A View of Ancient Rome, 1838. Photo: Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery.

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Fig. 11 Samuel Palmer, A View of Modern Rome after Carnival, 1838. Photo: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

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Fig. 12 The Summer Gardens, St Petersburg. Photo: Genevieve Nehrt.

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Fig. 13 The Bronze Horseman, St Petersburg. Photo: Genevieve Nehrt.

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Fig. 14 St Isaac’s Cathedral, St Petersburg (1818–58). Photo: Genevieve Nehrt.

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Fig. 15 Feasting Romans: the ‘Noantri’ sequence in Roma. Source: BFI; copyright: MGM—Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

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Fig. 16 The closing panorama: Rome: Open City [Roma Citta` Aperta]. Source: BFI.

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List of figures

Fig. 17 The motorcyclists: the end of Roma. Source: BFI; copyright: MGM—Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

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Fig. 18 Rome and EUR (Henry Buglass).

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Abbreviations Abbreviations of journals follow the conventions in L’Anne´e philologique; abbreviations of the titles of classical works follow standard practice. LTUR

Steinby, E. M. (ed.) (1993–2000), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, 6 vols (Rome: Edizioni Quasar).

OLD

Glare, P. G. W. (ed.) (1982), Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Notes on contributors Rhiannon Ash is Fellow in Classics at Merton College, University of Oxford Marina Balina is Professor of Russian and German at Illinois Wesleyan University Jason Banta is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Notre Dame Jacob Blevins is Associate Professor of English at McNeese State University Micaela Janan is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University David H. J. Larmour is Professor of Classics at Texas Tech University Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of South Carolina Diana Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham Elena Theodorakopoulos is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham Caroline Vout is University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Christ’s College

Introduction—Roma, recepta: a topography of the imagination* David H. J. Larmour and Diana Spencer

Exaudi, regina tui pulcherrima mundi, inter sidereos, Roma, recepta polos; exaudi, genetrix hominum genetrixque deorum, non procul a caelo per tua templa sumus: te canimus semperque, sinent dum fata, canemus, sospes nemo potest immemor esse tui. [...] urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat. Listen, Queen, who is the fairest in your world, amidst the starry skies Rome is made welcome; listen, mother of men and mother of gods, we are not so far from heaven on account of your temples: it is you whom we celebrate in song and shall, while fate allows, forever celebrate; no-one can be safe who is forgetful of you . . . you have made a city out of what was formerly the whole world. Rutilius Namatianus, De reditu suo 1.47–52, 66

The subject of this volume is the topography of Rome in its broadest sense, as a persistent present in the time, space, and memory of Western consciousness. Why Rome? Since the Italian Renaissance, Rome has occupied and engaged the Western imagination in a manner unparalleled by any other city, but even in the classical * We would like to thank OUP’s readers, in particular, for their advice and suggestions, and Gideon Nisbet for critiques of successive drafts.

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The Sites of Rome

city, the persistence of past layers of urban form continued to dominate each phase of development.1 The Roman practice of adapting or adding to existing structures and sites, rather than demolishing them in the manner whose consequences are so visible in Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Chicago, or Shanghai, has bequeathed to the eternal city a unique and paradigmatic intertextual richness and complexity. For a start, Rome occupies a cultural primacy as urban archetype in the Western imagination because of its roˆle as head-of-empire and world city, or ‘cosmopolis’ as Edwards and Woolf (2003a) typify it. In classical usage, this is exempliWed in the slippage between city and pan-Mediterranean empire that the name Rome both connotes and denotes (and this is dramatically diVerent from the dynamics of other, earlier, city-and-empire models). Secondly, the rapid changes in urbanization that characterize the Wfteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe draw much of their morphology and iconography from intellectual and archaeological investigations into Rome’s past, and from the ruinous and deceptively marmoreal and monumental qualities of the classical city that was emerging and energizing the Renaissance imagination. This vision of a classical Rome which somehow excludes the squalor and mess that the ‘real’ ancient city would have contained was inevitable because of the monumental nature of what had survived. Only the really solid and huge structures persisted enough to make signiWcant, if fragmentary, statements about the city they seemed to represent.2 They gave rise to a sense that Rome somehow comprised only what was grand, marble, and magniWcent, but, at the same time, was also a city that contained 1 Gowing (2005), who charts the persistence of the Republic in memory during the Imperial era, comments as follows (132): ‘On a purely practical level it was impossible in the period under discussion to avoid reminders of pre-imperial Rome. It is a mark of the Roman veneration for the past and for tradition that older buildings and monuments were seldom deliberately destroyed to make way for the new. Rather, new buildings were squeezed in to sit cheek by jowl with their predecessors, old ones regularly rebuilt or refurbished.’ 2 This has much in common with Resina’s term ‘after-image’, which in speciWc connection with the scopic apprehension of the city denotes: ‘a visual sensation that lingers after the stimulus that provoked it has disappeared, and opens the idea of ‘‘image’’ to a cluster of theoretical possibilities based on temporal displacement, sequentiality, supersession, and engagement’ (2003b: 1).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

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all its pasts simultaneously, that is, a palimpsest.3 This meant that a Renaissance ‘eye’, knowing the places and monuments that literary texts mentioned, was always likely to identify a composite classical city which was the sum of its greatest elements. This had the eVect that, once a site/sight was ‘designated’, its cultural value was frontloaded into the name and what that signiWed, rather than into a quest to fragment the remains further, so that if one has found the Domus Aurea, the impulse to deconstruct the already incomplete site/sight into Neronian and Flavian elements tends to dwindle. Moreover, as famously happened with the Laocoon, signiWcant named sites then ‘attract’ the identities of other Wnds.4 Rome’s continuing vitality as metaphor for cultural and military imperialism, cosmopolis, decline, and triumph ensures its persistence in the imagery and even symbolic capital of subsequent urban planning. We propose that Wnding out how to balance a coherent urban ‘legend’ against the fragmentary, messy, and lived experience of being in the city is as much a concern of ancient Rome as it is of the ‘rediscovered’ Rome of the Renaissance or of successive and modern and postmodern cosmopoleis. The position of Rome as the rediscovered object of an increasing variety of refracting gazes has, in addition, made it a city that exhibits a unique susceptibility to exist synchronously and symbiotically in successive texts and eras. In the words of Leonard Barkan, Rome’s simultaneity ‘becomes a kind of aporia, a space in which the later culture derives inspiration and self-awareness’.5 This quality makes The Sites of Rome not just a study of how Rome’s archetypal characteristics continue to inhabit and give meaning to the Western urban psyche but also a case study of the phenomenon of reception. From its textual beginnings, the meaning of Rome has been generated by its symbolic value as a mythic city of predestined exiles, a city ‘playing on all its pasts’, to quote de Certeau, for which the notion of home is repeatedly reformulated and scrutinized, particularly at moments of cultural 3 Duret and Ne´raudau (2001) coin a series of useful concepts for understanding the palimpsestic nature of Rome, including: ville-Phe´nix (16; 402) and ville-muse´e (279–316). Their study highlights the coexistence of Vetus Roma and Noua Urbs (e.g. 60–1). 4 For suggestive parallels to the Renaissance tendency to archaeology-asnomenclature, see e.g. Kinney (1990) and MacDonald and Pinto (1995). 5 Barkan (1991: 14).

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The Sites of Rome

crisis.6 ‘Rome’, then, is all about reception; but ‘reception’ itself turns out to be all about Rome already. The Sites of Rome foregrounds the dialogic relation of ‘Rome’ and ‘reception’, and unpicks the genealogies which lend reception studies its contemporary signiWcance. As the essays gathered here reveal, from earliest times, Roma was always already recepta in both the physical and the Wgurative sense.7 Investigating what Rome means in an ongoing sense means rethinking our approach to classical texts (literary, visual, and material). In The Sites of Rome, our authors situate texts within the critical discourses that generate ‘canonicity’ and explore how and why reading Rome backwards through modern perspectives matters. They situate texts and readers alike within a palimpsest of cultural contexts, exploring the relationship between texts that respond to and refract urban landmarks and spaces (and in turn create ideograms of the city),8 and pursuing the implications of reception at the inception of what has so often and retroactively been framed as the Classical Tradition.9 The last two decades in particular have seen an enormous growth of interest in what the Situationist movement termed the psychogeographies of urban form.10 Drawing on nineteenth- and 6 See de Certeau (1984: 91). On the reformulations of the Roman foundation myth over the centuries, see Grandazzi (1997). 7 We are particularly interested in the OLD deWnitions: (1) ‘made welcome’; (2) ‘admitted’; (3) ‘received’; (8) ‘established’, ‘adopted in practice’. 8 Cf. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘authorial refraction’ as elucidated by Emerson and Holquist in their edition of The Dialogic Imagination: ‘Every word is like a ray of light on a trajectory to both an object and a receiver. Both paths are strewn with previous claims that slow up, distort, refract the intention of the word. A semantic ‘‘spectral dispersion’’ occurs . . . before the word reaches the object, in the ‘‘occupied territory’’ surrounding the object. In any novelistic prose one can trace . . . the ‘‘angle of refraction’’ of authorial discourse as it passes through other voices, or voice- and characterzones. But there are other refracting media as well, including that mass of alien words present not in the object but in the consciousness of the listener’ Bakhtin (1981: 432). 9 The teleological implications of ‘tradition’ prioritize a notion of iconic Roman sites and sights, and Wx their relationship from ‘then’ to ‘now’. Koolhaas et al. 2000: 8.08 goes a long way towards undermining this simplistic narratology, but perhaps underestimates the issue raised by Le Corbusier (1927), which is that the Roman franchise operates most successfully away from ‘Head OYce’. R/OS_MM’s ‘Preference Summary’ section (Koolhaas et al. 2000: 6.04–6.09) mitigates against this underestimation to some extent. 10 As deWned in Internationale situationniste 1 1958, ‘psychogeography’ refers to the eVect of geographical setting on the mood and behaviour of individuals Cf. ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, in Internationale situationniste 1 1958.

Introduction—Roma, recepta

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twentieth-century philosophical investigation into the city as a humane model, recent scholarship from a wide range of disciplines has begun to tease out the roˆle of Rome as the locus classicus—both a city and an idea of ‘the City’. Catharine Edwards’s groundbreaking study Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (1996) is perhaps the best example of this trend within classical scholarship.11 In the theory and practice of twentieth-century architecture, Rome’s symbolic position continues to inform the most radical thinking. This is most clearly evident in Le Corbusier’s highly inXuential manifesto for a synthesis of form and function in modernism, in which his section on architecture commences with ‘The Lesson of Rome’ (1927: 139–61). What does Le Corbusier’s classical Rome oVer? ‘Absence of verbosity, good arrangement, a single idea, daring and unity in construction, the use of elementary shapes. A sane morality’ (1927: 146–7). But the polyphonous jumble of the multilayered ‘modern’ city is a diVerent matter: ‘Rome is a bazaar where everything is sold. All the utensils of the life of a race have remained there—the child’s toy, the soldier’s weapons, the ecclesiastical old clothes, the bidets of the Borgias and the adventurer’s plumes . . . The lesson of Rome is for wise men, for those who know and can appreciate, who can resist and can verify’ (1927: 141, 161).12 Le Corbusier’s vision of classical Rome is, ultimately, a paradox: it is characterized by spatial organization, unity of operation, and planning, yet it is only in cities that are not Rome that this stripped-bare matrix of urban identity could be eVectively expressed—Rome itself was too cluttered.13 This paradox gains momentum in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s study of Las Vegas. 11 See also e.g. Patterson’s collection (1984); Leach (1988); Purcell (1992); Favro (1996); Edwards (1999); Duret and Ne´raudau (2001). Even Rykwert (2000) on cities and their future is deeply indebted to his 1988 exposition of ancient urban form. For a detailed and thought-provoking study of how cultural tourism is generated and generative, see San Juan (2001). Cf. the on-going impact of philosophical, aesthetic, and aetiological strategies deployed by e.g. Freud, Benjamin, Baudelaire, Goethe, Montaigne, Gibbon, Winckelmann, Byron, and Eliot. 12 In contrast to his nitty-gritty formulation of Rome as bazaar, Le Corbusier deWnes the Parthenon (his Greek touchstone) as ‘the apogee of . . . pure creation of the mind’ (1927: 202). 13 Of course, as more recent work on the classical city has made clear, Le Corbusier’s comment (1927: 170) that his use of ‘Roman’ as a designator for classical space is both ahistorical and, to a large extent, mythopoetic needs to be taken very seriously.

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The Sites of Rome

Here, Las Vegas and Rome are paralleled: ‘Each city is an archetype rather than a prototype, an exaggerated example from which to derive lessons for the typical’ (1977: 18). In the years that followed the collaborative Yale project, the burgeoning study of ‘visual culture’ has brought into much wider currency the critical terminology of panopticon, palimpsest, mapping, pathway, axis, point of view, and perspective.14 That the metropolis is emblematic of the collision of voices and views, and of the Xoating subject, is something of a commonplace in twentieth-century critical discourse; as our opening comments suggest, we now Wnd that evocations of Rome and its urban imagery as palimpsestic have rapidly approached the status of cliche´. The ongoing Harvard Project on the City takes ‘Rome’ not just as a symbol or an archetype, but as an ideal generic template for urban form. ‘R/OS_MM’ (an unpublished report on the place of Rome in this project) pushes this idea to its extreme (for now) to produce Rome-as-semiotics: ‘as a Xexible system, which actively uses a generic architecture as both a tool and a strategy, to achieve and enforce cultural dominance’.15 In this introductory essay, we set out to explore how The Sites of Rome contributes not just to our understanding of the individual Wgures and texts that are our subjects but also to a broader, holistic understanding of the place of ‘Rome’ in Classics and its signiWcance in Western thought. Our authors face up to the task of reinvigorating the symbolic meaning of ‘Rome’, whether as an archetype of, or as a catalyst for, changing our understanding of the interrelationship of cities, identity, and culture. The play upon the homophones ‘site’ and ‘sight’ in the title indicates a primary concern of all the contributors: how the visible components of the city—its hills and monuments, the Tiber, the Fora and the Colosseum—function as both ‘sites’ and ‘sights’ of Rome in 14 The Panopticon, a prison design Wrst conceived in the eighteenth century by Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Wgures signiWcantly in Foucault (1995: 195–228) (a study of the eVects upon the individual of a state of conscious and permanent visibility). A ‘machine’ for total surveillance, the structure of the Panopticon ensured that all prisoners were aware that they could be observed at all times, but could never tell when and whether they were in fact under observation. The observer/guard, by contrast, was capable of seeing everything all the time, but was never the object of any gaze. 15 Koolhaas et al. (2000: 8.08). This unpublished ‘manual’ for the ‘Roman Operating System 2000’ is summarized, brieXy, in Koolhaas et al. (2001: 10–23).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

7

various texts. Aware of the kaleidoscopic qualities of urban discourse, each essay in this collection surveys the memory-laden urban space of the ‘eternal city’ from the perspective of a particular set of texts or artefacts, but always in a way that oVers Xeeting glimpses, sideways glances, and unexpected angles which serve to open up this most enduring of cities as a space deWned by fragmentation, contradiction, and instability—indeed, the city as metatext—in its widest possible sense.16 Reading ‘Rome’ after Barkan, our contributors pursue the city’s susceptibility to be positioned at the intersection of an almost dizzying range of perspectives. To write ‘Rome’ is to conjure up and with a city whose characterization by Tibullus as the urbs aeterna barely begins to sketch out the bewildering variety of meanings that exist concurrently in all attempts to engage with the city and its classical past(s).17 Rome, we suggest, is a city forever (de)limited by its successive iterations of topography as a function of (Western) collective memory—a reiWed echo of its own reception.18 The title of this collection, then, also points up a further issue that has a signiWcant impact on how we experience Rome—namely, the ways in which the weight of historical, cultural, and ideological grauitas that bears down upon a space once it is designated a sight/ site is translated onto the act and experience of viewing, as well as onto the spectator and the position from which she or he does the viewing. This process is crucial to the cognitive complexities of translating pictures, monuments, and dimensional spaces into intelligible experience (and how ‘experience’ models the spatial poetics of texts) and it Wgures in the concerns of all of our contributors. 16 In this, we also look back to de Certeau (1984: 91–3), a now poignant discussion of New York’s World Trade Centre as a paradigm for the kinds of Wctive and artiWcial perspectives that generate order and rank in cities. 17 Tibullus (2.5.23) coins the phrase (as far as we know), but in Cicero’s Pro Rabirio we Wnd the idea given structure when he characterizes the only threat to Rome’s eternity as devastation from within (33). Hardie (1992: 61) discusses the poetic fallout in Augustan Rome. 18 For Rome as mnemonic topography, see e.g. Yates (1966: 17–41); Vasaly (1993: 15–39); Edwards (1996: 27–43); Small (1997: 101–5) and passim; Spencer (2005). For detailed contemplation of the Roman street from ancient to modern times, see Gruet (2006). On the relationships between texts, houses, and memory at Rome, see e.g. Wiseman (1994), Bergmann (1994) (discussing Pompeii), and Baroin (1998). For an overview of Rome’s persistence and dialogic qualities, see e.g. Purcell (1992); for a detailed position-statement, Edwards (1996: 1–26).

8

The Sites of Rome

As Mary Jaeger observes: ‘We need terminology that extends beyond the visual to include the entire spatial experience of encountering a monument.’19 In her terms, we see Rome as the quintessential urban monumentum—it ‘occupies physical space and creates metaphorical space, . . . author and reader traverse these spaces . . . [and] a monumentum is situated in space and gives meaning to the space in which it stands’.20 This in turn echoes de Certeau’s characterization of the patterns that become established when we walk, ostensibly without purpose, in the city. He suggests that we impose: ‘ ‘‘a symbolic order of the unconscious’’ ’.21 By focusing attention on ‘visual culture’, the wordplay in our title also locates this collection within one of the most productive scholarly waves unleashed by what we know—albeit in a necessarily fragmentary and incomplete way—as postmodernism. This ‘new arena’, in the words of Irit RogoV, oVers the possibility of ‘unframing’ discussions of presences and absences, invisibility and stereotypes, desires, reiWcations and objectiWcations from the disciplinary Welds—art history, Wlm studies, mass media and communications, theoretical articulations of vision, spectatorship and the power relations which animate the arena we call the Weld of vision—which Wrst articulated their status as texts and objects. In this way we unframe them from a set of conventional values as either highly valued or highly marginalized or outside the scope of sanctioned vision altogether.22

Hence, most of the essays in this volume, while treating diVerent texts and artefacts from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, seek to engage the visual framing of Rome within texts that re-present the physical reality of the cityscape, forcing their audience to take a step 19 Jaeger (1997: 26), discussing Livy. Evaluating modern Italian responses to fascist appropriation of monumentality, von Henneberg comments that: ‘artifacts, names and spaces hold no universal meaning . . . The path to memory is slippery, particularly in countries where stories about the past have been repressed or submerged for more than a generation’ (2004: 41). 20 Jaeger (1997: 26), describing Livy’s text as a monumentum. 21 de Certeau (1984: 102), citing Emile Benveniste. In their study of ‘urbanism and metamorphoses’ in Rome, Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 15–16) invite the reader to walk through the city and the text simultaneously. Turchi (2004) provides a wideranging collection of maps which illustrate the centrality of map-making to cultural identity (e.g., he includes Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9 th Avenue, at 138). 22 RogoV (2000: 29, 31).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

9

backwards to experience the reality eVect on oVer. Drawing upon a wide diversity of critical methodologies, the essays are united by their reliance on dialogue and dialectic and by their exploration of gaps, voids, and Wssures—in landscape and topography, in narrative and subjectivity. Following upon Freud’s deployment of Rome as a model for the unconscious, contributors bring Lacan, Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Benjamin (among others) to bear upon the texts they examine. The shifting positions of spectatorship, the experience of ‘double vision’, and the phenomenon of the visual palimpsest all feature prominently, amid a general interest in lack of closure and the contestation of meaning in this most remarkable of urban, public spaces. In 1958, Architectural Review’s ‘Marginalia’ commented on the relationship between texts and cities with the observation that: This microclimatology of the psyche is something to which every towndweller can testify, and in a city like Paris, whose very street-names are part of Western culture, it is a more than personal aVair—that pioneer document of psychogeography, Andre´ Breton’s Nuit du Tournesol, which ought on the face of it to be an entirely private exercise in erotic topography, can be read with understanding, even by those who have never visited Paris.23

The term ‘psychogeography’ is one which has important implications for The Sites of Rome—it highlights the interplay between space, culture, and psyche within which our contributors explore Rome as a place for negotiating ideological and psychological conXict.24 23 Architectural Review, 124/738 (July) 1958: 1. 24 Despite its mid-twentieth-century generation and close and explicit self-connexion with the cultural milieu of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, psychogeography (and the related de´rive) is very much indebted to the nineteenth-century concept of the Xaˆneur, via e.g. Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire: see Benjamin (1999: 168–74), on the Xaˆneur vs. the urban crowd; (1999: 214–15, 231–2), on the impact of cinema and mass production as generators of shock and catharsis; and (1978). On Benjamin in these terms, see e.g. Gilloch (1996: 67–9). A process of self-conscious alienation from the ideological machinery of the capitalist city (and Paris in particular) in the wake of intense change is at the heart of Situationism’s concern with psychogeography. In the transformation of Rome in the Wrst centuries bce and ce we see a society undergoing a revolution echoed in twentieth-century culture and politics. Corbeill (2002), on how walking enacts ideology in Republican Rome, thinks hard about how being a pedestrian is politicized; cf. Bell (2004: 199–248) on Cicero and spectacle; Fredrick (2002b) explores how shifting the kinds of and access to spaces around the body is important, and in doing so provides a model for thinking about movement as socio-cultural metaphor. See also n. 101, below.

10

The Sites of Rome

The texts that form the basis of these readings exhibit a broad chronological sweep that reXects Rome’s persistence as an object and location of interest. The ten contributions dig into the psychological strata of successive Romes, from the Augustan and Imperial urbs (already a reXexive reXection of its own phantasmagorical past and of other unquiet urban ghosts—Thebes, Sparta, Troy) through to twentieth-century modernity. The Renaissance emerges as an experiential turning point within this episodic narrative. Barkan’s deployment of what he terms ‘archaeological synchrony’ (1991: 14) to understand how the Renaissance imagination fashions a monocultural ‘classical’ past also has important implications for the position of ‘Rome’ in our collection. As he suggests, the experience of simultaneity which ‘past’ and ‘present’ Romes acquired in that historical moment continues to enforce diVerence in (post-)modernity.25 Rome both appears to be, and is, ‘ours’; but it can only be part of what we are because we continue to remodel and rearticulate what it means in our own image.26 In these readings, Rome is always an object of looking and the gaze but is also Wgured in many other ways: as a character or spectator; as the human body or the mind; as unmarked space or semiotic overload; as ruin and emblem of decay, or site of renovation and source of rejuvenation; as arena, sewer, battleWeld, theme-park, or museum. These approaches focus on the contrasts and contradictions, polarities and paradoxes, and various oppositional formations (central vs. marginal, republican vs. imperial, outside vs. inside, new vs. old) which deWne Roman spectatorship (the act of looking in a manner coloured and/or deWned by Rome) in the texts under consideration. These double visions are intricately bound up with the experience of imperialism, which irrevocably changes the spaces and subjectivity not only of the colonized but of the colonizer as well.27 25 A good instance is provided by the magazine Vasco, 9 (2006), devoted to ‘Rome diVe´rente’, whose editorial speaks of palimpsests, traces, and conspicuous consumption. 26 Porter (2005) oVers an entertaining and lucid exploration of the impact of the name ‘Classics’ on the study of Greco-Roman antiquity, and (increasingly) traditions of its reception. This is particularly important as a position-statement for the discipline in the twenty-Wrst century. 27 On the question of whether the term ‘imperialism’ is an appropriate one to use in describing the Roman Empire, see the judicious discussion by Champion (2004: 8–10).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

11

Postcolonial criticism makes a fundamental distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’: a space becomes a place once it is deWned—by the imposition of boundaries or its inclusion on a map—and, most importantly, when it is named. To name a place is to assert discursive control, so that what was previously an unmarked and unseparated space is now a site quilted into a fabric of visual meaning: the social subject no longer simply takes in what is seen there as purely visual data, but is located along with that place in a vast cultural and ideological horizon.28 Taking a position implies the imposition of a wide range of authoritative and ideational hegemonies, and how we operate and are operated on by them is related, we suggest, to hermeneutics—as Barkan deWnes it: ‘an explicit means of linking the rules of psychic behaviour to the history of cultural interpretation’.29 Hence, when we think about ‘seeing’ (the gaze) we are also making decisions about taxonomy, perspective, and value that have a signiWcant impact on our point of view (where we think we are looking from, and how the singularity of our position relates to the dimensionality of the object of our gaze), and on our perspective (the act of capturing the object of our gaze within a mimetic reality in which vertical and horizontal axes are hugely signiWcant, and the object is relationally experienced vis-a`-vis our position).30 By being named, a Roman site in particular stands metonymically for the processes of expansion, conquest, or decline that have—or are ‘seen’ to have—transformed it: the renovation and extension of the Republican Forum Romanum by Augustus and his successors is a We take the view here that the beneWts that can be derived from the insights of contemporary postcolonial theory and criticism, with regard to furthering our understanding of the Roman imperial experience among all its ‘subjects’, outweigh the potential for misunderstanding which inevitably arises when any quintessentially modern terms are employed to discuss the ancient world. Moreover, such an application of contemporary theory can make explicit the intellectual tensions, uncertainty, and distancing techniques that energize our reception of Rome. 28 In de Certeau’s terms: ‘The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a Weld of programmed and regulated operations’ (1984: 95). 29 Barkan (1991: 18). 30 Fredrick (2002a) (in particular, essays by Barton, Fredrick, and Sharrock) deals with the gaze from a variety of angles. Fredrick is keen to emphasize the signiWcance of relationships between the body and urban spectacle. Dubbini (2002: 186–209) (‘Gazing at the Metropolis’) emphasizes the intersection between individual eyes and technologies of the gaze that characterize nineteenth-century urban sights.

12

The Sites of Rome

prime example of this. By being ‘visualized’ (in words, images, or symbols), given an ideational quality, and even reiWed, narratological processes are also being invoked that have a signiWcant impact on how ‘Rome’ and the Past colonize successive ‘present’ times, from the Republican city through to the present day.31 Thus, our interest is not only in the city as part of the landscape—the physical, literary, and ideological landscape of Rome—but also in the landscaping of the city. Exploring this duality leads us to consider Rome’s persistent inXuence over Western cultural mnemonics, and how this in turn aVects the kinds of authority embedded in postcolonial self-fashioning. We speculate upon the position of Rome within the cultural relations that produce the twenty-Wrst-century Self, and its impact on the ‘split subjectivity’ delineated by Lacan and Kristeva—whereby Rome’s symbolic and semiotic values are at war.32 In these terms, this volume also implicitly returns to Walter Benjamin’s famous apothegm: ‘there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism’. By setting this maxim against the comment with which he introduces it—‘whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate’—we are encouraged to question the extent to which it is useful, or even feasible, to try to read ‘Rome’ outside the parameters Wxed by our position as not just its successors, its inventors, and its critics, but also its colonial subjects.33 In the light of developments in postcolonial studies, we may still suspect that even as we recognize its existence, stepping outside the frame imposed by Rome is not, within the Western tradition at least, achievable—subject to ‘Rome’, we 31 As Fantham observes of Propertius, he ‘has let his image of Rome be dominated by groves and grottoes and waters that outbid the glitter and luxury of the new Augustan city’ (1997: 135). 32 Freud initiates modern theories of the split subject, something already given expression in many nineteenth-century novels of the fractured self (by Mary Shelley, Dostoyevsky, and others), and these are then elaborated by Lacan, whose most inXuential conclusion is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Consequently, the system of meanings and identities which produces subjectivity—the Symbolic Order—is always derivative and subjects are doomed to exist only in the zone between Symbolic and Imaginary, where tension, ambiguity, and contradiction hold sway. See Lacan (1977: 17). 33 Benjamin (1999: 248).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

13

continue to be complicit in its cultural authority.34 We stake out our subjectivity in opposition to a ‘Rome’ which is already generative of Western identity and enforces itself as a term of reference for the Western imagination; our diVerence is already a dependence. The complexity of the power dynamics of our position vis-a`-vis Rome is, of course, underscored by our continuing acknowledgement that Rome itself both appropriated and was also transformed by the cultures it conquered. There is irony here (in abundance) if we want it, but no possibility of ironic detachment. W. J. T. Mitchell poses the following question with regard to landscape: Is it possible that landscape, understood as the historical ‘invention’ of a new visual/pictorial medium, is integrally connected with imperialism? Certainly the roll call of major ‘originating’ movements in landscape painting—China, Japan, Rome, seventeenth-century Holland and France, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain—makes the question hard to avoid.35

In his collection of essays, Landscape and Power, Mitchell treats landscape as a ‘dynamic medium’ and advocates moving beyond ‘Wxed genres (sublime, beautiful, picturesque, pastoral), Wxed media (literature, painting, photography), or Wxed places treated as objects for visual contemplation or interpretation’ in order to examine how landscape ‘circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity’.36 One of the most striking 34 That colonialism operates on the ground of subjectivity is one of the conclusions of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1967), which marked a fundamental shift in consciousness among both colonized and colonizer: ‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all the attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘‘In reality, who am I?’’ ’ (1967: 200). We can consider, for instance, the cultural recovery project of Greek intellectuals—covered by the term ‘The Second Sophistic’—as an attempt to answer this question. Is de-colonization ever possible? Spivak (1999) oVers a useful discussion of positionality and postcolonial theory. Seminal essays on alterity in postcolonial theory can be found in Bhabha (1994). In Lacan’s conceptualization, the gaze of the great Other (grand-autre) is that in, and as a result of, which the subject gains an ‘identity’. 35 Mitchell (1994a: 9). 36 Mitchell (1994b: 2). This formulation oVers a timely revision of Benjamin’s assertion that ‘landscape’ is a space deWned by its ‘frame’, which we read inwards from the perspective of its edges: see Benjamin (1985: 78). His interest in space ‘between’ in cities (particularly as developed in the Arcades Project) continues to resonate in

14

The Sites of Rome

contemporary analogies is Berlin, a cityscape in which the landscaping of urban space both attempts to cover up and draws attention to the yawning chasms of history, amid which its ruined ediWces and its modern constructions are placed and often awkwardly juxtaposed. As we believe is the case with Rome, spectators in Berlin are confronted by shifting chronotopes at every turn: the ruined Reichstag with its twenty-Wrst-century glass dome, the monumental government oYces of the ‘new’ capital city, the North-American skyscrapers of Potsdamer Platz, while the giant eye of East Berlin’s tall Fernsehturm watches over everything below.37 The cityscape narrates an intense and continuing engagement between past and future, between ‘east’ and ‘west’ and ‘right’ and ‘left’ (with all that those innocent-sounding directions imply). The fragmentary and Xickering Rome which emerges in the interrogations of texts, authors, buildings, and landscapes in this volume proves to be an unstable site, even though it is commonly conjured up by its most obviously Wxed and stable elements: the monumental architecture of the Forum and the Colosseum, or the geological formation of the Seven Hills.38 If, for Freud, Rome is a model of the unconscious, then for many others in Western culture it is a philosophies of urban space (e.g. in the works of Bachelard, de Certeau, Soja, Auge´, and Lefebvre) as well, of course, as in Foucault and Lacan. 37 On Berlin, see e.g. Seltzer (2003), who observes that ‘The beauty of Berlin, if one can describe in that way a city whose essence is destruction, is its emptiness. That emptiness is in large part a matter of wound and memory, violence and loss: the city’s scarred identity as wound landscape and as the scene of the crime’ (62); he goes on to analyze the beauty of the city’s ‘antiarchitecture’ or ‘its vast quasi-occupied areas of nothingness’. Dubbini (2002: 49–82) discusses modalities of vision—how the spectacle of the city and its panoramas interrelate to its topographies and their depiction—showing clearly how this process gained pace in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. On spectacle in the classical city, see Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 185–231), Bell (2004), and Gruet (2006: 233–86). 38 The insubstantiality of even these apparently secure sites/sights is evident in the processes of change of use, name, and appearance that the structures of the Forum Romanum embody, and in the relatively late Wxing of an ‘authoritative’ list of Rome’s Seven Hills—as Vout discusses in this volume (cf. Varro, LL 5.41). Hopkins and Beard make the quirkiness of the Colosseum’s reinvention via de- and re-construction clear in their section ‘A Good Look at the Outside’ (2005: 183–5). As they pithily suggest: ‘There is an inverse correlation . . . between fame and ‘‘authenticity’’ in the strictest sense’ (2005: 122), and their chapters on the fabric and afterlife of the Colosseum trace the processes of crumbling and reconstruction that mark its place in the Western imagination (2005: 122–48, 149–81).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

15

locus—some would say the locus—of the split subjectivity delineated by Lacan.39 Consequently, Lacanian and Kristevan elaborations of gaps, voids, and the movement of desire feature prominently here, as does Bahktin’s chronotope. Bakhtin uses the term chronotope to characterize literature’s expression of an intrinsic connectedness between temporal and spatial relationships, where neither time nor space is privileged above the other, but both are completely interdependent. We share a fascination with the narratological possibilities of Xaˆnerie and its descendant, the Situationist de´rive, but we are also united by a post-Freudian concern with the implications of locating ‘Rome’ at the heart of all urban psyches. In Benjamin’s formulation, memory and the city coalesce in the metaphor of the archaeological excavation in which design (choosing a locus; structuring the dig), memory (Wnding and identifying the place; recognizing and categorizing the Wnds), and the shock of unexpected discovery in familiar ground combine.40 Finding ourselves in Rome, we site, sight and re(cite), but continue to question whether we are the diggers or what is dug out. Freud’s famous attempt, in Civilization and Its Discontents, to make Rome ‘a Family Romance for those who identify themselves with Western culture’41—in eVect, an atrium crammed with our collective maiores—is inevitably far more ambiguous and disturbing. Eventually, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Rome attains in warped fashion some of the qualities of an absent locus of desire which endow it with a distinctively dystopian quality: What I have in mind is a series of dreams which are based upon a longing to visit Rome. For a long time to come, no doubt, I shall have to continue to satisfy this longing in my dreams: for at the season of the year when it is possible for me to travel, residence in Rome must be avoided for reasons of health. For instance, I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railwaycarriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began 39 Freud: ‘Now let us, by a Xight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. [ . . . ] And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other’ (1991: 257–8); on the Lacanian ‘subject’ in Catullus and Propertius, see e.g. Janan (1994) and (2001), and in Tibullus, e.g. Miller (2004: 95–129). 40 Benjamin (1985: 314). 41 Barkan (1991: 16).

16

The Sites of Rome

to move oV, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen in the dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half shrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of ‘the promised land seen from afar’ was obvious in it. [ . . . ] In a third dream I had at last got to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was disappointed to Wnd that the scenery was far from being of an urban character. There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one side of it were black cliVs and on the other meadows with big white Xowers. I noticed a Herr Zucker (whom I knew slightly) and determined to ask him the way to the city. I was clearly making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never seen in my waking life. [ . . . ] Thus the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with all the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Carthaginian, though their fulWlment seemed at the moment just as little favoured by destiny as was Hannibal’s lifelong wish to enter Rome.42

The range of time-periods, or epistemes, embraced by this volume reXects the archaeological impulses inherent in a process of ‘abjection’ which we believe is central to Rome’s persistence as an object and location of interest. Although the rhetoric of ‘abjection’ is most obviously Kristevan, the image is one generated in the wake of Mussolini’s radical ‘archaeology’ at a time when the city, disembowelled, oVered a visceral and atavistic response to the fracture driven 42 Freud (1953: 193–4, 196–7: discussed by Barkan (1991: 16–17). This mirrors Goethe’s comments intriguingly. In a letter from Rome (dated 1 November 1786) he observes that the ‘reality’ of the city makes new what he had thought long-familiar: ‘Alle Tra¨ume meiner Jugend seh ich nun lebendig, die ersten Kupferbilder, deren ich mich erinnere (mein Vater hatte die Prospekte von Rom auf einem Vorsaale aufgeha¨ngt), seh ich non in Wa¨hrheit, und alles, was ich in Gema¨lden und Zeichnungen, Kupfern und Holzschnitten, in Gips und Kork, schon lange gekannt, steht nun beisammen vor mir; wohin ich gehe, Wnde ich eine Bekanntschaft in einer neuen Welt; es ist alles, wie ich mir’s dachte, und alles neu.’—‘All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the Wrst engravings I remember (my father hung views of Rome in the hall) I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long through paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models is now assembled before me. Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world; everything is just as I imagined it, yet everything is new.’ (Goethe 1982, 1962).

Introduction—Roma, recepta

17

into Rome’s modern ownership of its own classical ‘past’.43 As our essays suggest, surgical approaches to the tactics of deriving urban identity have a tendency to collapse, but simultaneously to become grafted into successive derivations of the meaning of ‘Rome’. As archaeologists of memory in these terms, we also cover ground from the impossibly recognizable ur landscapes and urban wildernesses imagined by Livy, Plutarch, and Juvenal—Wltered through Augustan, Greek, and wearily ‘imperial’ gazes—to the teeming, bustling streets conjured up by Horace and Ovid. In addition, we are encouraged to use more ostentatiously alternative cities (such as Ovid’s ‘Thebes’, Plutarch’s archaic Rome, Juvenal’s ‘Troy’, and even Soviet Rome) to dig deep into the psychological fabric of our relationship with the imperial city. What’s more, we think about the increasingly self-conscious overtones of the vistas appropriated from Rome’s Renaissance heights, of the monolithic experiments of Soviet pedagogy, and of late twentieth-century monumental fragments in various locations. Attempts to Wx a monolithic perspective on Rome—to dictate a sight line or impose a line on a site—invariably crumble (like Edward Gibbon’s Rome) under their own weight, leaving only additional fragments to amuse or bemuse the passer-by.44 The Xaˆneur may be a modern conception—Benjamin locates his origin in 1830s Paris, although various prototypes are found from the seventeenth century onwards—but many of the elements that deWne the experience of Xaˆnerie can be brought to bear on what we know of the experience of the Roman spectator: the city as the story in itself (as opposed to mere backdrop), the physical phenomena of the city as stimulus for connotative-associative mental walks, and the city as a series of fragmented snapshots. Similarly, the Xaˆneur’s sense of detachment (ranging from ironic observation to alienated marginality), of rising above spatial and temporal boundaries, and of blending the spaces of the present with the spaces of the past, all have their analogues in the 43 E.g. Cederna (1979). Cf. Edwards’s summary (1996: 89–95), situating Mussolini in a continuum from the Wfth century ce onwards. Discussions of utopia in classical and fascist Rome by Burdett (2003) and Evans (2003) display some of the continuities and disjunctions that twentieth-century receptions of antiquity lay bare. Cf. Burdett (2000) on fascist heterotopias. 44 See Gibbon (1966: 305).

18

The Sites of Rome

Roman spectators whose textualized experiences we can access in Aleksander Nemerovskii or Milii Eserskii just as much as in Horace or Tacitus or Juvenal. Like the modern city-walkers, the spectators of Rome are driven by the desire to Wnd the lost imaginary wholeness, to anchor themselves to points that might Wx their Xoating and fragmented subjectivity.45 Moreover, in the processes of alienation (or even, in Russian formalist terms, ostranenie) explored in Situationism’s de´rive, we Wnd echoes of the defamiliarizing juxtapositions, anachronisms, and testing of forms and genres that classical authors so often associate with the textualized city. The twentieth-century Zeitgeist in particular is characterized by an acceleration in the intensity of the fascination with the City that began to gather pace in the previous century. In its potential to mark a locus of anonymity, of alienation and reinvention, of displacement, decontextualization, and polyphony, the City is unparalleled.46 This is evident in the diurnal urban peripatetics of James Joyce’s Dublin or the crumbling artiWce of Andrei Bely’s St Petersburg, but is likewise present in the watery weirdness of Venice.47 Venice is a city in which walking the ‘streets’ is uniquely problematic. Almost an anti-Rome, Venice continues to sink, threatening to return to liquid, and in doing so sharpens our sense of Rome’s substantiality. By contrast, the Renaissance saw Venice engage in a complex and polysemic self-mythologization as the new Rome.48 Excavation—physical or cultural—into Venice’s past leads to water, and, in the ongoing signiWcance of Venice’s watery qualities and 45 Barta (1996: 6–18), charting the progression from the dispassionate Xaˆneur to the unhappy badaud to modernist city-walker in terms of increasing alienation and rootlessness. Cf. Soja’s vivid description of the Irvine Exhibit in California (1996: 261–2). 46 See Barta (1996). 47 Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (latterly, an opera and Wlm) is the most obvious example, but, more recently, Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 Wlm (of Daphne du Maurier’s short story) Don’t Look Now encapsulates Venice’s position as a Gestalt for Lacan’s mirror stage. In addition, Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981; Wlmed in 1991), Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997) and Michelle Lovric’s The Floating Book (2004) have teased out how and why water and the shock and recognition that liquid highways provoke are central to Venice’s straddling of past and present. PWster and SchaV (1999) oVers a good overview. 48 As Mayernik (2003: 92–4, 130–2) summarizes. On the role of Vergil in this process see Kallendorf (1999) for a detailed analysis.

Introduction—Roma, recepta

19

permeability, we may discover that there is an echo of Rome’s association with hydraulics and water management. Indra Kagis McEwen reads Vitruvius on water as dredging up some of the psychological tensions associated with containing and taming it. Despite Rome’s fame for aqueducts, plumbing, drainage, fountains, baths, and lakes, water remains ‘the enemy of coherence, that more than any of the other elements dissolves good bonds . . . water is also the enemy of mnemonic schematisation. You cannot chisel IMP. CAESAR onto water.’49 As Gore Vidal remarks in his tour of his ancestral cityscape, ‘For the visitor it is a sort of waking dream. Naturally, no Venetian dreams this Venice, but every Venetian works to evoke it for others . . . Venetian glass is like Venetian water. You are reXected. The reXection is real, but is the thing reXected real?’50 Whereas Venice derives meaning from seeming to Xoat precariously on the lagoon, it is in the control of water and spectacular hydraulic feats that Rome makes its relationship with water reside. The concrete structures and ruined ediWces that manifest Rome’s subjugation of water are as characteristic of the city and empire as the Colosseum (itself, famously, constructed on the site of Nero’s lake). Despite water’s apparent restraint, echoes and traces of its authority remain in the swamps and springs that populate Rome’s foundations, and continue to colonize its topographic imagination, not to mention the Tiber Xoods that continued up to the twentieth century.51

49 McEwen (2003: 88). On the numerous manifestations of water in Rome, see Malissard (2002). Water features in several of the essays in this collection, those of Janan, Larmour, and Spencer in particular. For a Lacanian reading of water in Propertius Book 4, see Janan (2001). 50 Vidal (1985: 153). 51 Draining Rome’s wetlands features repeatedly in the beneWts that (would-be) autocrats and aspirant politicians oVer. The famously undrained Pomptine Marshes were legendary by the late Republic (see e.g. Suetonius, Caesar 44; cf. Quintilian, Inst. or. 3.8.16); Agrippa’s role in draining the Campus Martius was central to its Augustan redevelopment. On water bubbling up for common use in the city, and its roˆle in Rome’s location, see e.g. Cicero, Rep. 2.11 and Frontinus, De aquis urbis Romae 1.4; cf. Pliny, HN 36.121, 122–4 and Frontinus, De aquis urbis Romae 1.9 on Agrippa’s huge programme of providing public fountains, and later emperors’ additions. On the immanence of the Cloaca Maxima (the city controlling and harnessing underground water) see Gowers (1995). See also Spencer (in this volume).

20

The Sites of Rome

In the essays collected here, it is apparent that the ‘I’ is inseparable from, and very much dependent upon, the ‘eye’.52 It is not (or not just) fanciful to see the city with Michel Serres as a mosaic—the art form which has become Rome’s trademark decorative idiom—partly because it is constructed from numerous fragments, partly because it ‘makes sense’ best when seen from some distance, but most of all because it encourages multiple angles of viewing, producing a series of diVerent scenes and subject-positions.53 The Gestalt city, in eVect, is made up of an endless and shifting accretion of microcosmic iterations of what ‘Rome’ means. Like a vast mosaic, it deWes physical attempts to take it all in at once, whilst at the same time rewarding the process of accumulating portmanteaux analyses into simulacra of totality.54 The contributors to The Sites of Rome re-energize the cliche´ of Rome-as-palimpsest via attentive engagement with the visual Weld and a readiness to honour the palimpsest’s genealogy in postcolonial criticism. This visual turn enables us to appreciate how earlier inscriptions remain part of the text of culture. Consider, for instance, one of the most ideologically loaded sight/sites of central Rome, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus which was burned down in 83 bce.55 Contemporary Romans believed that the foundations had been laid out by the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus (616–579 bce), and that it had been dedicated by Tarquinius Superbus in 509 bce. The temple was rededicated in 69 bce, having been rebuilt to the old plan, but marble replaced the original timber and brick, and, according to the Elder Pliny, the new columns were Corinthian, carried oV by Sulla 52 E.g. Zˇizˇek (1992b). More tangentially, one may detect similar approaches in Isherwood 1945. 53 Serres (1991: 185). 54 As Edwards comments (on Pliny, HN 36.101), this paradox was already evident in classical antiquity. For a start, to describe ‘Rome’ was to attempt to represent the whole world (1998: 236); moreover, as the Forma Urbis makes clear, ‘Rome’ is also the sum of a (select) series of its pasts (1998: 239–40). Cf. Gowing (2005: 132), quoted above (n. 1), and Gowers (1995: 23–4). The city comes most sharply into focus, then, when a balance is struck between bricolage and the (inevitably) totalizing qualities of each individual perspective. 55 Kennedy (1999: 32–4) discusses the syncretism and mutual interdependence between the Church of the Zoccolanti friars and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus in the genesis of Gibbon’s Rome, showing how the processes of appropriation continue to develop.

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21

from the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens.56 Or consider the triumphal arch, a form derived from the city gate, and imported to the central zone as a powerful signiWer of imperial power: thus, in the Forum Julium, the Temple of Venus Genetrix, dedicated in 46 bce, was Xanked by a pair of arches representing victory over both external and internal enemies, itself a monumental ideological statement. The Arch of Titus and others followed, as the iteration of the ‘internal gateway’ proceeded apace. These were designed to be viewed ‘in the round,’ not just as points of entry and egress.57 Or the Fora: with the Forum Augusti and the Temple of Mars Ultor, Augustus continued the programme of the extension of the Forum Romanum begun by his uncle. A further opulent and impressive sequence of spaces was added by Trajan, consolidating much that had gone before and indeed continuing the Neronian process of rebuilding and rezoning the city after the Wre of 64 ce, with a complex that climbed up the Quirinal Hill and included a temple precinct, colonnades, shop-buildings, and the Basilica Ulpia, as well as the elevated equestrian statue of the emperor and the Dacian column.58 In his detailed study of the area, Alain Gowing notes that it was possible to walk from the Augustan into the Trajanic Forum: Such a physical connection symbolized, in a way Romans would particularly appreciate, a sense of continuity. And yet to stroll in the Forum of Trajan in 112 ce, the year of its dedication, was to witness a very diVerent past, a past in which the icons of the Republic were replaced with the new icons of the Principate. The two structures evoke and perpetuate memories of two diVerent periods in Roman history, now separated in time just as they are separated in space. Not, to be sure, entirely severed, but certainly separated.59 56 Pliny, HN 36.45. De Angeli (1996: 149) suggests that Pliny’s comment may refer to columns from Athenian Zeus’ cella rather than the main temple. 57 On the Arch of Titus as reiterative apotheosis (entrance to and exit from Forum and, implicitly, ‘mortality’) see Beard and Henderson (2001: 183–6). The dimensional porosity introduced by the transgressive planes on this arch reminds us (perhaps with uncomfortable vividness) that triumph and sack are both inherent in ‘Rome’. 58 Equestrian elevation and its impact on perspective is discussed in this collection by Spencer, but for an alternative reading (focusing on Domitian’s horseback pose, in Statius, Siluae 1.1) see Spencer (2002: 185–7) and Newlands (2002: 46–87). 59 Gowing (2005: 132–59, in particular 146).

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The Sites of Rome

Gowing’s suggested ‘walk’, in fact, takes the pedestrian on a trip that stretches the cognitive faculties to the full. For a start, this stroll reiterates the idea that a dynamic and ongoing reinvention and reappropriation of the past is characteristic of Rome’s morphology. It emphasizes the impermanence and even transience of the most apparently solid monuments and ediWces, whilst simultaneously making it plain that even total and rapid destruction by Wre cannot erase the cognitive topography of the city’s fabric. Periodic devastation—the creation of ‘classical’ ruins—is nicely signalled and subverted in Hadrian’s deceptive rebuilding of Agrippa’s Pantheon. It reminds us that understanding the city means factoring in individual experience, personal and communal history, disaster and necessity, as well as ideology and autocracy. The importance of factoring in autocracy as a catalyst for the changes to Rome’s urban image is also evident outside the city’s formal boundary, and in changes taking place to the imperial domus. The area around the Campus Martius, to the north-west of the Capitoline Hill, underwent considerable development in the principate of Augustus—fora, porticos, theatres, baths, and the Pantheon60—while individually the quasi-domestic imperial buildings on the Palatine Hill retained a relatively modest aspect until Domitian, who was the Wrst to build a genuinely grandiose palace for himself.61 Perhaps one of the most intriguing projects, Nero’s Domus Transitoria (re-articulating the Palatine complex, whilst also structuring a new relationship with an imperially re-zoned Aventine) was swept away in the Great Fire and its Golden aftermath.62 This rapid sequence of renovation, construction, deliberate destruction, and reconstruction is famously characteristic of the Neronian era. Indeed Nero is renowned for pushing innovation in aesthetic urban vocabulary.63 At the same time, his deployment of a concrete and imperializing rhetoric may also have been manoeuvring Rome in the direction of a vigorous re-examination of ‘traditional’ perspectives, taking in the city’s simultaneously rural and urban(e) identities, and 60 For more detail, see Wiseman (1993: 223). 61 See Papi (1999: 30–1). For greater detail on Gaius’ building programme, see Hurst (1995a); on the Domus Tiberiana, see Krause (1995) and Hurst (1995b). 62 For an overview of the Domus Transitoria, see de Vos (1995). 63 See e.g. Ball (2003); Cassatella (1995).

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confronting Romans with the reality of the impact of the JulioClaudians on their city. If we fast forward a decade from Nero, we then Wnd the Colosseum rising on the land where Nero’s palace, parkland, lake, and colossal statue stood.64 Walking around the public places of central Rome, then, brought the spectator into confrontation with the past at almost every turn, and face to face with the visual evidence of the contradictions and paradoxes which underlay the imperial system. This was a realm of multiple perspectives and dramatic collisions. As the spectator looked oV into the distance, through a series of unfolding public spaces, s/he was in a kind of dreamscape in which idealized visions of the imperial state clashed with signs of ambivalence and resistance. Place, as opposed to space, is a constant reminder of diVerence and ambivalence. In the wake of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), the dream that was Rome has by now passed into a hackneyed cultural (sub-)consciousness, but Freud’s quasi-Utopian version continues to resonate with startling clarity. In this collection, Micaela Janan in particular is fascinated by the potentially hallucinatory qualities that such a fraying and disorienting palimpsest can invoke, but we can also see Rome’s position as a locus simultaneously of resistance (whether to understanding, progress, or historical process) and renewal in essays by Marina Balina, Jacob Blevins and Caroline Vout. Viewing Rome as a mosaic, we suggest that gazing at a particular sight/site in Rome always draws in further sights/sites, on both the metonymic plane—nearby buildings and so on—and the metaphoric: earlier constructions (perhaps visible in ruins or in fragments incorporated into new structures); images of the individuals who made them; or scenes from history or myth evoked by the location. In this regard, it is instructive to recall that the second style of architecture in private dwellings at Pompeii is remarkable for a form of decoration which denies the walls of enclosed rooms and seeks to extend space by framing gardens and country scenes; often these landscapes are imaginary, realms inhabited by Wgures from 64 Cassatella (1995) provides a useful introduction to the complexities of the Domus Aurea; on the roˆle of the Domus Aurea in the cityscape, see Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 349–64). For the stagnum in the ‘Colosseum’ valley, see Panella (1995). On the oddities of how Flavian re-appropriation of this area plays out, see now Hopkins and Beard (2005: 28–35).

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The Sites of Rome

myth.65 This later gives way to another form of extension, namely, the theatrical stage. We may connect this with the extension of the space of the Forum Romanum, initiated by Julius Caesar, completed by Augustus, and continued by their successors.66 The phenomenon of vistas through thematically charged spaces and of spaces receding into the distance has its corollary in the ‘layering’ of the city. Rome was a building site for much of its history and space was continually reshaped and reconstituted in line with political and cultural change.67 In the Renaissance and after, the conjunction of ruins and rebuilding lent the cityscape a uniquely fascinating character, much exploited by artists and writers.68 This layering and changing of vistas also Wnds expression in the literary tradition, where Rome is often transformed into earlier versions of itself, such as Romulus’ or Numa’s Rome or the Rome of the Republic, or into other locations from myth, such as Troy, Thebes, or Athens.69 A process of instantiating retrospective and retroactive mythmaking in the real bricks and mortar of the city is one which continues right up to the present day. The city that we experience now is very much a product of the late nineteenth-century struggles towards Italian uniWcation—the Piano Regolatore of 1931 overlaid with the dramatic and even surgical incisions cut into the historic city by Mussolini, and his attempt to inaugurate a new, modern Rome at EUR, and most recently the contemporary fallout in an anxiously post-fascist era.70 In the 65 Particularly interesting are the discussions of landscape rooms in Leach (1988: 261–306), who also discusses the Villa Farnesina frescoes, and Kellum (1994). 66 On the changes in the Forum Romanum from Republic to Empire, see Purcell (1995a, 1995b). For the development of the Forum Julium, see Morselli (1995); similarly, for the Forum Augusti see Kockel (1995), and for the later imperial fora, Bauer and Morselli (1995) discuss the Forum of Nerva, Packer (1995) discusses that of Trajan, whilst Coarelli (1999) discusses the Temple of Peace (in the Forum of Vespasian). On the metamorphoses of the Forum over time, see Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 69–126). 67 Fantham’s (1997) discussion of how this works, using Propertius as a model, is particularly useful. 68 E.g. Chard (1999), and the collections of Patterson (1984) and Edwards (1999). 69 See Edwards (1998), and on the potentially problematic qualities of the past’s presence in individual texts, see e.g. Fantham (1997) on Propertius Book 4, Dufallo (1998) on spectres in Cicero’s Pro Roscio, Zetzel (1997) on history in Vergil’s Aeneid, and Spencer (2005) on Lucan. 70 Late 2005 saw suggestions from the Mayor’s oYce that Mussolini’s Piazza Augusto Imperatore should be torn down and rebuilt, having nothing of value to

Introduction—Roma, recepta

Fig. 1 Ancient Rome: a synchronic overview.

25

26

The Sites of Rome

modern era, geographically far-Xung conurbations would be assimilated to Rome, such as Washington, DC—the capital of the new Republic, with its ‘three branches’ of government—or Moscow— styled the ‘third Rome’, after the fall of Byzantium, in a deeply rooted Russian cultural conceit.71 As Balina’s essay makes clear, the position of St Petersburg as a momentously loaded simulacrum of Rome— deWned through its imaginary and palimpsestic qualities as an artiWcially generated Russian space—is central to the pre-Revolutionary Zeitgeist. The impact of Rome on literary genres is also considered here. The Augustan building programme altered the centre of Rome, especially as far as the viewing and experience of space was concerned, in as farreaching a way as Franz Josef ’s ediWces changed Vienna or Haussmann’s did Paris. The ‘city of marble’ which Augustus created was, however, for all its grandeur and solidity, the visual evidence of political and cultural dislocation. Horace is the Wrst poet who shows clear signs of being deeply aVected by these changes in the experiential fabric of Rome, and it is no coincidence that the works of his corpus do not always Wt conveniently into what with hindsight often appear to be established genres—we do well to remember that Quintilian, at least, makes only satura ‘Roman’, and that after the fact (Inst. or. 10.93), whilst at the same time designating metre as the keystone of generic ‘categories’.72 How one ‘says’ something, then, and the context for the mode of expression chosen, is crucial.

oVer. A competition for a scheme to rehabilitate the Mausoleum and Piazza was inaugurated on 10 May 2006 (; checked 28 July 2006). On the nuovo Piano Regolatore, see e.g. (checked 23 July 2006). Cf. Notaro (2000) on EUR and Fascist urbanism; Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 340–1) on the unfortunate hyperbole of the Victor Emmanuel monument (on display in Fig. 3). 71 Vance (1989), a magisterial two-volume study of the impact of Rome on the development of the USA, makes the polyphonous, even dialogic qualities of the ‘imperial’ resonances clear. On Rome’s pop-cultural impact in the USA in particular, see Joshel, Malamud, and McGuire (2002). 72 As Kennedy (1997: 152) summarizes: ‘Genre (genus) implies ‘‘type’’, and all generic criticism, even that which would deny that any one work can ever fully exemplify a generic norm, still relies on and invokes the concept of the norm. Any attempt, by poet or literary historian, to conceptualise genre by narrativising it, by

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As far as we can tell, Horace substantially alters the form of satire from Lucilian practice, transforming it in his Satires from a discourse rooted in the cultural matrices of the high Republic (from a late Wrstcentury bce perspective) into one more ‘at home’ both within an evolving new system (one in which competition has become increasingly fraught) and within a literary-historical discourse. However Xawed (or self-aggrandizing) Horace’s retroactive conWguration of satura might have been, in his Satires (and in 1.4 in particular) he writes himself into literary history as the progenitor of something new, and something attuned to ‘modernity’.73 When he explains to Maecenas at the beginning of Epistles 1.1 that he does not want to continue in his service, he likens it to being ‘shut up’ again in a gladiatorial ludus or performing in the arena, conWrming a link between urban space and his own generic identity. Epic, that most portmanteau of ‘genres’, also changed substantially in the imperial era, blending not altogether comfortably with History and recognizable Roman landscapes in Lucan and Silius Italicus; and the new, speciWcally urban, form of elegy bloomed brieXy in poets including Tibullus, Ovid, and Propertius.74 The increasing instability of the sites and sights of Rome, as we move from the Republic to the Empire, is paralleled by unprecedented Xuctuation in the borders between literary genres, and the relationships between content and metre that they imply. Where, after all, is the ‘real’ generic home of Petronius’ Satyricon, Martial’s Epigrams, or Statius’ Siluae? That the three ‘urban’ poetic forms—pastoral, satire, and elegy—blossomed in this environment feeds into our interest in connecting with the generative roˆle of the city for particular modes of expression, and consequently receives attention in several of the papers. oVering a historical overview, will inevitably oVer a framework teleologically directed by and towards a particular characterising, typifying work’. Cf. Martindale (1997b: 108), nodding to Derrida in asking whether we might not better think of genres ‘as processes; not as essences or ontological entities, things, but as discursive formations, contested, Xuid, resisting even while inviting deWnition’. Farrell (2003) provides a clear and sophisticated overview of genre and classical literature. On this, see also Conte (1994). 73 For more on this, see e.g. Schlegel’s recent reading of Satires 1.4 (2000: 93–4, 106); Freudenberg (2001: 26–7, 58–9). 74 Farrell (2003: 397–402) takes elegy as a case study for understanding how genre works. On ‘epic’ and Vergil, see Kennedy (1997).

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The Sites of Rome

Pastoral and satire, both quintessentially of the city, Wnd common ground in fantasies of the lost Golden Age, the ‘natural’ order of things, and the absence of human corruption. The contrast between the noisy city and the peaceful countryside becomes an artistic commonplace.75 In a poem addressed to his friend Juvenal (12.18), for instance, Martial pictures him wandering restlessly in the noisy Subura or on the Aventine Hill, while he himself sleeps late in his country villa where the toga, and all the negotium (nec-otium; yet another absence) that goes with it, is ‘unknown’ (a point that resonates with Juvenal, who includes the same idea in his Satire 3). In 12.57, he returns to his preference for the rustic villa, but this time contrasts his noisy home in the heart of the city with Sparsus’ luxurious dwelling that looks down on it from the hills, a place where he has the country in the town, rus in urbe. This is, more generally, a deWning element of the Roman cityscape too, with its gardens and grottoes, and intensively controlled modelling of ‘natural’ landscapes and vistas.76 By the time of the late Republic and the Empire the dialogue between the rural and the urban, between nature and artiWce, becomes ever more urgent, and thereby more anxious and fraught. This potential for tension that inhabits Roman (self-)deWnitions of urban form draws us to one further strand embedded in Rome’s enduring lure as urban pin-up and leitmotiv, namely—the motif of 75 The seminal work on city and country in Roman satire is Braund (1989). As Martindale (1997b: 108) comments: ‘no classical theorist clearly recognises a pastoral genre as such’; nevertheless, as he also observes, whatever Vergil thought himself to be writing, the characteristic qualities that e.g. Ovid (in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti) and Calpurnius Siculus pick up on are very much about cultus and civilization. These qualities are heightened by intersections between quasi-Vergilian woods and shades, and eruptions of urban reWnement and even monumenta. Martindale’s speculative ascription of the phrase ‘modern pastoral’ to ‘a lament for a lost harmony projected onto a past which is timeless but haunted by a sense of temporality, and for an authentic nature free from the discontents and vulgarities of the life of the modern city’ (1997b: 122) is also relevant here. 76 On grottos, ‘rockeries’, and gardens, Grimal (1969) still provides a well-indexed, authoritative survey. More recently, Cima and La Rocca (1998) is both wide-ranging and thought-provoking. On Augustan aestheticization of landscape, see e.g. Kellum (1994) and Leach (1988). Spencer (2005: 59) sets up the signiWcance of controlling the landscaped gaze in Lucan’s world-view. See also Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 235– 41) and their discussion (329–31) of Strabo’s description of the Campus Martius as a dialogue between nature and art.

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dystopian anxiety that underlies many of the city’s texts, and which Charles Martindale alludes to.77 On occasion, this takes the guise of satiric critique, but more generally beneath much of what signiWes ‘Rome’ we can see glimmers of a sense of absence or fracture, a nostalgic sigh that breathes ‘loss’ over even the most optimistic urban discourse. As Edwards observes, fragmentation and alienation are already characteristic of the late Republican city; demographically, the rapid growth of empire was matched by an increasing inXux into Rome.78 Being Roman and identifying the city as ‘home’, therefore, was a very diVerent proposition to being born in the city itself, or, indeed, living in it, as we can see from the case of Ovid. Cicero articulates this very eVectively, via Atticus, in the De legibus (2.4), and perhaps it is as a collection of individual amores patriarum that ‘Rome’ gains most interpretative solidity. Livy’s famous account of Camillus’ plea to keep ‘Rome’ at Rome (5.54.3) proposes a process of identiWcation that makes the telling of Rome’s history into a new family history for all citizens—a process, as we have mentioned, given renewed force in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. For each successive generation of immigrants, Rome’s reiterative fashioning as place of exile (from Troy) and sanctuary (for Romulus’ rootless and dispossessed hotchpotch) allows newly arrived and long-established families alike to lay claim to its physical, intellectual, and political topographies.79 In a similar fashion, poets and other writers trace their way through the city’s literary terrain.

77 Martindale (1997b: 122); Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 319–25). 78 Edwards (1996: 18, 26–36); see also Morley (2003). 79 Bonjour (1975: 119–62) discusses this in some depth. On Cicero and selfidentiWcation as ‘Roman’ see Vasaly (1993: 31–3), who comments on the similarities with Livy’s later formulation. Cf. Petrarch’s comment that ‘nowhere is Rome less known than in Rome’ (Ep. Fam. 6.2). See most recently Dench’s detailed study of Roman identities. Chapters 3 and 4, and her discussion of Catullus (2005: 329–42) are particularly relevant here. On the Aeneid, Dench comments that ‘ ‘‘foreignness’’ is ultimately a complex and unsettling theme . . . a charge levelled at Aeneas’ Trojans, but a quality that is also at the heart of the ancestors of Rome, and even her very topography’ (2005: 276–7). Cf. Edwards and Woolf (2003b: 1–2) on the Colosseum as a symbol of Rome’s ‘cosmopolitanism’. Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 317–64) devote Chapter 7 of their study to the question ‘Comment peut-on eˆtre Romain?’ On diVerence, exclusion and authorized narratives of urban space in contemporary urban theory, see e.g. Sandercock (1998: 34, 39–44, 46–54).

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The Sites of Rome

The process of working on a collection such as this necessitates engaging with absence and omission as much as presence. Although our essayists do not (with the exception of Blevins on Cicero) tackle pre-Augustan texts, allusions to Rome’s Republican identity are implicit throughout.80 Moreover, although we are all inheritors of a ‘Rome’ coloured and given chiaroscuro by neo-classical, Romantic, and nineteenth-century appropriations, none of us has chosen to write in detail about these eras. Instead, we focus on the Wrst hundred and Wfty years of the imperial period and the imaginative energy that reinvented classical Rome as a site of European consciousness in the Renaissance; we consider the impact of Rome’s hills and the view from above on urban iconography and Rome’s ideological signiWcance; we explore the conXicting realia of Rome invoked by damnatio memoriae in Soviet Russia, and juxtapose this with its potential both to represent an ultimate paradigm for class-struggle and simultaneously to operate as a parallel (or even possible) locus of kaleidoscopic diVerence; and we conclude by exploring the frantic dislocation in Fellini’s Roma of post-war Rome’s fractured dialogue with recent and classical pasts. The connexions between the ten essays in this volume are complex and allusive. They tell no one story—indeed, they share an insistence that no such story can productively be told—but together they suggest a variety of pathways towards understanding the city. One important narratological function of this introduction is to tease out some of the tales that can be told in the interstices. A version of such a narrative pathway might pick its way through the following headings.

STABILITY AND FRACTURE One reason why Rome has tended to underpin so many Western attempts to locate ideological authority in the city is the self-conscious quality of its symbolic position. This combines a concern to identify origins with an ongoing interest in how each ‘present’ will eventually 80 As noted above, Gowing (2005) oVers a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the immanence of the Republic in Imperial consciousness. See also Favro (1996); Fowler (2000).

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Wgure as another element in the historical fabric of the city. In eVect, this reiterative process has uniWed Rome’s fragmentary image, and caused it to stand for permanence, Wxity, and trans-historical continuity. We can observe the rebirth of modern Rome in Vout’s consideration of Renaissance (and subsequent) internalization of classical monuments into the cartographic view from the hills. Vout demonstrates that the guiding principle of Pirro Ligorio and fellow mapmakers was to manifest the circumscription and persistence of Rome not just by angle of (historical) perspective but also by the sequential layers of subsequent building and demolition that enclose, cover, and reveal the ancient sites. Her investigation of the microcosmic qualities of the Capitoline in particular suggests one way of thinking through how Rome has come to represent a place where we can stand in our ancestors’ footsteps and map our vista onto every previous gaze. Vout makes Rome’s hills central to the city’s emblematic role in the development of the Western urban consciousness. The meagre dimensions of the Capitoline, when set against the quantity of sights and sites that we know it to contain, pose a conundrum that confronts all classically minded visitors to the city. To ‘see’ Republican Rome means enacting a process of imaginative devastation on the contemporary cityscape, with its intersecting imperial monuments. This in turn denudes the city of the contaminatory clutter that a ‘real’ city requires. Indeed, as Blevins’s discussion of a range of more or less imaginary Romes implicitly suggests, the city is most coherently available when experienced at (at least) one remove. This sense of necessary dislocation as a prerequisite for meaning re-emerges as a key feature of Balina’s location of symbolic Roman topographies at the heart of the transition from pre- to post-Revolutionary Russia. Wandering around the Palatine in recent years oVers an excellent example of how Rome’s ‘eternal’ qualities are susceptible to the vagaries of the Bakhtinian chronotope. Here, ‘time’ really is visible as the skeleton of the hill’s history emerges from and remains buried in its fabric, and the relationship between chronology, space, and experience is exposed in the randomness of the stories generated by and applied to the spaces at any given moment by the signposts, personal memories, guides, and expectations of the wandering sightseers. The Palatine site deWes coherence and defeats synopsis. Areas are inexplicably open or closed, the heat or cool drives one from or to shade, and every map and

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The Sites of Rome

book oVers a diVerent tour and explanation of the holes, tunnels, and traces of walls. The potential for confusion, disorientation, and frustration is overwhelming unless one Wxes upon one particular ‘guide’ or narratological programme; this in turn requires (even provokes) a process of individual self-fashioning as topographer. In eVect, each tour takes on an autobiographical guise as the visitor struggles to make sense of the complex layers of space—simultaneously alien and fragmentarily familiar—confronting him/her. Fixing upon Rome’s autochthonous ‘generation’ of the West’s collective memory, Blevins goes so far as to see in ‘Rome’ an embodiment of a teleological anxiety at the heart of humanist identity formation that he terms ‘classical crisis’.81 As we argue in this collection, this is a crisis which arises at least partly from the anxieties already present in surviving Latin texts. Receptions of antiquity in general and Rome in particular were central to developing secular philosophies of identity and man’s place in the universe, and inscribed in Rome’s fragmentary survival is, Blevins argues, a necessary incompletion that generates recuperative and progressive discourse. In the process of familiarization, Renaissance authors ensure that ‘Rome’ now is very much a product of their centripetal visions in which visiting the physical sites is itself a Wctive activity. Balina’s account of Rome’s normative role in generating pre-Revolutionary Russian identity oVers a striking counterpoint. In her suggestion that Rome’s symbolic meaning was both ‘faked’ and embodied in St Petersburg’s cityscapes in particular, we can see how experiential reality can be drowned out by the mimetic reinvention of an absent locus of desire. This aspect takes on additional signiWcance in the Soviet period, as opportunities to travel were closed down, and Russia-as-Rome prioritized symbolic meaning over vision, sightlines, and the gaze. Again, Balina notes yet another process of fracture embodied in Soviet pedagogy. Learning about ‘Rome’ as the paradigmatic site of class struggle (cleansed of the bourgeois

81 We can see a version of this at work in Goethe’s letters to the Duchess Louise (12–23 December 1786) and Charlotte von Stein (20–3 December 1786) from Rome; Goethe experiences a kind of epistemological crisis when he Wnally engages fully with the simulacra, ruins, and ‘academic’ theory and practice which are Xooding his experience of the city (Goethe 1982). He expresses this as a species of collision between understanding and knowledge.

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connotations of Latin as a language) marked a rite-of-passage moment in a child’s progress through the Soviet educational system. Paradoxically, this reinvention of Rome’s socio-cultural topography progressed in tandem with new trends in Soviet children’s Wction. Using Wction, Balina suggests, historians-turned-novelists adopted and adapted ‘Rome’ as a site for liberal Soviet exploration of the city as dogma-free zone. As Elena Theodorakopoulos’s development of an intimate connexion between urban and imperial ideologies in Fellini’s Roma (1972) also suggests, more recent guided tours of the city continue to play out Rome-as-paradox. Fellini’s Rome is a continuously collapsing and fragmenting locus which explodes all attempts to close down sites of meaning, whilst at the same time oVering itself as a palimpsest for interrogating authoritative ideological monuments. Balina, similarly, exposes the intellectual problems faced by Soviet historians rewriting a vision of Rome for a post-Revolutionary society. As she reveals, it was not just Rome’s symbolic landscape which underwent a process of reimagination; the city’s topography was reconWgured from seven to two hills (Aventine and Palatine) to match the ideological binarism of class struggle. Both Vout and Theodorakopoulos are interested in what happens when divergent Roman monuments and vistas collide within individual texts, and both (in diVerent ways) reach similar conclusions. Taken together, Vout’s Renaissance maps and touristic perspectives, and Theodorakopoulos’s reading of Fellini make it clear that ‘Rome’ is only knowable in the points of intersection and collision between competing and conXicting schemata and representations. The most porous and permeable representations are also the most haunting and provocative. As Blevins argues, this conclusion is inevitable given the particular qualities ascribed to the city in the texts that modelled Renaissance (and thereby later) conceptions. His account proposes that the ‘Rome’ we see rising out of the works of Cicero, Vergil, and Ovid is a space that always keeps an eye on the future, as well as on the past. In these texts are brought to life versions of a city endlessly susceptible to cycles of devastation and regeneration, one which continues to reverberate in all later appropriations.82 Blevins’s essay 82 In this, Blevins is keying into a theme summarized succinctly by Edwards (1996: 63–6). See also Spencer (2005: 48–56, 60–4) on ways of reading Lucan’s response.

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The Sites of Rome

emphasizes the importance of performative versions of Rome in Jonson and Shakespeare. In particular, he explores how the visualization of fragmentary and connotative emblems took on particular meaning for denoting ‘Rome’, and for locating it physically in the here and now. This attempt to understand the wide-ranging intellectual implications of Rome’s culturally imperialistic impact on the beginnings of modern Europe (and eventually the United States of America) is mirrored in Vout’s interest in cultural tourism (why people travel to the city), Balina’s invocation of stay-at-home and imaginary tourism, and the omissive and Wctive qualities of the ‘maps’ and perspectives they generate. In these four essays, and the dialogue among them, we see traced some of the ways in which impossibly complete and determinedly fragmentary visions of ‘Rome’ can still represent the ultimate imperial trope—a city which continues to inXuence urban morphology and exercise an intellectual hold, whilst also exerting a magnetic attraction. This ‘new’ imperialism and its potentially dangerous implications are held up for scrutiny in Theodorakopoulos’s response to the famous closing scenes of Fellini’s Roma. Although the centres of Western imperialism may have shifted to London or New York, Rome remains in many ways a model for later versions of the phenomenon. In the absence of a narrator, the bikers take control of our trip through the otherwise deserted streets and trace a pattern that appears to implicate Rome’s ‘monuments’ in a denial of the city’s humanity. As Theodorakopoulos suggests, however, the end of this tour of the sites of Rome is a cautiously optimistic denial of any conclusive relationship between classical monuments and monolithic ideologies. Instead, as Vout also argues, it is in the intense and confusing polyphony which gives meaning to Xeeting conjunctions of monuments, sites, and characters that ‘Rome’ thrives, more as a metaphor than anything else. Moreover (as other contributors suggest), it is in the fracture and collision which diVerent ‘Romes’ generate that the scenographer and auteur operate. One of the qualities that most characterizes modern perceptions of the city is, of course, its teeming masses. The sense that the city is an anonymizing and even deracinating space which makes recognizing, forging, and maintaining individual identities intensely problematic is one which must have been equally characteristic of classical

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Rome.83 Ironically, however, this quintessential urban quality is an early perceptual casualty of our ability to imagine the lived experience of Rome. What survives the repeated patterns of destruction and reconstruction is not the tenements, the insulae and workshops, the smells and dirt, the disease and detritus of a historic capital city. Classical literary authors tend to pick out for commemoration what is diVerent and unique (the mythic, politicized spaces, vistas, and monuments, the grand devastation and the visionary rebuilds), not the daily world of wine-shops, fullers, stonemasons, and general emporia. Even epistles, straddling the boundary between literary and demotic, tend to magnify and memorialize urban hurly-burly and dislocation for effect. Our understanding of the classical city, then, mainly comprises the kinds of structures that survive millennia (grand ones) and the kinds of place that catch authors’ eyes (uniquely signiWcant ones). Two exceptions to this strike us. First, in literary texts, satire interests itself in Rome’s swarming crowds and high-density lifestyle, but, even here, the hordes that Wll the city tend to be portrayed as agents of its grandeur’s destruction, or outsiders, rather than as its natural inhabitants. Second, the vast Forma Urbis Romae (Severan map of Rome) seems to oVer a glimpse of the imperial city as the sum of its buildings, routes, and pathways—monumental, public, and domestic.84 This early third-century ce marble map of Rome was designed for a wall in the Temple of Peace, and depicted the ground plan of the whole city, but it was already suVering fragmentation within a couple of centuries of its completion. What was rediscovered in the sixteenth century was both damaged and diYcult to understand. Even now, only from 10 to 15 per cent of the map is known, and understanding of what the map was for, or how it functioned in the temple and as a feature of the city, is Wercely debated. Satire and the Forma Urbis, in diVerent ways, suggest an alternative Rome, one familiar from Le Corbusier’s comment that architecture was impossible 83 Lott (2004), Chapters 1 and 4 in particular, makes clear the complexity of Rome’s urban fabric. 84 On the Forma Urbis Romae, see the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project, which has the extant fragments online at (checked 28 July 2006). Particularly useful is the discussion by Tina Najbjerg at ‘The Severan Marble Plan of Rome (Forma Urbis Romae)’. Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project, (checked 19 June 2006). Cf. Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 325–8) on ‘Les ‘‘Baedecker’’ de Rome’.

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in ancient Rome because ‘the city walls were too crowded, the houses were piled up ten stories high . . . The Forum must have been ugly . . . Town planning, a large lay-out! There was none of this’ (1927: 144). This other Rome is a city at once organic, generated by imperialism, and deWned by its political function. Its form was starkly overwritten by attempts to erase ‘contemporary’ urban squalor in the late nineteenth century. This ‘Haussmannization’ of the historic centre denied the vitality of urban squalor, attempted (at least) to suppress periphrasis and by-ways, and rapidly fed into fascism’s wholesale demolition of swathes of inappropriately jumbled, high-density, medieval zones.85 The fracture and dislocation that these strategies suggest are not, of course, modern prerogatives; as we have observed, classical texts are themselves already becoming implicated in a tense dialogue between city-as-object and city-as-subjects. Paul Allen Miller’s exploration of Rome’s mean streets connects genre and performance in a series of snapshots of a seedy, often night-time world that is exhaustively Roman. These streets thrive on dissonance and contrast—permanent Wxtures, just like the marbled walls and magniWcent monuments—endlessly available for display to vicarious thrill seekers. Of particular importance for Miller’s ‘maps’ (as sketched by Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal) is their ability to provoke a radical reassessment of how cities are transformed by two speciWc processes of alienation or estrangement. When Miller focuses on what happens to perception when the light is drained from the nocturnal city—and makes explicit the potentially seedy role of the literary demiurge or cartographer in every topographical package—he is also reminding us as consumers (albeit at one remove, at least) that providing a sensational overload for those on the outside looking in is one shtick that has continued to delight the (paying) customer. The contrast between day and night in ancient Rome is, of course, an extreme one.86 Confronting us with a night-time city is an obvious way of 85 See e.g. Baxa (2004: 1, 3–4). One might even speculate that fascism’s fantasy of order and symmetry revisits Piranesi’s caprices of ‘lost’ cartographic unity, in which he extrapolates from the then-known fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae to produce a distinctively baroque city of geometric forms. 86 Because of the absence of artiWcial lighting; for a modern equivalent of the contrast, one might think here, almost paradoxically, of the diVerence between the ‘Strip’ of Las Vegas by night and the same location during the day. After Caesar, too,

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focusing our attention on the multiple and simultaneous versions of the city that can and do coexist; concentrating our attention on the role of the auteur is another. In both cases, the audience is forced to pay lip-service at least to the exigencies of the frame, and to recognize an all-too-necessary estrangement from the phantasmagorias and schlock on oVer at every intersection. Like Ovid in exile, the satirist looks in from the outside. Miller’s reading equates darkness with private acts, and in many respects the day-lit vistas of Ovid’s Tristia 2 are as murky as the more straightforwardly night-time ambience of rape, adultery, and prostitution that Horace showcases in Satires 1.2. Here, just as in Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Juvenal 3, we can see how moral and ethical diVerences between day and night are being subverted as sunlight and political, public spaces are subject to reinvention. Miller’s elegiac and satirical Xaˆneurs are propelled metonymically through Rome’s ethically dark places by a series of satisfactory (if at times grotesque and debasing) moments of pleasure which he characterizes as anarchic, degrading, and carnivalesque by turns. Diana Spencer’s gaze across the city has stability and fracture as its central concerns. This essay’s exploration of Livy’s reiterative telling of the story behind the Lacus Curtius prompts an investigation into the eVect of a view from above (a horse, or a hill) into the (psychological) depths of the Forum Romanum. In Livy, the Lacus Curtius oVers to swallow up Rome’s best and brightest in order to erase opposition and conXict, all within an amphitheatrical performance space that looks up to its enclosing hills for meaning. Taking this back to Miller’s suggestions about how meaning is drained from and written into particular places, Spencer’s essay makes the Forum viewed from above (particularly from a Capitoline perspective) into a location of fracture and tension for citizen self-fashioning. In the process of teasing out the semiotics of Livy’s unstable chasm, Spencer suggests that Hegel’s identiWcation of void as a site of meaning (and Deleuze’s development of Hegelian existentialism) the aural diVerence between day and night is likely to have been astonishing (qualitatively at least), and the kinds of traYc thronging the streets will also have impacted enormously upon the availability and accessibility of particular routes. Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 345) comment on the combination of noise and darkness into which the city was plunged at night.

38

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oVers a productive way into Livian psychodynamics. By opening up and reinscribing this black hole in the Augustan city, she argues, Livy was (at least implicitly) highlighting Augustus’ reconWguration of Roman time and space. Here, it is suggested to us that Livy’s fascination with each of his two Curtius’ leaps oVers one exploratory foray into the whole process of allocating meanings not just to civic space but to the politically loaded process of moving through civic space in particular ways and along speciWc routes. It is not so much whether one is up or down—whether in Livy’s increasingly legalized and annalistic city, emerging from foundational chaos, or searching for Wrm ground in the mythic, murky subterranean depths which provide its opposite—but how one perceives the process of (controlling) passage between the two. Controlling the prospect of the city’s public fabric is a burning issue in Tacitus’ Histories, and Rhiannon Ash dissects what happens to the buildings of the Capitol when Vitellians and Flavians clash. Like Spencer and Vout, she stresses the signiWcance of the view from above, but she also focuses our attention on Tacitus’ personiWcation of the city as an embodiment of History, making the buildings themselves into agents of perception and historical change.87 For Ash, the buildings that dictate Rome’s glory become debased and deWled deities—they look down on the bloody and sordid conXict that Tacitus lays out, whilst also suVering structurally from the violence that washes around them. But these buildings also take part in the conXict: raised above the city, Vitellius’ brother’s house does not simply gaze down upon the city as it tears itself apart, it attracts Rome’s eyes upwards, to Rome’s numinous hills, and thereby compromises Vitellius’ claims to have laid aside imperial authority (Histories 3.70.1). The destruction of the Capitoline Temple demonstrates how decapitation aVects the whole life of the Empire (Histories 3.72), and, more disturbingly, makes it eventually possible for the Gauls to see in the death of the Capitol the fall of Rome (Histories 4.54). The temples (notionally elevated through their representation of their gods) and Capitol (temple and hill) are unable, in Tacitus’ Wlleting of Rome, to make any impact on the soldiers who are 87 Cf. Edwards (1996: 76–9) on Tacitus’ Forum-as-arena (Histories 1.40–3). Cf. Purcell 1995a and 1995b.

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despoiling their own city, and as roof tiles hurtle down, thrown by Flavians onto Vitellians, Tacitus’ Rome is self-destructing both structurally and metaphysically. Ash’s reading of Tacitus’ structural imagination shows us how implosion and a collapse of all perspectives model a civil war-torn city in which hills and temples lose their ethical and actual elevation. Here, Tacitus’ Rome folds in upon itself, physically and psychologically, and we see just how signiWcant a contrast between heights and depths has been to understanding and Wxing its urban topography. The derelict body, in Ash’s Tacitus, stands for both the cancerous citizens (destroying their host/themselves) and the decaying urban fabric, holes and dislocations in the psychogeography of which are central to narratological momentum. By showing how Tacitus personiWes the city, only to decapitate it (by toppling the Capitoline citadel), Ash argues that this Rome takes on the qualities of a mise en abyme, but one in which ethically drained ediWces reXect each other’s gaze in a landscape drained of citizenship.88 There are clear points of intersection between this analysis and David Larmour’s embodiment of Juvenalian Rome as an ‘abject’ subject. Revisiting one of Miller’s sites (Juvenal, Satires 3) amongst others, Larmour’s essay argues that in Juvenal we Wnd a cognitive model for experiencing, indeed taking on, the skin of the city in order to understand its hidden, marginal routes. As he draws out the visceral qualities of urban form, Larmour’s Juvenal makes a case for glorying, revelling in the explosive, indeed expulsionist imperative that characterizes his view from the bowels. But whereas Ash shows how Tacitus reports, appalled, on a body from which identity has been erased and the internal (ethical) fabric obliterated and buried, Larmour suggests a paradox of liminal vitality, and even centrality. We see this at work also in the characterization of Rome as a body in dramatic crisis in Jonson’s Catiline and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Here, ‘Rome’ the place becomes not so much a theatrical prop as a key protagonist in Elizabethan cultural politics. Rome on stage is simultaneously a locus classicus, a visually garrulous set, and a signal 88 See e.g. Gowers (1993: 12–16, 1995: 25–9) on Rome as a body. McEwen (2003) oVers a sometimes provocative but always intriguing reading of the corporeal qualities in Vitruvius’ De architectura. She reads this as a document that synthesizes emperor, architect, architectural text, and empire into one corpus.

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for self-scrutiny that aVects all of the characters deployed about it. Reconstructing ‘Rome’, for these authors and their audiences, is as much about fashioning the self (in Stephen Greenblatt’s terms) as it is about the ‘historical’ detail being played out.89 Using ‘Rome’ to speak about and alongside the formal dramatic narrative interjects a note of dialogic immediacy. This in turn highlights the impact of mnemonics of place—the stories that places ‘tell’ about themselves, and the stories that we map onto them—upon individual and cultural identity. Miller’s route-maps of degradation and alienation are located in physical processes mapped onto individual and collective citizen bodies. Strategies for moving through Rome’s mythopoetic topographies are thus hugely signiWcant. How one reads movement into Rome concerns Ash—a military advance through the city towards its symbolic heart makes Rome collapse from the inside. In Larmour, by way of contrast, the boundaries of the city are plotted as its agents of abjection; only by formulating an escape trajectory can Rome continue to exist (a topos revisited, with a twist, by Fellini’s bikers in Theodorakopoulos’s essay). Miller’s exploitation of Lacan in particular is complemented by Larmour’s use of Kristeva to explore what happens when Rome ejects its own authenticity via the methods of egress and ingress which give the city structure and meaning. The Kristevan process of ‘abjection’ has important connexions with Miller’s conWguration of a city contaminated by erotic and shameful activities, deWned by everything that should remain hidden. Abjection also underlies the archaeological tensions highlighted by Blevins and Vout as they investigate how position vis-a`-vis the city and the eVect of its semi-buried status impact upon its iconic qualities. We can see Larmour’s approach, too, as a meditation on the suggestion that ‘Rome’ is most explicitly located in the deeply embedded places which make passage in and out possible: Juvenal’s focus on roads and gates characterizes the city/body by its holes and rifts. Like Miller’s scene of urban degradation and (self-)abasement, Larmour’s ‘Juvenal’ makes ‘Rome’ itself a site from which one wishes 89 Greenblatt (1980: 9): ‘self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien and what is produced in this encounter partakes of both . . . and hence . . . any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss’.

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to recoil. Paradoxically, Larmour’s proposal that we use a process of abjection to understand the Juvenalian subject shores up the interpretative gaps in ‘Juvenal’s’ authorial identity. It also opens up wider concerns of how satire models Rome. DeWled locus amoenus, arena, mean streets—these sights/sites not only frame the subject but also package Rome’s urban qualities and imperial gaze. Elegy and satire meet at the city gates—in the Wgures of Ovid longing to return from exile and Juvenal’s Umbricius longing to leave Rome for Cumae in Satire 3. Larmour’s interest in voices that police the edges and edgy qualities of Rome’s borderlands, psychic and otherwise, engages with a trope which features signiWcantly in The Sites of Rome, and indeed his de´rive-ist concern with the process of ordering space as a series of vignettes, to which meaning is attracted by the stories and journeys that connect them, is central to this collection. But whilst the productive collision between competing voices and the tensions that repel and attract edges and centres are vitally important for understanding Rome’s persisting signiWcance, other approaches also weave through this volume.

M I N D T H E G A P . . . G E N R E A N D G RO UN D Larmour’s interest in boundaries and distinction maps directly onto Latin literature’s negotiation of genre and mode. Quintessentially Roman genres and modes are diYcult to identify, even before one engages with the problems involved in deWning ‘genre’ tout court, as we observed above. Essays by Miller, and Jason Banta, alongside those of Balina and Ash all tackle the topographical implications of writing genre and ‘category’ in the city, and, indeed, how best to write ‘Rome’ in(to) genre. Miller is interested in the impact of satire and elegy on the subjectivities and individuation that determinedly urban poetics represent. He argues that the self-conscious choice of genres paraded by Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal is at least as signiWcant for their cityscapes as the episodic and picaresque stories that they recount. In particular, Miller develops the urban implications for characterizing Latin ‘elegy’ as inherently contaminatory, depending for its identity on an intimate, even cannibalistic relationship between public and private discourses,

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and a voracious ability to swallow, digest, and regurgitate tropes more straightforwardly associated with epic, didactic, and satire. This has the eVect of marking up the panoramas oVered in Miller’s texts as a series of segues that are not just spatial or even temporal, but rooted in the most basic ability to read and interpret, to speak and listen freely. As he implies, the way elegy ‘feeds on’ other genres is emblematic of a more general blurring of boundaries and appropriation that characterizes much of Roman literary production, arising as it does from a culture of consumption.90 Banta’s investigation of Plutarch’s archaic Roman landscapes confronts us with another perspective on the re-zoning of Rome. Forests, like cities, are frequently places of forgetfulness and dissolution of identity. For authors of the late Wrst and early second centuries ce and, in particular, the cultural production of the Second Sophistic, matrices of identity are increasingly grounded in imaginary (and even fantastic) constructs of an interplay between individual, community, space, and res publica. Banta focuses closely on Plutarch’s introductory comments in the Theseus (1.1) when he makes ‘early’ Rome a locale suitable only for (and susceptible only to) the vagaries and marvels of poetic, Wctive discourses. This essay uses Plutarch’s modelling of diVerence between Romulus’ Rome and Numa’s recategorization of the emerging res publica (sic) in order to highlight Plutarch’s emphasis on the diYculties of writing an account of a time and space outside chronological parameters, and without clear generic distinction. We can, however, already see this at work in Janan, as the metapoetics of Ovid’s metamorphic ‘Theban’ glades and springs (Met. 3.6–159) represents a disruption in collective perceptual reality, and the creation of an alternative ‘Rome’—one in which genre as well as identity is compromised. Janan’s reading of Ovid’s wilderness-city makes it into a hyperreal exposition of the fakery inherent in topographies of identity. Banta’s contribution, in contrast, draws out the slippage that is inherent in the edgy characters who occupy the city’s temporal badlands. One of only two of our contributors to tackle classical historiography, Ash takes Tacitus’ Histories as a locus for exploring ‘Rome’ as a 90 See, for example, Gowers (1993) on eating, and on the connexion between politics, the city, and disposal of eZuent (1995).

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model for historical discourse. In Spencer we can see some of the ways in which Livy’s reiterative approach to narratology emphasizes the poetics and programmatics of writing history. She also draws out some of the ways in which historiographic rhetoric, allusivity, and the conventions of persona all combine in Livy to emphasize the interpretative process that text and city require alike.91 Ash’s analysis of Tacitus takes this in a diVerent but intriguing direction. Writing into a traditionally modelled annalistic existence a process of internal meltdown is a strategy that she sees writ large in the Histories, where Tacitus maps conventional tropes and discursive strategies (personiWcation, obituary, moralizing critique, ostensibly regular passage of time) onto the built fabric of the city itself. As her title suggests, Ash’s interpretation of the Histories makes Rome a key player in Tacitus’ narrative. Taken to an extreme, we might argue that Rome becomes the main character and imaginative focus, transforming the Histories into something akin to a biography of a city drained of its ideal citizens. Rome’s protagonistic potential surfaces also in Balina’s account. Her analysis of Rome in Soviet Wctive and historical discourse is qualiWed even further, generically, by factoring in an intended readership: children. Here we see ways in which Rome’s all-inclusive qualities make it an ideal space for interrogating the aesthetics of— and even a perceived infantilism in—socialist realism; indeed we Wnd that a (Soviet) child’s Rome might oVer freedom not only from ideological imperatives but also from overtly propagandist didactic as well as the generic strictures of History and Fiction.

H A L LU C I NAT I N G T H E C I T Y: FA N TA S Y A N D P H A NTAS M AG O R I A A third approach—particularly important in essays by Banta, Vout, Janan, Spencer and Larmour—zeros in on the impossibility of isolating any one version of the city from its previous, contemporary, 91 Cf. Kraus (1994b: 268); Edwards (1996: 6–7) for a brief discussion; and Jaeger (1997: 1–29). As Edwards (1996: 82) also argues, Livy’s landscapes signify historical continuity, writing the present into existence by deploying historical topographies.

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The Sites of Rome

and even counterfactual layers. By exploring the cognitive and even psychological problems that eruptions of semiotic multiplicity can have, this strand in The Sites of Rome makes multiple guises and ideological Xags of convenience de rigueur for every snapshot panorama or stroll through the city’s imaginary and experiential accretions. Engaging with ‘Rome’ identiWes each sightseer with every itinerary, guide, and account available to the eye of every beholder, whilst the act of drawing out a multiplicity of (stories about) cities contained in ‘Rome’ reminds us of the paradox of the urbs aeterna. ‘Rome’ (that is, stories about Rome) always glances backwards for alternative and failed urban experiments against which to locate its identity, and, by devouring their qualities, always contains a sense of nostalgia and immanent decline. At times, this lingering sense of teleological anxiety exposes the city’s dreamlike qualities, making wandering Rome’s streets into a perambulation through individual and collective consciousnesses. All of the texts which The Sites of Rome considers share a fascination with what happens when one juxtaposes contemporary meaning and the persistence of past elements in Rome’s topography, and how this shapes receptions of Rome. They are all interested in the distortions and cognitive disturbances that cause overlapping and often dissonant versions of Rome to Xicker in and out of experiences of the city. Similarly, our authors identify ‘Rome’ as a site whose fragmentary collective identity confers individual sense of self and grants quasi-imperial power, whilst at the same time assaulting the senses and defying narratological attempts to close down its sites of meaning. We can see this operating in early imperial interest in moment(s) of closure: the point at which ‘Rome’ gained walls and thereby made a bid for stability and integrity, and Wrst attempts to categorize citizenship and codify laws; but looking back to Romulus’ Rome or the early monarchy never oVers easy answers. Stories about Rome’s foundation constantly face a paradox: from Aeneas’ Trojan fugitives to Augustus’ refoundation, and from Renaissance tropes of rediscovery to more recent exploitation of reception theory, each version of the city has situated itself on shallow, at times wholly unburied foundations. A Bakhtinian approach to Plutarch’s use of alienating and destabilizing rhetorical techniques for authorial self-fashioning moves Banta towards an exploration of the processes of synchronicity at work in the

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Romulus and Numa. In particular, he tests the implications of Bakhtin’s chronotope for Plutarch’s reinvention of Rome from the outside in. He Wnds that this model makes historical and experiential time and space inseparable; this in turn makes ‘mythic’ Rome an ever-present thorn in the historiographical progress of Numa’s city. From this position, Banta explores what happens when one takes Plutarch at his word and reads in Athens (from the Theseus) and Sparta (from the Romulus). He argues that Romulus’ Rome is the archetypal imperium sine Wne ; as such, this amorphous urban space is outside the control of Terminus and Janus (both of whom play a signiWcant part in his account of Numa), and thereby deWes attempts to deWne it intratextually. Romulus’ foundation of the city sets it up as a collective space which requires outside perspective, and even contamination and penetration, to know its own identity, whilst simultaneously devouring the signiWers of ‘diVerence’ that validate it. The appearance of Janus and Terminus in Plutarch’s Numa ought, then, to ensure Wxed limits for the city (containing it whilst circumscribing it), but despite the chronological implications of their authority (which Plutarch emphasizes—Roman Questions 19, 22, 41), alien, formless ‘archaic’ vistas keep creeping back into his attempts to diVerentiate incontrovertibly between his two palimpsestic Romes. Experiencing Plutarch’s Rome through Bakhtin’s chronotope (rather like Freud’s location of ‘Roman’ space at the heart of a reiWed Western consciousness) identiWes the city as a site of intersection between myth, history, and individual identity. Like Plutarch, Ligorio (in Vout’s essay) is attempting to connote diVerences between a chronologically determinate ‘now’ and a tantalizingly incomplete ‘then’. Vout, however, presents us with a far more ostentatiously dialectical panorama in which ‘Rome’ self-consciously embraces and gazes into its own historical identity. In Ligorio’s map a view from the Janiculum (outside the city’s walls) is framed not just by the tacit but omnipresent cartographer, but paratextually by the temporal fold which allows a Renaissance woman to face ‘Rome’ (classical fragments, accretions, and the contemporary city synoptically) from the edges of the page, whilst being confronted by the outward gaze of two classically attired ‘Roman’ soldiers. As Vout observes, climbing the Janiculum to see all Rome laid out beneath one continues to be a popular activity. She collects up a range of the intensely allusive Roman vistas that we experience now,

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and demonstrates our own edgy status as viewers and viewed, imaginative and imaginary cartographers at once. By concentrating on Rome’s hills, Vout reminds us that the hills are boundaries that inscribe numen into the urban experience, and that allow us to locate ourselves in what we recognize as Rome’s most sacred and culturally contested spaces. Furthermore, when we look down from the ‘gods’ we also Wnd ourselves drafted into the ongoing urban diorama. We become part of the spectacle that we are attempting to contain and understand. In each case, a perspectival frame ensures that the ‘traveller’ remains outside the landscape looking in, whilst at the same time situating him- or herself in a line-up of chroniclers and Romanophiles that has taken on a fantasy life and textual qualities of its own. In this way, each scene continues to emphasize the interpretative weight of history that makes the fragmentary bones of the city on display so tantalizing. Where Banta’s essay faces up to the implications of Wnding the past seeping into the present, and Vout toys with the idea of the present endlessly contaminating the past, Janan, Spencer, and Larmour are all concerned to investigate what happens when past and present are jostling vigorously to occupy the same sites. Janan’s watery Thebes, in Ovid, is a menacing space that stands as a determinedly antiRoman city, a vision perhaps of the abject which Rome seeks to repress. If Rome is the u¨ber-cosmopolis, then the failure of civilization that Ovid’s Thebes embodies oVers a disturbing familial model for a city obsessed with genealogies and ancestry.92 The omnipresence of Rome’s maiores—conceptually and physically inescapable in private and public urban vistas—always makes it diYcult to separate out Rome’s present from its pasts, and one lurking danger that Janan exploits is the threat of ghostly presences. In ‘Thebes’, Janan argues, Ovid Wnds an ideal locus for exploring the horrors that the backward glance can conceal, or reveal. The rapid changes that the fabric of the Augustan city was undergoing were ostentatiously concerned to implicate one version of Rome’s biography in all accounts of present prosperity and future security. Ovid’s Thebes, Rome’s warped mirror 92 Edwards and Woolf (2003b: 1–2, 7–13) introduces some of the ways in which diversity and multi-ethnicity generate meaning and threaten ‘civilization’. See further Morley (2003) and Dench (2005), Chapters 1 and 2 in particular.

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image, draws on perverted and distorted mythic tropes to show how an obsession with foundations can turn urban space into an hallucinatory swamp in which there is no stable (interpretative) ground beneath our feet. This is, after all, the book of the Metamorphoses which also contains the Narcissus episode. In this nightmarish Theban Rome, Janan sees a delusionary phantasmagoria that maps out what Lacan might frame as a terminal disruption of the Symbolic. This psychogeographic rift makes it impossible to distinguish between now and then, between monstrous and natural, between fantasy, myth, and urban realia. This is complicated, in Janan’s reading of Ovid, by a parallel rift in what she terms the antipodes of pietas and furor. The imposition of distinctions between right and wrong that characterize attempts to give meaning and order to collective identity in a city break down at their most basic level in Ovid’s Thebes, where the object of pietas (father / State) comes to represent chaos and sadism (as the emperor does in the arena, even if nobody ‘sees’ it that way). In this manner, even and especially Rome’s most authoritative monuments and most mythically and culturally grounded topographies are inevitably gateways to a dizzying and disorienting mise en abyme. Spencer is also concerned with Rome’s potential to act as a distorting mirror which draws the beholder into a disturbing city-within. Here, the hallucinatory potential is performative; the act of walking up to the contemporary Lacus Curtius involves a re-enactment of the soteriological moment(s) when the abject threatened the notquite-founded city. The implicit threat contained in the persistence of the Lacus in the Forum locates the unknowable and chthonic deep in the heart of the city’s Republican fabric, but it also reiterates the warping eVect of alternative perspectives on a citizen’s ability to interpret and lay claim to contemporary urban landscapes. The Lacus oVers a canvas that is at once blank and crowded with aetia. Livy’s susceptibility to the inexplicability of the Lacus makes it, in Spencer’s view, an intriguing alternative to Ovid’s Thebes for testing the eVect of katabasis on a city’s self-fashioning. Closing down the opportunities to gaze from above, in this scheme, is what threatens to collapse identities. One way of reading the Lacus is to see it as a momentous example of a nascent urban space performing an act of self-vivisection—the

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resulting reconWguration makes deformity and mutilation of the fabric of the city intrinsic to Roman self-fashioning. In Larmour’s essay we see an alternative version whereby the satiric Xaˆneur (as an everyman) ravenously generates and devours as many of the urban highlights as he can in order to stave oV invisibility and anonymity in a city that teems with far too many stories. Here, Rome’s characteristic gesture is the shrug—the city absorbs stories and myths in a manner that consumes citizen-identity as a process of generating urban meaning. The narrative confusion that this inscribes in the spaces across which the Xaˆneur strays makes his attempts to narrate the city into coherence a by-product of his quest for individuation. The satirist’s blink, in Larmour’s essay, reminds us of a looking-glass world in which not only is everything both more and less than what it seems, but is also susceptible to an almost cinematographic eVect— time lapse movie-making in which vital frames fail to make the cut. This locates Egeria’s grove, in Juvenal 3, on a number of hugely signiWcant faultlines. Most obviously, perhaps, it marks the point of departure from Rome via the Porta Capena; this also, however, makes it a point of access, the implications of which for how one models Roman citizen identity are laid out in its contemporary inhabitants (Jewish beggars). Both Egeria and the Jews are contained in the space (‘Egeria’ in its designation, the Jews as its inhabitants) simultaneously, but as Larmour points out, Juvenal makes it impossible to allocate semiotic priority to one or the other. To be authentically ‘Roman’, here, is rewritten as to be in a constant state of (internal) exile, to be dependent upon incoherence and a process of straying that requires Wxed meaning to be drained, salubriously, from the city’s most entropic sites.

RU S IN U R B E: RO ME A S T H EME PAR K Locating meaning at Rome’s edges and in the shadows that cluster around (but fail to be Wxed coherently in) Rome’s monuments oVers us a city that eludes attempts to impose rationality and coherence. Nevertheless, the dystopian urban psyche that these essays try on for size is itself a means to a recognizable end: a desire to enforce order

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and map chaos. One way of generating distinctive urban identity is to juxtapose city and countryside (succinctly characterized as rus in urbe). The Sites of Rome is interested in how rus acts as a space for testing urban theory and for formulating characteristically civic qualities; we are also interested in how and why reinventing rus in the city eventually leads to urban meltdown once nature-as-artiWce overwrites productive dialectic between rural and urban tropes. This is particularly vivid in the essays of Janan and Larmour, and reading Rome’s increasingly tenuous relationship with a working countryside alongside the proliferation of urban pleasure gardens and exurban luxury estates, we can see how these sites oVer digestible entre´es into the disturbing worlds of all-too-real theme parks.93 As Balina’s essay also suggests, the overwhelming metonymic signiWcance attached to Roman objects and images sited or recreated in Russia made travel to their locus classicus not just irrelevant, but even undesirable. Selfregenerative and solipsistic spaces, theme parks redeWne the outside world in their own image; they warp perceptions of scale, distance, and time, and drain (adult) authority from visitors.94 For Rome, theme-park mentality is most obviously represented in excoriating and awe-struck impressions of Nero’s Domus Aurea. It is striking that despite a wide range of allusions, classical authors shied away from extended commentary on this ultimate urban fantasy.95 One reason at least for Latin literature’s need to move rapidly on is surely that the Domus Aurea is too obvious a symbol of hyperrealism in the built environment, descriptive commentary on which could too easily segue into a critique of the Principate and autocracy, and subsequent rulers.96 This lack of clear and detailed engagement with Nero’s projects draws our gaze to alternative fantasy vistas that previous sections have already touched upon. Ovid’s Metamorphoses oVers beguilingly and almost ridiculously transgressive sites where 93 Cf. Harwood (2002)’s comparison of Disney’s reinventions of ‘reality’ with the kinds of cultural appropriation on oVer in eighteenth-century landscape artiWces. (See also Lowenthal (2002), Treib (2002), and Brown (2002), in the same volume). 94 Cf. Eco (1987) on ‘fakes’ and their impact on ‘reality’. 95 On ancient disinclination to praise any aspect of Nero’s public buildings, see Elsner (1994: 119–20, cf. 123). 96 Nero becomes synonymous with the Domus Aurea, and vice versa; on this, see Elsner (1994: 118, 123–4).

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inspiring tableaux, quasi-animatronic monsters and beauties, breakneck and disorienting changes of level and perspective all entertain and bewilder. Like Disney’s It’s A Small World, After All, Balina’s preRevolutionary St Petersburg oVers a better-than-life simulacrum of the classical experience, where ‘Rome’ is more convincingly and conveniently available to those who remain at home. Similarly, in Janan’s exposition of Thebes we Wnd a collapsing pan-Mediterranean prototype for an audience schooled to expect pleasures to track them down in Rome rather than vice versa. Visiting a theme park and unrolling the Metamorphoses are activities that oVer something of the hallucinatory, oV-kilter qualities that were considered above, and Janan argues, in eVect, that the terrifying monsters that uncoil in Thebes’ warped Main Street, USA are intrinsic to a society undergoing a collective psychosis. The disproportion and insanity of scale that characterize Thebes are founded in a characteristically Augustan disinclination to accommodate chaos and anarchy within the urban experience. Here, necessary conXict, normative uncertainties, and random cruelties are banished from the monumental landscapes under Augustus’ control. Nightmares require an outlet, and it is in his horrors mapped onto a recognizably ‘other’ Rome that Ovid provides them with full rein. This story could transform Rome itself into a site of terminally and even violently peaceful quietude. But monstrosity or, as Janan writes it, a rift in the Symbolic, contrives to remind ‘Rome’ of where its foundations lie. This intrusion of abnormality is charted allusively by Ovid in Thebes’ paradox of artiWcial nature laid alongside the assertion of environmental authority by the city’s natural history, but the paradox of rus in urbe is one which was Wrmly lodged in the Roman imagination well before Ovid’s monstrous landscapes took shape. When Cato commented that the best compliment one could pay to a Roman was to call him a farmer, he was voicing an obsessive and insupportable relationship between urbs and rus that by the Wrst century bce was already running on empty.97 The scatter-gun approach of Varro’s multi-generic philosophy of agriculture and identity and Vergil’s recreation of Arcadia in a world from which small-holders were increasingly being squeezed out are indicative examples of 97 Cato, De agri cultura praef. 2.

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responses to the violent changes that had transformed the direct relationship between citizenship and working the land. As land ownership increasingly became an e´lite prerogative rather than a signiWer of citizen identity we begin to see nature, pastoral, and agriculture forcing their way more centrally into iterations of speciWcally urban identity. Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics allude in diVerent ways to the immanence of rus in urbe; but whilst literary and artistic production of the late Republic and early Augustan principate tends to situate rural and natural motifs in urban settings and attempt to retain a sense of integrity of rural identity distinct from urban landscapes, subsequent texts are often open to interpretation as to the possibility of integrity of separate identity for either space. Rus as theme park, dominated by scantily populated latifundia and pleasure gardens, is so closely connected into urban modes of discourse and autocratic ideology that identifying a diVerence between what have become symbiotically linked urban and rural playgrounds becomes ever more diYcult.98 Nero’s Domus Aurea is in many respects a reiWcation of concerns that are only implicit in Ovid’s Thebes, with its ostentatiously artistic serpents, pools, groves, glades, and grottoes. In Statius’ Siluae we can see what happens in a fantastic post-Neronian rustiWcation of the city. Urban and even urbane discourses here are signiWcantly supercharged when Statius takes the breakdown of barriers between rus and urbs to its discursive extreme by making his book represent both the ‘forest’ (with its imaginative connotations in contemporary consciousness) and also the villa. But where once the villa (like the city) was in eVect a service post for the ‘real’ business of land management, the city-villa (and we are already beginning to see Rome’s own villaqualities expressed in Varro, RR 3) is a place from which labour, in e´lite experience, is excluded. A suggestive corollary for the silua as an object of contemplation and place associated with otium (and the absence of negotium) is found in the forest scenery of the arena. With siluae in the arena, one Wnds a potentially dizzying disembowelment—that which should be outside, unknowable, and marginal 98 Cf. the case of England, where the rural landscape became, and in many respects remains, a Capability Brown theme park: see e.g. Stroud (1975) and Turner (1985). Chapters 2 and 4 (in particular) of Ayres (1997) oVer a perceptive and holistic analysis of the eighteenth-century English connexion with Rome’s landscapes.

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replaces the city, and does so by colonizing the ‘new’ point of balance between authorities of emperor and people. As Kathleen Coleman observes, both Calpurnius Siculus and Apuleius comment on the introduction of ‘wild’ forests into the cultus of the arena, and given the intense ambiguity that saturates this particular kind of scenography, its literary polyvalence in the later Wrst century ce is unsurprising.99 Varro’s inscription of rural and urban simultaneity into an Orphic ‘spectacle’ at Hortensius’ villa (RR 3.13.3) makes a highly stage-managed and enclosed ‘wilderness’ equivalent to the Circus Maximus. Varro’s accounts (via ‘Appius’) of this and another perspectivally managed scene at Varro’s own Tusculan villa (RR 3.13.1) are particularly interesting for this collection because of their emphasis on the raised position of the spectators. The forest-arena is a prestige space for dying in, and its increasing scope as a space for testing the reality-eVect of cultural imperialism must certainly have lent weight to its signiWcance for exploring models of authority—both psychological and physiological (Coleman 1990: 54, 72–3). Translating the potential of the locus amoenus to an urban location, and then (as Statius to some extent does) reinscribing this warped reXection back onto a rural scene, makes a radical statement about cultural politics and centres of authority that in many ways oVers a continuation of Varro’s ‘urban’ villa (RR 3).100 The paradox of rus in harena points to the centripetal and centrifugal currents that deWne the experience of the imperial city. The Colosseum is the site of inXux and eZuence par excellence, since it was into here that animals and humans branded as Other Xowed in vast numbers and from here that their lifeless bodies were cast out. In the Colosseum, the ‘society of the spectacle’, to appropriate Guy Debord’s coinage from his 1967 expose´ of capitalism, enacted a vision of Rome and the Empire which aimed at—even if it could 99 Coleman (1990: 52). She cites Calpurnius, Eclogue 7 and Apuleius, Met. 10.30.1–34, 10.34.2, but can see evidence of similarly manipulative and disorienting entertainments at e.g. Varro, RR 3.13.2–3, where Hortensius’ Laurentine silua is at once therotrophium, amphitheatrical restaurant, and locus for knocking e´lite autarky against decidedly ambivalent mythic archetypes (cf. Martial, Liber spectaculorum 21). Coleman at 67 picks out Varro’s use of ‘Orpheus’ at Hortensius’ villa, but does not comment on his focus on artiWce, connotations of enclosure, and comparison with the Circus Maximus. 100 See in particular Green (1997: 427–8).

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not fully produce—ideological closure.101 Flavian gradual decommissioning of the Domus Aurea must have laid bare the eVort and care required to create an impression of artlessness, and, ironically, made it imperial business to emphasize the artiWce of what would replace it.102 The Colosseum’s ambivalently Neronian foundations lie in the infamously vast lake that reXected Nero, heavens, and domus alike; its aggressively manmade qualities emphasize (we might suspect) the humane mortality of its builders. Nevertheless, any postNeronian aestheticization of landscape (whether literary or concrete) must be susceptible to the quirks of a dangerous association. Nero could be accused of dragging a fantasy rus into a city already saturated with compromised renditions of Rome’s rustic heritage, and doing so in real time and space in a manner that Xouted the vestigial distinctions that previously kept e´lite pleasure gardens and the business of urban life safely distinct. In eVect, the whole Domus Aurea complex holds up a mirror to Rome’s wealthy citizens and demonstrates their distance from any notionally unselfconscious relationship with their land.

101 As Debord (1995: 19 [24]) puts it, ‘by means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise’. The spectacle stands between the mass of citizens and an understanding of how to enact socio-political change. Cf. Hopkins and Beard’s comments on the symbolic power of the Colosseum and its place in the history of arenas and games at Rome (2005: 36, 38–41, 106–7 and passim). Their speculation at 54 that the Colosseum could well have been just as emblematic of cosmopolitan Rome in between ‘shows’ as when formally in use is attractive. ‘Spectacle’, for the Situationists, signiWed oYcially authorized and imposed ways of reading urbanism (and living in the city), which lead to a collapse of reality. The phenomena of the spectacular city are the trappings of mass consumerism and manifestations of a glamorization of corporate and political hegemony; cf. Fredrick (2002b: 243, 245) on the hyperreality of the arena/ theatre. Although self-avowedly of the moment, Situationism’s responses to radical urban revision and a rise in cultures of consumption oVer, as we have argued, thought-provoking analogies for the works of such late Republican and early Imperial commentators as Cicero, Sallust, Pliny the Younger, and Juvenal. Sadler (1999) on the early moves of Situationism oVers an insight into how the mid-twentieth century replicates some of the characteristics of Wrst-century ce Rome. On Rome as ‘city of spectacles’, see n. 37, above. 102 On the close connexion between art and nature that the Domus Aurea inspired in commentators, see e.g. Tacitus, Annals 15.42; Suetonius, Nero 31.1. Elsner (1994: 121–2) discusses rus in urbe, the politics of placing a ‘country’ villa in the city, and the Domus Aurea; see Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 349–64) on Nero’s ‘insolente solution’ (349).

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Urban ‘pastoral’ helps us to think through the Neronian aftermath, and the multiple audience experiences suggested by Statius’ diversity of arboreal matter nod to the unknowable and notionally impenetrable (the wild forest), and hint at the possibilities of epistemological taxonomies that a controlled and encircled forest oVers; but by civilizing (that is, cultivating) the idea of the forest (whether in text or arena) its liminal and external qualities are subverted.103 This dilemma—how to revitalize poetic discourse within the psychodynamics of what modern geographers term the doughnut (or ‘edge’) city—becomes particularly important for Larmour’s reading of Juvenal. As this essay eventually comes to imply, inserting external space (liminal zones that contain and surround) into the city’s heart removes the prospect of understanding its diVerence, and makes that ‘heart’ into ‘no place’. Without solid physical, cultural, or generic boundaries, urban epistemologies (and, in particular, the poetic modes that attempt to characterize or somehow encapsulate the city) are drained of meaning. The hole at the city’s heart (whether ‘arena’, ‘forest’, or even, as Spencer suggests in Livy, ‘swamp’) signals incompletion, and in the lack of integrity that this Xags up reside the nostalgic fantasies of a ‘perfect’ lost city. Larmour’s Juvenalian grove situates us in an ostensibly urban scene, but its urban qualities are a tottering series of constructs. The sacral qualities of the Grove of Egeria are vitally important because they connect Numa (urban morphology, codiWcation, and textualization) with Egeria (notionally an outpouring of nature, captured in water). But, as Larmour makes plain, Juvenal’s rhetoric is conceptually incapable of drawing this relationship to a successful conclusion. The marble deWlement that has polluted Egeria’s spring and grove is a by-product of Rome’s position as imperial capital, but so is Juvenal’s distinctively literary commodiWcation of the ‘authenticity’ (grass, tufa, and water—3.18–20) which it desecrates. Not only has it become impossible to disentangle artiWce from nature but also we Wnd that a supposedly natural landscape is only perfect when 103 For Statius, muddying the boundaries between city and forest is also potentially a sideways glance towards his self-location as a post-Horatian poet (and the dilemma of how to position ‘public’ poetry written in Horace’s vatic future) in the Siluae, a task he addresses just as vigorously as he does the prospect of post-Vergilian epic in his Thebaid.

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tended (and deWned) by human responses. Once abandoned by Romans, it becomes (ironically) a wilderness which Rome cannot contain or internalize, and which undermines notions of romanitas (as peddled by Juvenal’s narrator). Juvenal’s Umbricius expels himself from the contaminating prospect opened up by the Grove and its grotto; in its status as a cultural ruin, this extreme vision of what happens to rus sets up the Wnal theme that this introduction highlights.

RU I N A N D D E C AY: O P T I M I S M A N D THE END OF HISTORY Larmour’s interrogation of Juvenal’s Rome Wnds decay deeply embedded in the psychic framework that deWnes the city. His reading opens up the prospect of a city which—like that viewed by Burkhart—is propped up by its ruinous and broken character. Ruin was already a preoccupation of the late Republican city, with the absent presence of monuments from which meaning has been drained evoking a city sinking—like that imagined by Gibbon—into a terminal decline;104 but the complexities of what ‘ruin’ can mean have wide-ranging implications. As Larmour argues, fragmentary remnants of Juvenal’s signiWeds continue to persist, wandering the city and clustering around its liminal sites, just like Juvenalian narrators. This paradoxical sense of an ongoing semiotic vitality embedded in the notion of decay can be traced back in particular to some peculiarly Augustan concerns. A fetishization and even aestheticization of ruin and devastation in late Republican cultural production draws on Rome’s ambivalent status vis-a`-vis Greece. Just as the political and military ‘ruin’ of the Greek world could be modelled as recuperated and restored by Roman intervention, so the civil wars of the Wrst century bce and a material decline in the fabric of Rome could be represented as integral to a period of optimistic transformation and restoration under Augustus. Politically, a ruinous and decaying space was an important element of Augustan ideological fashioning, and 104 E.g. Gibbon (1914: 173–4).

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despite Horace’s overtly pessimistic, even nihilistic characterization of Rome as a ruinous space (Epodes 16.1–2) the notion that destruction and devastation are the foundations upon which the city Xourishes is a vital element in what Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesarro have termed Augustus’ ‘cultural revolution’.105 Lucan’s spectacularly jaundiced Mediterranean panoramas are, perhaps, the Wrst move towards exploring the long-term implications of ruin for ‘Rome’, but this volume’s interest in the trope of ruin is centred on later rather than classical fallout. The European Romantic movement in particular emphasized the emotive signiWcance and generative nostalgic qualities that ruins could evoke, and ruins certainly have the capacity to signal process and historical change.106 A ruinous object also, of course, has immense potential to act as an alienating object. A ruin parades a decayed or fragmentary vision of what it formerly was whilst also signalling the inherent ephemerality of presently whole materia. But just like pastoral discourse, ruins can also signal artiWciality, particularly in terms of the voluble follies that modulate eighteenth-century European pleasure gardens. The rise of the ruin follows, in modern times, the rediscovery of classical antiquity and coincides with a renewed interest in the processes that underlie man’s relationship with nature.107 In nineteenth-century responses to Rome, and particularly in America, we 105 Habinek and Schiesaro (1997: xx). On Lucan and the end of optimistic ‘ruin’, see Spencer (2005). 106 Famously, Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, parades the immanence of ruin and grandeur in Rome past and present particularly vividly, e.g. Canto 4: Stanzas 78, 80, 143, 145–7. Canto 4 Stanza 112 maps out the sepulchral noise inhabiting contemporary Roman vistas. Cf. Goethe (nn. 42 and 81, above), whose impact is discussed in detail by Hachmeister (2002). On the general impact of ‘ruin’ in the (British) Romantic imagination, McFarland (1981) oVers an excellent introduction, as, more brieXy, does McGann (1984). The eVects of Cultural Tourism (the ‘Grand Tour’) are a thriving area of scholarly activity. Particularly interesting and provocative discussions of Rome, reception (and ‘ruin’) include the edited collections of Patterson (1984) and Edwards (1999); and studies by Goldstein (1977); Buzard (1993); Springer (1997); Chard (1999); and Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 365–408). 107 A useful introduction to the place of classical identity in forging Renaissance consciousness at Rome is Stinger (1985). On the changing shape of classical Rome in the (Western) Renaissance imagination, see e.g. Barkan (1991) and (1999), and Jacks’s detailed cultural readings (1993). Rowland (1998: 178–9) notes plans by Bramante and Julius II to turn Rome into a garden city in a manner evocative of classical Rome’s Tiberine villas. Her discussion (at 1998: 178) of Bramante’s eVort to

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see a growing sense of concern about the nature of intellectual ownership of Rome’s telling sites.108 Some of this can be traced back to Napoleonic incursions, when ‘Rome’ became a storehouse to be raided for new imperial conceits; in eVect, a ruin to be scavenged for salvageable fragments which could be reinvented and located evocatively in new ideological frameworks. This itself was grounded in the idealization of the Roman Republic so prevalent among the leaders of the French Revolution.109 Another strand is Italian uniWcation; classical ‘Rome’ was no longer the decaying game preserve and quarry of the papacy and aristocratic palaces. Nor was it straightforwardly or uncomplicatedly possible for the post-Revolutionary United States to locate itself as Rome’s Republican descendant when faced with the monarchical and increasingly imperial baggage that contemporary Italy was accumulating.110 Vout commences with Rome’s condition as a ruinous cultural artefact, and notes that ‘ruin’ oVers one way of providing the sense of distance that a panoramic understanding requires. Distance and circumscription (whether from above, or as a result of fragmentation and incompleteness) oVer clarity of vision (however spurious) and maps such as Ligorio’s kick start this process; moreover, they do this, Vout suggests, even as they echo the narratological possibilities of (un)framing the gaze that are already present in classical texts. Visualizations of Rome by Ligorio and Samuel Palmer, she argues, make classical Rome worth prospecting for, but, similarly, Montaigne’s claim to have identiWed a vista (from the Janiculum) that encapsulates the whole extent of the city makes one wonder what version of the city he has in mind. The shared expectation that characterizes so many of these Roman expose´s is that by ‘Rome’ we all identify a common set of signiWers, but since classical Rome was forge a holistic sense of modernity from fragments and ruin is particularly relevant to this collection’s concerns. Also of interest, here, is Burckhardt (1958: 183–95)— ‘Rome, the City of Ruins’. 108 Freud (1991: 257–8). On Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James see e.g. Block (1984); Bisztray (1991); Fogel (1990). 109 See Larmour (1991). 110 The essays in Edwards (1999) gather together many of these issues of intellectual ownership of Rome from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. See, previously, Patterson (1984) and Vance (1989).

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only gradually coming to light (literally and metaphorically) in the sixteenth century, it must also be the case that as ‘new’ ruins enter the urban fabric de haut en bas they are both mimicking and engaging in a dialogue with classically-inspired contemporary building and interior de´cor.111 One of the qualities of ‘ruin’ that makes it so relevant for our understanding of classical Rome is the destabilizing, contaminating eVect it has upon our ability to experience epistemological certainty. Classical fragments were already, even if anonymously, embedded in the Renaissance city as successive popes and aristocrats quarried the ruins, making it impossible to distinguish between ancient and modern fabrics. This means that rediscovering ‘Rome’ within the Renaissance (and later) city is not just about the classical past, but also about recognizing the material integrity of both cities within one another. Knowing classical Rome’s fragments and ruinous state entails recognizing the ruinous and fragmentary qualities that classical building blocks embed into the new city. Excise the fragments of the past, and the modern city will crumble. This Wlters through Vout’s essay, but is expressed more clearly in Blevins’s analysis of a crisis of identity at the beginning of modern humanistic consciousness of self. In this reading we can see how teleological models can impose notions of ruin that make’s Rome’s ‘perfect’ completion (the buried city is a Wnished and dead city) emblematic of its diVerence from the progressive developments in European philosophies of identity and individuation. Alongside this version of ruin as symptomatic of deathly perfection, we also Wnd that ruins oVer enormous potential to generate stories, triggering an urge to Wll in the gaps. By characterizing classical Rome as ruin (slipping into the footsteps of authors such as Horace and Lucan), Renaissance intellectuals and aristocrats 111 As Freud’s description of chronological and topographical simultaneity in Civilization and Its Discontents at 1991: 256–8 implies, only a ‘reader’ educated in the classics and religious history will be able to participate: by making Rome synchronously polyvalent, he also makes ‘Rome’ an exclusive club. In this, he implicitly echoes the reality for most ancients: Rome the cosmopolis and emblem of empire was a symbol accessed mainly via texts. Most ‘Roman’ citizens would never ‘see’ the city in the Xesh and an ability to access its textualized bricks and marble was itself generative of cultural status: see Woolf (2003). On the ‘travestied’ vision of daily life presented in texts by Roman authors—most of whom were not born in the city— see Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 317–18).

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were provided with an opportunity to inscribe a new ‘Roman’ Europe in the ruinous lacunae. This reading suggests, we think, the beginnings of a process that eventually develops into the appropriative strategies of revolutionary and Romantic eras, whereby Rome’s fragments are reinvented as hermeneutically Wxed tropes generated to maintain enjoyment of philosophical landscapes and deployed as fragmentary and decontextualized historical exempla. In her reading of closure into the end of Fellini’s Roma, Theodorakopoulos traces an at once outward-facing and solipsistic urban meditation that responds to these concerns. In Fellini’s apparently abortive ‘interviews’ with Gore Vidal (an American of Venetian descent, who positions himself as a latter-day Baudelaire) and Anna Magnani (loquaciously silent), Theodorakopoulos locates Fellini himself as another voice in an increasingly chaotic series of slices through strata of Roman meaning. Vidal’s potential to stand in for a New World consciousness (or new global consciousness) and a fresh perspective on (and in) Rome is always undermined by Rome’s intense signiWcance for American republican ideology and foundation mythology: ironically, Vidal’s notoriety as trenchant critic of American imperialism and hypocritical moralizing embeds him in the very narrative he seeks to demystify. Moreover, dining in Roma and in Rome, at the heart of an imploding and enclosing site, suggests necrophagy—reminiscent of the Satyricon—rather than the jet stream of progress. Vidal’s creative interest in Rome is generated by its ruinous decline rather than its qualities of creative vitality, so feeding amongst the carcass of Rome’s glories is one obvious interpretation of Fellini’s characterization of Vidal as an intellectual, but his roˆle in this Wlm in particular seems to push his signiWcance harder. The dying light in which Vidal bathes Rome suggests closure, just as does Magnani’s closed door, but what both eventually embody (Theodorakopoulos suggests) is the illusory nature of every perspective on the city. The frailty of Vidal’s stature as author and commentator (and, by extension, the vacuity of all attempts to make Rome stand for one dominant ideology) and the wordlessness of Magnani (who embodies but cannot speak for the city) implicate not just cinematography but the wider scheme of cultural poetics that govern representations of ‘Rome’. Between them, Fellini’s unsatisfactory interlocutors collect

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up the most signiWcant discourses to shape twentieth-century reception of Rome; at the same time, they fail or refuse to give the city sense or substance. We might draw the conclusion that the ruins on display in Roma are less the concrete fragments of Rome’s continuing struggle with its past(s) than the modes of engagement that remain open to us when attempting to interpret them. Fellini, in Roma, locates ruin in the solipsistic and cannibalistic qualities of successive characterizations of the city and in attempts to connote neatly packaged ideological-bites to suit those who collude in its decaying qualities. Post-classical responses to Rome have, traditionally, had a lot vested in Rome’s susceptibility to interpretation and re-authorization. Reborn as features of a whole and perfect, living, urban fabric, the twilit ruins that Fellini self-consciously conjures up would be useless for a (Freudian) imposition of meaning on the city’s emblematic and characteristic dissonances, but Theodorakopoulos suggests something rather more subtle. Her Roma reinvigorates Freud’s famous comparison of Rome to the human subconscious, giving it a wholly twentieth-century twist. This reading makes ‘Vidal’ and ‘Magnani’ characters in a stylized dialogue in which Rome’s permeability and fragmentary meanings are always emphasized by voice-over, but which reminds us tacitly that when the narrator’s voice itself falls silent we are faced with a choice. We can take over and reimagine ‘Rome’ afresh; or, like the bikers who elude the ideological embrace of the Colosseum, we can prioritize movement away rather than place within. With these bikers, we are back to Juvenal’s eternally (and never quite) departing Umbricius.

1 Rome at a gallop: Livy, on not gazing, jumping, or toppling into the void* Diana Spencer

P REA MBL E Getting a sense of perspective on Rome, whether temporal or spatial, is a recurrent concern of this collection. Modelling the chronological Wlters and processes of layering of the spaces from which, and into which, one gazes, is central to understanding how and why Rome’s multiple pasts continue to obsess us. It also allows us to tease out correspondences and conXicts between ongoing urges to recuperate ‘Classical’ Rome, and a succession of simultaneous penchants—from antiquity onwards—for rewriting it in our own image. Chronological perspective (or, in Bakhtin’s terms, the chronotope) Wgures as one underlying concern in this essay—the versions of us and them, then and now, that Rome and Livy invoke are never culturally neutral. Equally signiWcant, however, is the perhaps more straightforward trick of creating a textual ‘reality eVect’ by deploying a whole range of vertical and horizontal perspectives, both spatial and temporal. My essay is interested in particular in how one deWnes place, moves through space, and comprehends up and down in Livy’s early Rome; in the consequences of this for Augustan Rome; and Wnally, in the * David Larmour, Indra McEwen, and Gideon Nisbet signiWcantly improved various drafts of this essay, for which many thanks are due. The audience at a University of Manchester research seminar (in November 2002) kindly listened and responded to a very early spoken version; I hope that I have addressed some, at least, of their comments and questions!

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potential frictions that these activities generate.1 This opening section sets up some key issues, whilst subsequent sections move on to tackle Livy’s text in more detail. Physically, one looks down from a building or a hill, up from a valley, oV into the distance or up to high stories from street level. Such angles of gaze, and the perceptual and cognitive possibilities that they open up, inevitably generate and respond to key sites in an urban topography. The narratives that coalesce at these conjunctions of space, place, and point of view themselves draw together further associations between people and places, personal and collective stories and myths, societal expectations and longings. Hence, at the heart of each individual’s unique reading of urban topography lies a complex nexus of standpoints and angles of gaze—personal, psychological, aesthetic, mnemonic, imaginary, and experiential.2 Inside Augustan Rome, all of these cluster with particular urgency around the Fora, Capitoline, and Palatine.3 Nicholas Purcell suggests that Clodius’ funeral (52 bce) marked the Wrst dramatic shift in the topographies of the Forum Romanum, but also that Caesar’s impact on the Forum kick-started a relatively coherent (if long-drawn-out) process of ‘imperial’ reinvention. It provided a locus where Augustus’ restoration of the glory of the res publica and his position as princeps could both be celebrated, and whilst it may have been less coherently impressive than the redeveloped Campus or new Forum Augusti, its resonance as a monumentum and venue for legitimating power continued to increase.4 Topographically, the Forum valley has many 1 Jaeger’s analysis of Livy (1997) is a particularly important contribution. In this volume, see also Ash, Banta, and Vout (on hills and valleys) and Theodorakopoulos and Larmour (on movement around and between). For this essay, see especially Figs 2–5, and 8. 2 See e.g. de Certeau (1984: 115–130); Boyer (1994: 9, 474); Hayden (1995 passim); and Favro (1993), who imagines a ‘walk’ through Rome. Larmour and Spencer’s essay introduces these issues, in this volume; Vout discusses the issues in some detail. 3 See Favro (1993: 230–4). Iacopi (1995) discusses Augustus’ ‘complex’ on the Palatine, but see also Wiseman (1994: 101–10); Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 184–7); and Patterson (1992: 204–6). On the Capitoline, see e.g. Richardson (1992: 68–70); and Reusser (1993). Cf. Wiseman (1979) on Livy’s use of the Capitoline in his account of Manlius Capitolinus; on the Capitoline in Tacitus’ Histories, see Edwards (1996: 69–95) and Ash (in this volume). 4 Purcell (1995b : 336, 338, 339–42); cf. Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 74–7, 129–30).

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of the characteristics of an enclosed space; its hills in some senses seal it oV, and give a superWcial sense of coherence and deWnition. Its nexus of historical and historicized structures generated its meaning and made it a deWnitive space for Roman identity, but this complex texture also made it a diYcult zone to stage-manage, and on which to impose one authorized, coherent, and permanent understanding. I have chosen to focus on one particular monumentum—the Lacus Curtius: a ‘hole’ in the Forum Romanum—and to explore how Livy’s two aetiologies (the Wrst in Book 1, the second in Book 7) fashion, script, and give colour to this central ‘republican’ space and its relationship with the Palatine and Capitoline hills.5 Livy’s two causae for the Lacus oVer a singularly eloquent way into understanding how and why the marshy valley between the hills is signiWcant for the early Augustan city. His Wrst version of the story deploys rhetoric that focuses intensely on the participatory qualities of its spectacular ‘here-and-now’ choreography of Rome’s mythic history.6 This episode is predicated on the near-death experience of a Sabine soldier, Mettius Curtius. He rides his horse into a sticking place at the heart of the battleground, a site equivalent to the space which will be the Forum. In the process, he facilitates the rapprochement between Romulus’ proto-citizens and the Sabines that will 5 As Jaeger (1997: 51–2) notes, the hills deWne Livy’s Wrst account of the Lacus Curtius, but also Wgure signiWcantly in the versions recounted by Piso, Dionysius, and eventually Plutarch. Livy’s emphasis on the hollow space between the hills (the Forum) is, however, striking. Other literary references to the Lacus Curtius can be found at e.g.: Plautus, Curculio 466–82 (in a description of who lurks where in the Forum, we’re told that gossips, malicious people, and liars hang out there); Varro, LL 5.148 (the Lacus holds the memory of a mysterious chasm, only Wlled by an M. Curtius’ plunge in, saving the Forum, 362 bce); 5.149 (the Lacus memorializes one M. Curtius’ fall into a then-swampy site in Romulus’ city)—L. Calpurnius Piso also tells this ‘swamp’ story; 5.150 (it’s a fenced-oV spot with a puteal [wellhead or low kerb], marking the site of a lightning strike during the consulship of C. Curtius, in 445 bce); Dionysius, Ant. Rom. 14.11.3–4 (chasm); 2.42.5–6 (swamp); Valerius Maximus 5.6.2 (chasm); Pliny, HN 15.78 (chasm); Dio 30.1–2—and Zonaras’ epitome, 7.25—(chasm); Plutarch, Romulus 18.4 (swamp). See also Ovid, Fasti 6.401–4; and Suetonius, Augustus 57.1. Indra McEwen has reminded me that Varro alone (LL 5.150) includes the third version that speciWcally marks the spot with a puteal commemorating a lightning strike. A puteal might also mark a wellhead; this might suggest some earlier conXation of causae, since water features in Varro’s preceding version. 6 Livy 1.12.1–13.5. On Livy’s use of spectacle, see especially Feldherr (1998: 4–19 and passim).

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secure Rome’s future. The scene that pivots around the Lacus Curtius in Book 1 is recognizably part of Rome’s mythic landscape (the marshy heart of Romulus’ city), and a feature of everyday reality in the contemporary Forum (the dry and marbled monument still, in Livy’s city, called a lacus—reservoir, basin, and lake). The semantic Xuidity that the term lacus introduces points to a wider and immanent problem, hinted at in this Wrst causa: how to understand and deWne swampy and porous space, and how to integrate it into the city. The project of drying out Rome is one that keys directly into one of Agrippa’s most extensive schemes: sorting out the drainage. This project was most dramatically realized on the Campus Martius, the traditional but similarly damp location for citizens’ equestrian exercises; but by conjuring up a swampy proto-Forum and making it the stage for a cavalry skirmish Livy seems implicitly to draw changes to the Campus into the picture. Simultaneously, this dialogue between the two spaces, and between past and present, might also remind readers of the archetypal qualities of marshes as undrainable, and therefore always in some way porous, dangerous, and mysterious sites.7 In the story’s second outing (Livy 7.6.1–6), the lacus becomes a mysterious and initially unWllable chasm that suddenly opens up in the Forum. Reminding us that aetiology is an ongoing and iterative 7 On Rome and water, marshes and drainage, see Larmour and Spencer (in this volume) n. 51 for references. Purcell (1996) oVers an excellent summary of issues, while McEwen (2003)’s provocative study of Vitruvius has made a signiWcant impact on my reading of the Lacus Curtius as a site of tension. We may also, at this point, read in the story of Romulus’ apotheosis from the Palus Caprae (eventually to become Agrippa’s Stagnum) when we think about the dangers and persisting strangeness of a swamp on Rome’s doorstep (see e.g. Livy 1.16). Edwards (1996: 59–60) comments on the possibly parodic qualities of Ovid’s use of the swamp motif in the Fasti. On the Palus Caprae, see Coarelli (1993 and 1997: 17–60, 590, 591–602). More recently, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg oVers a useful parallel in which both foundation myth and city rise from a swamp. One could also look to Mussolini’s combination of pragmatism, radical archaeology, and mythmaking in his freezing of the then-waterlogged site of the Ara Pacis to facilitate its recovery; similarly, his draining of the Pomptine Marshes (which we must assume was glancing back to Augustus’ endeavours; e.g. Horace, Ars poetica 64–5, even if a closer referent is Garibaldi’s unrealized grand plan to divert the Tiber to dry Rome’s malarial swamps). Mussolini’s drainage project was part of the redevelopment of the area to the south of Rome (the planned Terza Roma) in conjunction with a determination to uncover enough of Ostia Antica to make it an archaeo-park for the planned Esposizione Universale of 1942.

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process might allude to late Republican research projects such as Varro’s, but it also cues the idea that even grand narrative historiography is contingent, and liable to generate interpretative friction. Again, in this second version, an equestrian plunge saves and uniWes Rome when the city is in peril—this time, when the uates had pronounced that the chasm could only be Wlled by hurling in Rome’s chief strength. Whereas the Wrst Curtius’ swamp is too viscous, ultimately too solid to allow him a fully realized deuotio, the second equestrian Curtius really does achieve a serious descent and successfully oVers up his life in exemplary fashion.8 His plunge suggests a subterranean and usually hidden depth to the Forum that mirrors the Capitoline and Palatine heights above it. In addition, it implicitly proposes a prototype zone beneath the Forum that preWgures the Cloaca Maxima. The spectacular qualities of both episodes are striking and diVerent. In the Wrst, a relatively static horse and rider get bogged down at the centre of an epic episode characterized by rapid scenographic transitions (in particular, zapping from one hill to the other), disturbances in chronology, topographical elision, acts of hubris, decisive action, and direct speech. In the second, a dramatically active horse and rider are encased in a scene memorable as an almost static tableau. It is described in terms of stately action, hesitancy and indecision, annalistic rhetoric and antiquarianism, and the site/sight is hedged around with reported speech. This becomes particularly signiWcant when we read Livy’s accounts of the Lacus Curtius as part of a wider exploration of what monumenta and their reception can mean for Augustan Rome. Monumenta, as Mary Jaeger suggests, are more than the realia of three-dimensional marble, bricks, and mortar; they are intrinsically concerned with the mnemonic processes of remembering and instantiating culture and tradition.9 By transforming his Forum 8 Feldherr (1998: 85–92) is particularly important on the deuotio (or sacriWce of self for community) in Livy, but see also Barton (1993: 40–5) for a more general discussion. Barton (1993: 40–1) characterizes the deuotio as the characteristically Roman and aristocratic expiatory (but also strategic) sacriWce. 9 Jaeger (1997: 25). Fowler (2000) argues persuasively for the cultural instability of monuments; on allusion and narrative topographies see Bergmann (2001); on topographies of memory in Lucan see Spencer (2005). Gowing (2005: 82–96) oVers a diVerent angle on Lucan, and also (2005: 132–59) provides an overview of the function of memory in classical Rome.

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into a temporary arena (or, given its position vis-a`-vis the hills, an amphitheatre) to stage a kind of aristeia-and-deuotio for each of his two Curtii, Livy also tackles the role of the eques in Rome. This equestrian scripting of the Forum is also, I suggest, likely to draw in the scenography and route of the transuectio, a parade reinvigorated by Augustus. As the annual procession of Equites, the transuectio gave renewed cavalry-style meaning to citizen-understanding of the city, and provided the sole occasion other than the triumph when the formal qualities of equestrian display and military prowess were enacted within the city. One way of investigating how Livy develops such a plurality of meaning and leans on his audience’s cognitive input is to read the two accounts in the light of contemporary work on the philosophical relationship between time and space. A model that proves particularly useful for my discussion is the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s highly inXuential enrichment of Hegelian existentialism, and, in particular, his reWnement of Hegel’s basic qualities of Negative and Positive as the guarantors of existence.10 In Hegel’s thought, existence demands ongoing dialectic, which in turn requires that categories and concepts must contain within themselves their opposites. In other words, without an underlying opposition, existence and historical progress are impossible. Hegelian History moves forwards in a dialectical progression towards a set of contingent ends (dependent upon and associated with particular events, or strands, in History; the zeitgeist, as it were), and idealized ends (the goal of full Reason, towards which the dialectic of History struggles). Each progressive element represents a response to and an advance on the previous. Starting with Hegel, we might think that this model has much in common not just with late Republican teleological historiography, but with some of Livy’s historiographical strategies, particularly his 10 Hegel (1969) is a good starting point for exploring the Negative, and his conceptualization of inWnity; see also Hegel (1975), and (1970 § 254–62) on space and time. Deleuze (1990: 253–79) oVers an intriguing insight into how he positions his work in terms of ancient philosophy. Elsewhere (Spencer 2006), I develop some of the implications of Hegel’s Negative for reading Horace’s countryside Odes as an edgy (self-)deconstruction of an Augustan critical voice, trying but failing to Wnd dialectic in the Augustan city. Deleuze’s work has been immensely signiWcant (at times to the point of cliche´) in modern architectural theory.

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interest in binary schemes. Ab Urbe Condita (AUC ) is, however, more complex in its nuances than a strict imposition of this logic would suggest. As I discuss below, a Deleuzian ‘being’ which is generated by the posing of questions and the establishment of problems can oVer signiWcant advantages as a model for cultural enquiry into the emergence of the Augustan Principate.11 Writing on, amongst other things, the positive value of chaos in modern architecture, Rem Koolhaas has suggested that ‘If there is to be a ‘‘new urbanism’’ it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty’.12 Livy’s double causae—and, in particular, the designation of the Lacus as a monumentum (1.13.5)—Wx our attention on some of the perceptual and cognitive ambiguities in the spectacular qualities of Augustan space.13 Livy’s interest is not, I think, in reconciling divergent ‘past’ times, nor in imposing a coherent teleological syncretism or momentum for moving through his topography. Nor, I suggest, is he eager to demonstrate the vitality or persistence of one prioritized account of the Forum or its myths. Instead of imposing his stories and explanations as individuating exempla for the Augustan present, Livy focuses on the historical, experiential, and narratological contradictions and holes in the fabric of the Forum, and uses these problems and the questions they might suggest in order to point up the friction between annalistic and exemplary history. In the process of developing this stand-oV between the broad sweep of chronology and the singularity of individual achievement, he also crystallizes how such a friction can impact upon and create meaning within the realia of the city. In this context, Jean Attali’s proposal that the experience of urban time is that of ‘a void tunnelling into the present of the urban 11 Deleuze (1994: 269) lays out ‘being’ as follows: ‘being is full positivity and pure aYrmation, . . . and there is (non)-being which is the being of the problematic, the being of problems and questions, not the being of the negative’. In other words, what makes existence possible is not thesis and antithesis, but thesis and interrogation. 12 Koolhaas and Mau (1998: 969). 13 See Feldherr (1998: 21–5, 31–5) for a keynote discussion of monumenta, spectacle, and history. Jaeger (1997: 23–9) outlines the relationship between monumenta and gaze. Favro (1994) and Beard (2003) consider the relationship between triumphs, spectators, and roˆle-playing writ large. Bell (2004: 151–248) oVers an engaging speculative account of what Roman spectacle might have felt like.

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condition, which allows it to communicate not only with the city’s past (through its mythology and its patrimony) but also with an imaginary future’ is particularly pertinent.14 The swamp-and-chasm site which coalesces from Livy’s two causae represents, I suggest, just such a void. As such, this site and its iteration also open up the kinds of spatial, narratological, and chronological perspectivism that show how even apparently distinct aetiologies are more closely and complexly related and co-dependent than might at Wrst seem. Teasing out how, and why, Livy’s narratological choices for the two aetiologies can cause problems or generate questions that lead to resistance and uncertainty oVers speciWc answers to the more general questions with which I commenced. It also, I suggest, sends us back both to Koolhaas’s comment on ‘uncertainty’, and also to Deleuze’s reWnement of Hegel. Applied to Livy on the Lacus Curtius, these contemporary approaches oVer, in the Wrst instance, a way of comprehending the radical shifts that characterize the relationship between citizen, city, and empire in early Augustan Rome. More broadly speaking, they can inform our understanding of the immense signiWcance of each individual experience of the city for generating meaning. The end result, I suggest, avoids the kind of nihilism that too often seems to characterize the story we tell about Augustus’ propagandist triumph over urban form and meaning.

A P P ROAC H I N G T H E ( F I R S T ) LAC US : RO UTES AND MONUMENTS It has become a truism that Augustus attempted to deploy Roman concerns with the past and how it might be understood—that is, the physical and intellectual manifestations of Empire, and the totemic persistence of mos maiorum—in order to gloss the changes that he promoted.15 Augustan phenomenology needed to script an urban 14 Attali in Koolhaas, Boeri, Kwinter, Tazi, and Obrist (2001: 276). 15 See e.g. Gowing (2005: 18). I’m also thinking, however, about the quasi-afterlife accorded to the maiores themselves—individual, and as a collective notion—as atrial presences, on which see Flower (1996).

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experience that was both tightly controlled and apparently open. Moreover, the uniqueness of Augustus’ position made it crucially important that the whole city was not heavy-handedly overwritten to impose consensus and coherence.16 We may, therefore, agree in principle with Diane Favro that in Augustus, ‘Rome acquired an author who possessed not only the motivation, but the resources, the power, and above all the endurance to script an explicit text from the entire cityscape’.17 Nevertheless, it is signiWcant that she sees this reiWed most clearly outside the city: in the Campus Martius and its axis along the Via Flaminia, and a series of vistas centring on that route.18 Rather than seeing the Campus as a tabula rasa awaiting Augustus (as Favro does), it could be argued that this liminal space was, by the end of the Republic, already compromised and cluttered by successive individual, monumental expressions of autocracy set amid spaces devoted to the res publica.19 The position of the Campus outside the city slots Augustus’ scenography there into a line of lateRepublican attempts to force those travelling into and out of the city to experience the transition on (more or less) their authors’ terms.20 This would suggest that it was Augustus’ changes inside the pomerium that tackled head-on the complexities and chaos of what a 16 As Favro (1993: 234) observes, Republican loci and imagines (‘short stories’, in her terms) ‘did not coalesce into an urban narrative.’ 17 Favro (1993: 235). 18 Favro (1993: 249, 250). As she comments, looking towards the Capitoline from the Campus ‘the urban narrative became muddled . . . [and] observers did not Wnd a clear story line’ (1993: 245). Her point is that the terminus and point of coherence of a view from the Via Flaminia (once one had passed the Porticus Vipsania and was moving towards the Capitoline) is Augustus’ restored Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. As Zanker (1990: 154–5) suggests, it was also important for Augustus to maintain a sense of continuity with, and reverence towards, Rome’s traditional cityscape. 19 By the late Republic, the Campus was all too available for reinvention—it oVered not just sprawling spaces but also a mixture of a down-at-heel or at least ragbag of structures which serviced the res publica and memorialized late republican imperatores; for a summary, see Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 74–6). See also e.g. Zanker (1990: 22); Richardson (1992: 67). Contra, Favro (1993: 235–7). On the Augustan Campus Martius, see in particular Strabo’s ‘tourist’ account (5.3.8); Wiseman (1993); and now Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 75–7). On the connexion between memory, monuments, and tombs on roads to/from Rome see Purcell (1987a) and Koortbojian (1996: 233). 20 See e.g. Favro (1993: 237); cf. Gruet (2006), Hillier (1996: 226, 232–5) on ‘fat space’ and the experience of roads, and Conan (2003) on designing movement through space.

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new phenomenology could look like when mapped onto Rome’s foundation-sites. Jaeger comments that the pendulum-like qualities of the Wrst account of the Lacus Curtius are part of a Livian agenda in which Roman res gestae (deeds) and Res Gestae (that is, Roman history) are made ‘to continue in the landscape that generates them. Although the Romans themselves are not indigenous to the place, their res gestae are.’21 But Jaeger is most interested in what she describes as an intensely binary, polarized, and oppositional narratological strategy on Livy’s part, foregrounding the role of the high points of the pendulum’s swing for this causa: the Palatine and Capitoline. Whilst this model is clearly available, I try out an alternative approach and focus on the space between, that is, the Forum. Relative to the two hills, the Forum takes on the deWnitional qualities of the Hegelian ‘void’, and via the instability of the Lacus Curtius it also moves us towards the problematizing approach that a Deleuzian reading opens up. As the city rapidly expands (Livy tells us), it morphs into an increasingly large empty space (1.8.4–5), a space that Livy makes strongly prospective (1.8.4). Rome as vast urban desert (uana urbis magnitudo, 1.8.5) then segues into a bifurcating vista of Rome as two hills: the Palatine, inherently monarchical and associated with the individual; and the Capitoline, the deracinating collective space where Romulus locates his original ‘asylum’, a place which elides prior nationalities and reinvents the Xotsam-and-jetsam rejects from other cities as the preliminary building blocks of Rome’s greatness (1.8.5–6). As the reader progresses through Livy’s spatial and temporal re-foundation of Rome, s/he Wnds that although the Preface commences by emphasizing the primacy of Romans (plural) (Praef. 1), individuals persistently stand in, synecdochically, for the collective. Palatium primum, in quo ipse erat educatus, muniit (‘the Palatine Wrst of all, on which he had been reared, he fortiWed’).22 Rome’s Wrst constructed boundaries are erected by Romulus around his own childhood home, the Palatine. This then situates Rome’s singular founding father (and king) biographically at the heart of 21 Jaeger (1997: 50–1). 22 Livy 1.7.3. The version of the Latin text used throughout is based on Hillen’s editions (1987, 1994). Translations are my own.

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urban space.23 Livy’s speciWc choice of the term Palatium could potentially have drawn in the new temple of Apollo (Palatinus). Taken in conjunction with educatus, it must have suggested Augustus’ birth and upbringing in C. Octavianus’ Palatine home. In these terms, the Palatine’s transformation under Augustus seems likely to be an available subtext, particularly given the rhetoric of refoundation and associations with Romulus which characterize the early Principate (see Fig. 1).24 Whatever Livy’s rationale, focusing on the Palatine as Rome’s birthplace is an excellent strategy in narrative terms. The Palatine is explicitly marked out as a venue for parading Romulus’ personal history, whilst the Capitoline seems by contrast to connect Rome ‘then’ to the long panorama of Roman history (via the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, founded at 1.10.5–7). Conceptually, this reading also embodies in the Palatine and Capitoline a dialectic between biography, exemplary and annalistic history. Finally, Livy’s account emphasizes how the Capitoline asylum inaugurates the city as a space which overwrites and even cannibalizes individual identities (‘sine discrimine’—without distinction, 1.8.6) in the longue dure´e.25 23 Cf. 1.6.3, 4. This is played on, I think, at 1.8.1 where Livy’s Romulus uses law to make one body (corpus) from the people (populus). Intriguingly, we are told that Romulus came to the conclusion that a ‘rustic’ people would only accept his law if he manifested in himself the weight of majesty, and took on the trappings of power (1.8.1–2). On Livy’s distillation of Rome’s telos as a sequence of exceptional individuals (when comparing Alexander the Great to Rome in Book 9) see Spencer (2002: 44–5, 47–53). The speciWcally biographical focus given to the Palatine’s fortiWcation (foregrounded by educatus) is interesting in this context—Rome’s early history is almost personiWed, but also made synonymous with an individual’s progress. Earlier and alternative tradition makes the Aventine Romulus’ augural site for founding the new city, topographically a very diVerent proposition—Servius, Ad Aen. 3.46; Ennius cited in Cicero, De diu. 1.107. Remus is sidelined to the Mons Murcus, in eVect, the SE spur of the Aventine; see Skutsch (1961: 252, 254, 259) for references and discussion. Plutarch goes into some detail: Remus takes the Aventine as his augural site, whereas Romulus takes ‘Roma quadrata’—foursquare Rome (Romulus 9). 24 The early Principate saw a connexion between Augustus and the Palatine sites associated with Romulus—a new script, in eVect, for moving up the hill. The later Augustan Principate saw development of the other side of the Palatine, making the Forum (in eVect) into a kind of forecourt or new zone of approach. For this account of the Palatine see Wiseman (1994: 104, 107–8, 109, 110). Cf. Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 184); Zanker (1990: 79–85); and now Gowing (2005: 133, 135). 25 Romulus’ foundation of the Temple of Jupiter Feretrius intervenes between the city’s foundation and the Temple of Jupiter Stator, and provides another of Livy’s

72 The Sites of Rome

Fig. 2 The Forum Romanum, Palatine, and Capitoline hills—late Wrst century bce/Wrst century ce.

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This agenda is given a positive gloss by the prospect of working towards a collective strength in depth (1.8.6). Romulus’ Wrst act after fortifying the Palatine is to initiate sacriWces to the gods.26 The next formal engagement with the gods introduces Neptunus equestris, and oVers a signiWcant prologue to the Lacus Curtius episode(s): Romulus . . . ludos ex industria parat Neptuno equestri solemnis; Consualia uocat . . . Multi mortales conuenere, studio etiam uidendae nouae urbis . . . Inuitati hospitaliter per domos cum situm moeniaque et frequentem tectis urbem uidissent, mirantur tam breui rem Romanam creuisse. Romulus . . . busied himself in organising formal games in honour of Equestrian Neptune, which he called the Consualia . . . Many people gathered, since there was a great eagerness to see the new city . . . The guests were entertained hospitably in private houses, and once they had examined the site of the city, and its walls and many buildings, they marvelled that in so short a time the Roman State had grown. Livy 1.9.6, 8–9

Here, Livy concentrates our attention on how Rome can change rapidly and almost eVortlessly from empty space to a recognizably urban scene under the control of one man; but although there are homes and walls (the focus of readers’ and the visitors’ gazes) there are as yet no itineraries, no landmarks, no schemes for understanding how to navigate a way through the streets that have appeared.27 elliptical aetiologies. Like the Lacus Curtius, it reappears (e.g. 4.20; 4.32). It is signiWcant as Rome’s Wrst temple, and it is located on the Capitol, but its narrative site (by an oak that we are told is traditionally sacred to pre-Roman shepherds) makes strikingly little attempt to imbricate past and present. At 4.20 we Wnd that its restoration by Augustus is a re-build, in eVect making Augustus its new founder. On the niceties of writing up the spolia in Augustan Rome, see Harrison (1989). 26 Livy 1.7.3–4. He sacriWces to Hercules in accordance with Greek custom (perhaps reminding us of Arcadian/Palatine Evander), and to the rest of the gods in Alban fashion. Yet another duality, and particularly revealing in terms of the cultural polyphony of the Consualia. 27 Livy’s use of domus is surprising, given that no families can have been inhabiting the houses. Similarly, his new citizens, very much without wives, are designated patres (fathers). The domus here, one suspects, is both a kind of placeholder and also an expression of how prospective memory can work. The houses that line the Palatine in Livy’s Rome are thereby already presences, in Romulus’ city. As David Larmour rightly pointed out to me, Livy’s use of ludi also signiWes order and a social system in place.

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For this sketchy city, the Wrst games are particularly important because they draw outsiders in and it is only in the gaze of outsiders that the city takes on concrete and coherent urban qualities.28 Complex etymological and syncretistic explanations for Livy’s representation of the Consualia aside,29 one thing at least seems clear—there are connexions to be made between Consus (a granary god), the Underworld (granaries, typically, were underground), and funerary connotations of horses. Together, these seem to be gathered up in Neptunus equestris.30 Key points to keep in mind for Livy’s two causae are, therefore, that Rome’s seizure of the future (women) is initiated with a cross-culturally referential festival that: (a) has equestrian overtones; (b) implicitly hints at katabasis (underground granaries); (c) evokes Neptune as earth-shaker; and (d) invokes the physical realia of regeneration (children, cycles of production, re-emergence from underground). Livy’s emphasis on Neptune’s equestrian associations just before the Wrst Lacus Curtius causa is narratologically intriguing. It introduces the prospect of wateriness playing a signiWcant role in Rome’s foundation, connects this with horses and (with hindsight at least) hints at the possibility of earth tremors to come. This short passage, then, oVers a telling introduction to a city that is constantly in a state of Xux, but also one that requires dramatic moments of intervention. In terms of Livy’s contemporary city, the notion that transforming the cityscape was in itself an act of pietas towards the ongoing processes shaping Rome’s history might have seemed reassuring, but for an Augustan ‘script’ it might also undermine a story of progress and destiny written into urban renewal. If Rome has always been Xuid, reXexive, and susceptible to reformulation—a monumental document of reception—then Augustus’ promise of security and refoundation might be equally transient, as might be the conceptual and physical integrity of his contribution to Rome’s palimpsestic 28 The point of these games is that, without them, ‘Rome’ remains a one-generation experiment (1.9.1)—a ragbag of random exiles inhabiting a space wholly devoid of collective iconography or meaning. 29 Ogilvie (1965: 66–7); see also now Dusˆanic´ and Petkovic´ (2002). 30 Varro (LL 6.20) is relatively uninformative (apart from asserting a connexion between Consus and Consualia), but does also propose deriving Consus from consilium (Augustine, Ciu. Dei 4.11); Dusˆanic´ and Petkovic´ (2002) deal with this in detail.

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bricolage.31 If we draw Deleuzian existentialism in at this point, we might in addition Wnd that a never-ending Augustan peace could be the danger, with Livy’s Xawed, grating, and provocative scheme oVering the promise of Rome’s continuing existence.

J UP IT E R S TATO R A N D T H E F I R S T S T I C K IN G P L AC E Tucked in between the Consualia and the Wrst Curtius’ plunge, we pause with the temple of Jupiter Stator (as, indeed, the extended treatment of the narratological scheme encourages us to do). This is a spot which, with the Lacus Curtius, refocuses Livy’s schematic opposition between Capitoline and Palatine, imprinting duality within the valley itself: Tenuere tamen arcem Sabini; atque inde postero die, cum Romanus exercitus instructus quod inter Palatinum Capitolinumque collem campi est complesset, non prius descenderunt in aequum quam ira et cupiditate reciperandae arcis stimulante animos in aduersum Romani subiere . . . Ut Hostius cecedit, confestim Romana inclinatur acies fusaque est ad ueterem portam Palatii. Romulus et ipse turba fugientum actus arma ad caelum tollens, ‘Iuppiter, tuis’ inquit ‘iussus auibus hic in Palatio prima urbi fundamenta ieci. Arcem iam scelere emptam Sabini habent; inde huc armati superata media ualle tendunt; at tu, pater deum hominumque, hinc saltem arce hostes; deme terrorem Romanis fugamque foedam siste. Hic ego tibi templum Statori Ioui, quod monumentum sit posteris tua praesenti ope seruatam urbem esse, uoueo.’ Haec precatus, ueluti sensisset auditas preces, ‘Hinc’ inquit, ‘Romani, Iuppiter optimus maximus resistere atque iterare pugnam iubet.’ Restitere Romani tamquam caelesti uoce iussi: ipse ad primores Romulus prouolat. Mettius Curtius ab Sabinis princeps ab arce decucurrerat et eVusos egerat Romanos toto quantum foro spatium est . . . However it came about, the Sabines had control of the citadel; then on the next day, when the Roman army was drawn up and Wlled the plain between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, they would not come down to level ground till rage and a desire to re-take the citadel goaded the Romans to mount an uphill attack against them . . . When Hostius fell, immediately the Roman line broke and Xed back towards the old gate of the Palatine. Even Romulus 31 Cf. Miles (1995: 220–4), who explores a less pessimistic reading.

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himself was carried along in the crowd of the fugitives, when raising his weapons to heaven: ‘Jupiter’, he cried, ‘it was your augural birds which commanded me to lay the Wrst foundations of the city here, on the Palatine. Already the Sabines have treacherously bought the citadel; from there, fully armed, they have conquered the intervening valley and are bearing down upon us here. I beg you, Father of gods and men, keep the enemy from seizing this spot too; banish terror from the Romans and stay their shameful Xight. Here I vow to you a templum: to Jupiter the Stayer, which shall be a monument to posterity that it was by your present help that the city was saved.’ Having made this prayer, just as if he sensed that it had been heard, he cried: ‘Here, Romans, Jupiter Best and Greatest commands that we make a stand and renew the Wght.’ The Romans stood Wrm as if ordered by a heavenly voice: Romulus himself sped to the front line. Mettius Curtius had meanwhile led the Sabine charge down from the citadel, and drove the Romans, in chaos, throughout the whole space that is now the Forum . . . Livy 1.12.1, 3–8

If, for example, one examines the map entitled ‘Rome in the Regal Period’ at the end of the Wrst Loeb volume of Livy, Jupiter Stator’s ‘temple’ is neatly located at the NNE edge of the Palatine: just where Livy’s Romulus vows a templum.32 This, however, collides with what would have been obvious to Livy’s contemporary audience, namely, that, in their present city, Jupiter Stator had two locations.33 First, the early third century bce temple (aedes) in foro by the Porta Mugonia, the foundation of which is credited to M. Atilius Regulus in Livy (10.36.11; 10.37.15) and in which Cicero locates his Wrst speech against Catiline to the Senate in 63 bce.34 Second, the temple in campo, dating to the latter part of the second century bce, and embraced initially within the Porticus Metelli (see Fig. 8). As part of 32 Livy translated by B. O. Foster (1919: 448–9); reproducing a map from H. J. Edwards’s Cambridge edition of Livy Book 1. 33 Fowler (2000: 202–6) oVers an elegant summary of the issues surrounding mutability and monuments. 34 E.g. Cicero, Cat. 1.11, 33; Plutarch, Cicero 16.3–4. Vasaly (1993: 56) glosses Cat. 1.33 as Cicero making Romulus ‘establish’ Jupiter himself (not his templum) at the key moment. Vasaly’s detailed discussion (1993: 41–59) is reXected in some of my conclusions, but concentrates on drawing out connexions between Cicero and Jupiter in the speech’s rhetorical strategies. For a summary of debates as to the location of this structure, see Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 156–7). The ‘ancient’ Porta Mugonia may or may not still have had a physical existence in Augustan Rome; it did, however, continue to function as a toponym; on this, see Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 196).

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Augustus’ redevelopment of the southern end of the Campus Martius (mid 20s bce) this Porticus was remodelled as the Porticus Octaviae and its two temples were also rebuilt or at least substantially restored.35 This could make Romulus’ vow of a templum (in Livy) particularly topical. Narratologically, a brief halt at this site is encouraged and Livy’s emphasis on its Palatine location (‘hic . . . huc . . . hinc . . . Hic . . . Hinc’ 1.12.4, 5, 6, 7) makes for a semantic hiccup. His treatment seems to urge his audience to pause and give a second glance to the contemporary Porta Mugonia, and it plays on the unsuitability of Romulus’ decision to name this site’s patron, Jupiter, as Stator (‘stayer’). As Livy scripts it, Romulus’ templum has no physical existence outside of the concretizing rhetoric of this episode. No actual ediWce is erected within the text in Romulus’ lifetime, and the oddness of this missing structure is underlined by Livy’s Wrst use of monumentum (with respect to an aetiology) to characterize it.36 As Jaeger has noted, the templum should mark: a spot that is: (a) at once the edge of ‘old’ Rome; (b) the point (inthis episode)at which Romulus opens upa direct channel tothe heavens; and (c) the nadir of Rome’s battle and the apex of the Sabines’, and vice versa.37 The presence of this ghostly templum at the foot of the Palatine—almost-and-only realized in the constructive force of Romulus’ rhetoric—draws its two later incarnations into Livy’s text at this point. Livy’s audience thus inevitably factors in Regulus’ aedes, and also the temple in campo, surrounded by the imperialistic cornucopia of booty displayed in the Porticus Metelli/Octaviae.38 The history of the Porticus Metelli is intimately connected with Roman imperialism, but, as Favro notes, it is highly unlikely that Jupiter Stator in campo would have had an impact on the physical sightlines of someone travelling towards central Rome on the Via Flaminia, whilst the Capitoline itself would have blocked the Porticus 35 See Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002: 206). 36 See Jaeger (1997: 32) on the momentous qualities of this use of monumentum. 37 Jaeger (1997: 52). 38 A further speculative association that this might draw in would be the equestrian monument/memento mori which the Porticus was particularly famous for. Velleius Paterculus (1.11.3) enthuses about Metellus Macedonicus’ installation of this captured sculpture group, thought to represent Alexander amongst the fallen cavalry at the Granicus, and believed to be by Lysippus. Edwards (2003) tackles the wider issues involved in understanding (and domesticating) ‘captive’ statues at Rome. As Favro (1994) suggests, these displays of booty also helped to make the imagery of the triumphs they represented continuously available.

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and its temples oV from Jupiter Stator in foro.39 Its eVect, therefore, would be most signiWcant when looking from the hills to the east, from the Transtiberine estates to the west, or from the Capitoline itself (from where both temples of Jupiter Stator would be visible). This Capitoline point of view would be an obvious alternative gaze available to Livy’s Sabines—if they turned their backs on the Forum and the site of Romulus’ vow, and looked north-west across the Campus. But, as Livy’s focalization may suggest, the Sabines are not the only people to whom this vantage point is on oVer.40 In fact, as privileged viewers whom the text has allowed to observe and participate in the unfolding of events, we as the audience are just as likely to imagine ourselves observing from the Capitoline as from the Forum or the Palatine slopes. From this viewpoint we would be gazing at the Romans and down across the Forum; we would also be aware of the Campus—a marsh that mirrors the Forum—and its porticos, theatres, temples, and monuments, spread out behind us. Whilst one might expect any classical city to be conWgured in terms of tropes of up and down, hills and plains, Livy’s conceptual map makes notably complex retrospective demands of his audience. It operates a space which requires that readers bring to bear a full set of urban sight-/ site lines even before the city proper is brought into narrative existence.41 Hence, even before future Roman space is transformed into a bricks-and-mortar city by its Wrst citizens, it is already comprehensible as a paradigmatically and inevitably urban site and sight. This also means that for a reader in the 20s bce, contemporary and characteristically urban complexity lurks prospectively in the ‘open’ spaces that Livy evokes, just as it does, famously, in Evander’s tour of future Rome in Aeneid 8. The narratologically absent but implicit temple (aedes) of Jupiter Stator in the Campus draws the reader and his or her gaze from one edge of the Forum, at the Palatine (site of Livy’s Romulean templum), to a position outside its opposite boundary (the Capitoline), and also outside the city itself. In doing so, it suggests that to understand Romulus’ templum, as a reader, one needs to lean on its future (as Regulus’ aedes) and on its alter ego (in the Porticus Metelli/Octaviae).42 39 Favro (1993: 240). 40 See Jaeger (1997: 54–7). 41 On this, see Jaeger (1997: 33 n. 11). 42 Bjur (2005: 11) reminds us (very much in terms of Hillier 1996) that actual and quantiWably measured distances between topographical features are very diVerent to

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Jupiter Stator in the Campus may be narratologically absent here in Livy, but cognitively it is very much present as a feature of Augustan renovation. Conversely, Romulus’ ur-templum really has cognitive weight as a monumentum precisely because it is unbuilt and therefore uncompromised; or uncompromisable because never physically available to become part of a programme of rebuilding or refurbishment. It is in this semiotic gap, or even blister, that we see something emerging that I argue is a shift from the binary framework that Jaeger argues for.43 EVectively, here we may be seeing the cautious development of what I have outlined in terms of Hegelian opposition into something slightly more optimistic—something akin to Deleuze’s formulation of existence as a synthesis of the Positive and the Problematic. Hegel’s conceptualization of history enshrines conXict, dialectic, and what he terms the Negative in a teleological process that moves from primary event (or thesis), through conXict between the inherent antitheses (Negative and Positive) that characterize existence, towards a new synthesis. This then in turn is subject to conXict as its internal contradictions become apparent, and the process continues towards an ideal goal or End, that is, Reason. Reading the cultural production of the late Republic and early Augustan Principate against such a model oVers one way of understanding the traumatic eVects of civil war, present and recently past. It is, however, a model that Romans were prone to question.44 An early Augustan viewpoint could, just about, celebrate a new and peaceful age of reason and enlightenment, an age which is most fully conceptualized in the Saecular Games. It is still the case, though, that even in Aeneid 6 we Wnd intimations of change and decline in experienced and perceived geo-temporal relationships. The shared toponym, in this instance, plus the direct availability of both from a Capitoline point-of-view, drags them closely together. 43 Jaeger (1997: 33–56). Jaeger’s excellent discussion underlies much of my analysis of how this opposition works, although we reach slightly diVerent conclusions. 44 Cycles of decline and conXict and strategies for realigning History are set out in diverse ways by e.g. Sallust (writing on Catiline); Vergil (in the Eclogues and Georgics); Catullus (64, 68); Cicero (variously, but most obviously in the De republica); and Lucretius. Vergil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Epistles in particular oVer other manifestations of a shift from civil war models of polarization towards a reXection of the beneWts of forgetfulness and imprecision, but we can also see this at work in the impact of Epicureanism through the Wrst century ce.

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Vergil’s set-piece parade of Roman heroes ready to emerge into History. Indeed, the Aeneid as a whole dabbles with issues raised by what Hegel would later call a ‘bad inWnity’—an ongoing, cyclical dialectic process, never achieving an end in Reason,45 or ‘empty pages in history’—when opposition is written out of existence.46 Just as ambiguity in the Aeneid encourages speculative engagement with ‘Augustan’ tropes of history, Livy also makes History into an exploration of the gap between oppositions and alternative explanations. Indeed, Livy highlights and prioritizes the place of uncertainty and contingency even within annalistic historiography. His interest in historiographical process, and in the importance of interrogating events in order to achieve coherence and stability, is characteristic of what we might term a cautious optimism. It is also, I suggest, usefully read in terms of the Deleuzian model I have outlined. Both versions of the Lacus’ story show the city’s Republican heart being made impermeable: the swamp fails to swallow Curtius number one and silently dries up, disappearing from the narrative; Curtius number two closes the chasm. Livy’s AUC tests this process both as speciWc res gestae which can be subjected to enquiry and revision (the acts of each Curtius and his horse and their relationships with a ‘hole’ in the Forum) and Res Gestae (the whole text-as-monumentum, comprising conXict and uncertainty, but structured as a sequential and uniWed whole).47 Using two versions, and playing the overall narrative of the AUC oV against the internal and inconsistent narratives of the causae, allows Livy’s audience the space to ask their own questions. Will they choose to prioritize a synthetic reading of the two accounts of the Lacus? Or opt to focus on and interrogate the individuating elements? Or to see the two causae as inWnitesimal moments in a monumental text—rather as the Lacus itself might be recast within Rome the cosmopolis? In episode one, the two physically existing temples to Jupiter Stator combine with Romulus’ conceptual templum to oVer one preliminary area of friction. The main structural work is undertaken, 45 e.g. Hegel (1969). 46 e.g. Hegel (1975). 47 On monumenta as texts that instantiate death, see Fowler (2000: 197–8), building on Kraus (1994a) on Livy 6.1.2.

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however, by means of the opposition between Livy’s Capitoline and Palatine in the primary narrative. It is this opposition which focuses readers on the central arena (the Forum Romanum) and the trapdoor let into it (the Lacus). The Roman army is spread across the campus (the future Forum) between the two hills, occupying the noman’s-land intercolline zone.48 The signiWcance of this topographical distribution is emphasized by the Sabines’ position. They will not come down from the height to Wght: instead they goad the Romans into advancing up the hill towards them. Moreover, they actually occupy a version of ‘Rome’ (the arx), and thereby stand to rewrite Romulus’ men as the aggressors. So one might quite logically draw the conclusion that here the Sabines, and not the Romans, are the ones who most picturesquely stand Wrm. Livy then crosses the Ts of his binary scheme by telling us that two principes make the running in the Wght that ensues, not quite up or down the hill. Until Hostius Hostilius’ fall, he holds the Roman line—his name almost a parody of aggression. His death precipitates the Roman rout, back down the hill, and across blank space to the Palatine. But even though this is (textually) a topographical blank, Livy muddies the route of the retreat by making the Romans Xee ‘to the old gate of the Palatine’ (ad ueterem portam Palatii, 1.12.3), an alternative site of Rome. When, exactly, are we to understand the adjective to operate? The gate cannot eVectively be old for Livy’s purposes, as the disorderly troops sweep back towards it, but we get no signal that we are to understand this as a contemporaneous or narratorial aside outside the text’s time frame. This sudden appearance of prior meaning and topographic organization in Romulus’ lacunose city emphasizes how divisions between past and present within the city’s fabric can make apparently inexplicable and potentially disturbing eruptions into everyday life— just as they do by design into Livy’s text. It is in this that we see further signs that the instability suggested initially by the inclusion of 48 Calling this space campus is interesting since locating cavalry manoeuvres and military struggle in an implicitly agricultural space draws both aspects of citizenship together, and must remind us of the Campus Martius, the other complicated swamp, which as well as being an electoral and census site (and, as ager publicus, a reminder of the expulsion of Rome’s last king, in addition to the apotheosis of its Wrst, Romulus), was notionally a pasture for sheep (Schol. Iuv. 6.528) and horses (Dionysius, Ant. Rom. 5.13), as well as a site for equestrian activity; Horace, Odes 3.7.25–7.

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Neptune will undermine clear-cut oppositionality. This already ‘old’ gate destabilizes Romulus’ position as Rome’s author, and also emerges at a moment of intense vulnerability and even disaster. Propitiating it with a templum acknowledges it as a site of concern and a semiotic boundary, but the absence of that templum in Livy’s Rome also oVers a sense of the unknowability of the past. In addition, it suggests the propensity of particular names and sites to accrue multiple meanings, and encourages us to understand the city as (a collection of) temporally complex narrative zones.49 One might argue that it is the quirkily ‘old’ quality of the gate that stops Romans from abandoning their citadel (the arx) and enacting a straightforward ‘retreat’ to Romulus’ Palatine stronghold. Livy’s Wrst treatment of the Lacus continues to point up binary relationships (albeit compromised ones) between Forum and Capitoline, Forum and Palatine, and Capitoline and Palatine. In addition, it also encourages us to linger over the intimate and intricate visual and spatial patterns which their up-and-down dynamic sets in perpetual motion, and to wonder what the gap (campus, ualles, palus, lacus, aequum, forum) signiWes. That the collapse of this dialogic equilibrium is brought about by the swampy space between the hills is what gives Livy’s Wrst Lacus Curtius its particular bite. Nec procul iam a porta Palati erat clamitans, ‘Vicimus perWdos hospites, imbelles hostes; iam sciunt longe aliud esse uirgines rapere, aliud pugnare cum uiris.’ In eum haec gloriantem cum globo ferocissimorum iuuenum Romulus impetum facit. Ex equo tum forte Mettius pugnabat; eo pelli facilius fuit. Pulsum Romani persequuntur; et alia Romana acies, audacia regis accensa, fundit Sabinos. Mettius in paludem sese strepitu sequentium trepidante equo coniecit; auerteratque ea res etiam Sabinos tanti periculo uiri. Et ille quidem adnuentibus ac uocantibus suis fauore multorum addito animo euadit: Romani Sabinique in media conualle duorum montium redintegrant proelium; sed res Romana erat superior . . . Not far, now, from the gate of the Palatine, [Mettius] was shouting: ‘We have conquered our faithless hosts, an unwarlike host! Now they know what a distance separates seizing young girls and Wghting against men!’ Just as he was boasting in this way, Romulus and a band of the most daring Roman youths attacked him. By chance, Mettius was Wghting from horseback, so it was all the easier to put him to Xight. As he Xed, the 49 On the spatio-temporal qualities of ‘society’ see e.g. Hillier (1996: 401).

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Romans followed, and the rest of their army, Wred by the reckless bravery of their king, routed the Sabines. Mettius plunged into a swamp when his horse took fright at the clamour of those giving chase; this event, putting such a great man in danger, even caused the Sabines to wheel about. For Mettius, the gestures and cries of his many supporters gave him added impetus, and he extricated himself; the Romans and Sabines then renewed the battle in the valley between the two hills, but the Romans gained the upper hand . . . Livy 1.12.8–10

This battle, overlooked by the recently betrayed Capitoline, and located in what will be the heart of Republican Rome, will determine the future identity of the Roman people. The site of the Lacus in Livy’s city is particularly signiWcant in the Forum’s recent history because it is in front of the new temple of Caesar. This site seems destined to draw Caesar’s catasterism into the frame, especially in terms of Romulus’ disappearance from the city a few sections of Livy later. Its central image in particular might foreground such an intratextual allusion since the conclusion to this narrative arc would be Romulus’ unique apotheosis from a swamp.50 Mettius Curtius and Romulus alike are reckless in their crossing of the valley that separates the hills, in this account, but the focus of the episode is not a confrontation between the two. Instead, Livy concentrates on the stymied Xight of the Sabines and the hollering Roman pursuit. The volte-face of the Sabines, in conjunction with the cries and pursuit of the Romans, together give Mettius’ deuotio meaning. Regnum consociant: imperium omne conferunt Romam. Ita geminata urbe, ut Sabinis tamen aliquid daretur, Quirites a Curibus appellati. Monumentum eius pugnae, ubi primum ex profunda emersus palude equus Curtium in uado statuit, Curtium lacum appellarunt. They shared the sovereignty, but vested all executive power in Rome. In this way, the city doubled in size, but as a concession to the Sabines, ‘Quirites’—from the town of Cures—was the name by which they were called. As a monument to [/memorial for/reminder of] the battle, where Wrst the horse, brought up out of [/wrested from] the swamp’s depths

50 For this site of Romulus’ apotheosis, see Livy 1.16.1; Ovid, Fasti 2.491–6 (on horseback); Florus 1.1.16–18.

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[/heights], set down [/established/erected] Curtius in its shallows [/depths/ safety], they named it Lacus Curtius. Livy 1.13.5

The two opposing forces combine to cause him to slip oV terra Wrma into the episode’s deWning monumentum. His reckless charge leads to a slow-motion almost-engulfment which is what the battle comes to be remembered for. Finally, the Forum gains a location that commemorates this, not the victory scored by Romulus.

T H E P LU N G E The Wrst Forum drama seems wholly accessible, immediate, and weirdly experiential. Our second visit to the Lacus Curtius redraws it in very diVerent terms.51 Here, it becomes a chasm that appeared in the Forum, perhaps caused by an earthquake. This suggested explanation implies the presence of Neptune, and marks a connexion to the preexisting causa. The mysterious chthonic qualities of this event also hint at a threatening subterranean void beneath Rome, ready to open again. Eodem anno, seu motu terrae seu qua ui alia, forum medium ferme specu uasto conlapsum in immensam altitudinem dicitur; neque eam uoraginem coniectu terrae, cum pro se quisque gereret, expleri potuisse, priusquam deum monitu quaeri coeptum quo plurimum populus Romanus posset; id enim illi loco dicandum uates canebant, si rem publicam Romanam perpetuam esse uellent. Tum M. Curtium, iuuenem bello egregium, castigasse ferunt dubitantes an ullum magis Romanum bonum quam arma uirtusque esset, et silentio facto templa deorum immortalium, quae foro imminent, Capitoliumque intuentem et manus nunc in caelum, nunc in patentes terrae hiatus ad deos manes porrigentem, se deuouisse; equo deinde quam poterat maxime exornato insidentem, armatum se in specum immisisse, donaque ac fruges super eum a multitudine uirorum ac mulierum congestas, lacumque Curtium non ab antiquo illo T. Tati milite Curtio Mettio sed ab hoc appellatum. Cura non deesset, si qua ad uerum uia inquirentem ferret: nunc fama rerum standum est, ubi certam derogat uetustas Wdem; et lacus nomen ab hac recentiore insignitius fabula est. 51 Ash’s essay (in this volume) also tackles this episode in Livy, but as a comparative for Tacitus’ up/down schema.

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In the same year, whether as a result of an earthquake or some other violent force, it is said that at the middle of the Forum the ground gave way and left a vast chasm, sunk to an immeasurable depth. Moreover, the gulf could not be Wlled with the earth which everyone bought and threw into it, until admonished by the gods, they began to inquire as to what constituted the chief strength of the Roman people. For it was this, the prophets uttered, that must be oVered up to that spot, if they wished the Roman republic to endure. With that, Marcus Curtius (a distinguished young soldier) rebuked them—it is said—for doubting whether anything was more characteristic of Roman excellence than arms and courage. In the silence that followed, gazing up to the temples of the immortal gods which overhang the Forum, and to the Capitol, and now to heaven and now to the gaping hole in the earth stretching out his hands, he gave himself over to the gods of the underworld. Then, mounted on a horse which was decked out with the greatest possible splendour, he plunged fully armed into the gulf, and oVerings and fruits were thrown in after him by a horde of men and women. It was for this man and not Curtius Mettius (the soldier of Titus Tatius in days gone by) that the Lacus Curtius was named. Diligence would not be wanting, if there were any route which could lead the inquirer to the truth; now, however, the rumour of events must stand in when antiquity restricts the security of our knowledge. And the name of the pool is better known from this more recent story. Livy 7.6.1–6

Despite the simultaneously mannered and alarming qualities of the story, it does not stand isolated from the preceding narrative. Through his use of eodem anno Livy connects this yawning hole in the Forum with the annual progress of events across the years (annalistic history), and in particular to the preceding events which he treats in some detail.52 For his own narrative, it eventually emphasizes that Livy is rewriting his previous explanation of the Lacus; for his audience, it emphasizes the strangeness and even improbability of such an inexplicable incident. The catalogue of events which precedes this episode does nothing to give Livy’s audience any sense of a sure historical footing; it juxtaposes plague, superstitious panic, a sacriWcial banquet for the gods, a Tiber Xood, 52 The connective phrase is one of his favoured non-speciWc temporal signiWers; see Rich (1997)’s analysis of Livy’s compositional techniques, and Vasaly (2002) on structural poetics.

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and the beginnings of drama at Rome. This series culminates in Titus, the dutiful but dull-witted and unloved son of the shamed dictator L. Manlius Imperiosus, forcing a Tribune of the Plebs to drop charges brought against his father.53 After Livy’s programmatic recommencement in Book 6, the opening of Book 7 again announces change: we meet the Wrst nouus homo (‘new man’) to hold a consulship, and the establishment of two new magistracies created by and for patricians. It is not long afterwards that plague erupts into the narrative (7.1.7–8), an event which Livy connects speciWcally to Rome’s otherwise peaceful state at home and abroad. The plague kills M. Furius Camillus, whom Livy sets after Romulus as Rome’s second founder (7.1.10). T. Manlius’ display of pietas by force majeure, after the arraignment of his father, then segues into the deuotio of the second Curtius. In this Xurry of action, the plague slips out of the narrative. The prodigy in the Forum takes its place and end-stops the sequence of supernatural terrors. By opening up Rome’s interior in Book 7 to oVer a second causa for the Lacus, Livy does more than just cause us to revisit his Wrst treatment in Book 1. He also implicitly evokes the symbolic and narratological signiWcance of Tarquinius Superbus’ lasting legacy: the Cloaca Maxima; in Pliny’s account, suicidal labourers were cruciWed as hortatory and admonitory examples.54 The warped deuotio that this might represent oVers one more alternative angle that could colour Livy’s scheme. The disturbing empty space underlying the Forum in Livy’s second causa oVers neither the straightforward marsh of Book 1’s ‘mythic’ history, nor the managed water courses suggested by lacus (the site’s contemporary designation) or cloaca (the 53 Livy makes this a conXuence of character and name: the Plebs hated Manlius for the viciousness of the levy he imposed, for his ‘ingenium atrox’ or cruel nature, and for his surname—an oVence to a free state (7.4.2–3). 54 See Livy 1.38.6; cf. Pliny, HN 36.24.106. We might wonder whether the juxtaposition with the story of Manlius Imperiosus makes the lurking presence of Tarquinius Superbus harder to dismiss. As Gowers (1995: 24–5) also comments, the Cloaca Maxima’s legendary imperviability makes it an intriguing foil for Livy’s Lacus. Pliny (HN 15.78) tells us, retrospectively, that the Lacus was yet one more site rewritten by Caesar, who shifted its altar to make way for a gladiatorial show—yet another reason to read impermanence into the site of the Lacus whilst also drawing in associations between gladiatorial games and the Etruscans (and, thereby, monarchy—a connexion which Caesar was also, reputedly, keen to make).

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real and watery subterranean space). In eVect, the Cloaca Maxima draws the two Lacus Curtius stories together—it is alluded to by the wateriness of the Wrst causa, and by the space generated beneath the Forum of the second. This is particularly significant in the light of Emily Gowers’s comment that ‘for Livy, the sewers were important because they preserved the original layout of the city at a time when building on the surface had become increasingly haphazard’.55 Once the uates pronounce that the chasm can only be plugged by hurling in Rome’s chief strength, the aristocratic young M. Curtius interprets this to mean the best of Rome’s up-and-coming generation, and rides into the void, which duly closes up. This act, of course, was oddly echoed in the Augustan convention that citizens annually threw a coin into the Lacus in thanks for Augustus’ (and thereby Rome’s?) safety.56 The conclusion of Livy’s second story forces us to confront the contradictory nature of these causae, making us revisit our memory of the Wrst as readers and consumers of cultural myth. Far more graphically than in Livy’s Wrst version, this account oVers us intensely visual archetypes of ‘up’ and ‘down’. Set against each other, in eVect, are the idealized and previously anonymous Roman youth on his horse, in the Forum—a kind of living equestrian statue—and the immeasurable chasm into which he plunges. Ground level (the Forum itself) is the point of transgression, and for the static and helpless onlookers the scene transWxes whilst forcing all eyes to follow this second Curtius’ trajectory. The careful structuring of the tableau, in which those gazing down are themselves being overlooked by the temples above the Forum, further emphasizes the intensity of the vertical dynamics of the scene. 55 Gowers (1995: 25), on Livy 5.55.5. Cf. Purcell (1996) on water control and power, and San Juan (2001: 130–3), who Wnds Filippo Bonini’s 1663 treatise The Tiber Enchained, or The Art of Arresting Running Water to be intensely interested in the relationship between Xoods, water control mechanisms, and collective memory at Rome. 56 Suetonius, Augustus 57.1. Ogilvie (1965: 75) makes the Lacus a mundus (a point of intersection between mortal and infernal worlds). This operates eVectively with both of Livy’s accounts (given the Consualia and Neptune as context for the Wrst account). In terms of plague and deuotio, David Larmour also drew my attention to Thucydides’ juxtaposition of the plague at Athens with Pericles’ funeral speech honouring the sacriWce of the young Athenians (2.34–46), suggesting that the conjunction is a trope that cities require.

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Discussing Livy’s Lacus Curtius, Gary Miles comments astutely on how Livy may be signalling the problematic nature of history and memory when Augustus has the authority and power to monopolize truth.57 For Miles, monumenta come to depend on fabulae, but perhaps this overlooks the satirical subtext of Livy’s explicit request at 7.6.5 that we very literally revisit our narrative and cultural memories.58 Indeed, Joseph Farrell goes so far as to suggest that ‘memories actually have no existence independent of ‘‘storage media’’ ’.59 The joke, if we read it this way, is that both versions and sites/sights are essentially telling the same story. Impetuous Roman youth can be harnessed to the State’s good, but only in a way that brings the hot-headed gallop of a reckless young man to a halt. Both Curtii are engulfed by the city; the Wrst emerges, but loses his Sabine aggression against Rome and is absorbed into Roman myth. The second is brought to a far more permanent halt, but only because of the momentous and vigorous leap that horse and boy undertake. Each Curtius’ disappearance, willy-nilly, makes him a physical and cognitive monumentum via the toponym ‘Curtius’. The Wrst Curtius is narratologically erased when Livy denies his link to the Lacus (7.6.6); the second Curtius is physically erased once he disappears into the void. This second aetiology for the Lacus is also markedly diVerent from the Wrst in terms of its chronological patterning and its ideational rhetoric. It storyboards a dramatically diVerent visual eVect. Despite its opening nod to annalistic rhetoric and its apparently secure location within recorded history, this version is saturated with the trappings of hearsay. By tricking this account out with prophets, riddles, and human (self-)sacriWce, Livy undermines what he is at the same time telling us is the most usually accepted explanation. This version is almost relentlessly textual (lacking

57 Miles (1995: 35–8, 56). See also the excellent treatment in Jaeger (1997). Cf. Farrell (1997: 375–83) on the commercialization of memory at Rome, and Gowing (2005: 54– 5), who comments on Valerius Maximus that his moral universe ‘is fashioned as much by exclusion as it is by inclusion’ (at 55). Gowers (1995: 25) discusses the signiWcance of the Cloaca Maxima for authoritative rhetorics of up and down in urban morphology (on display at e.g. Pliny, HN 36.24.104; Frontinus, De Aquis 1.16). 58 Livy does not choose to cite his sources, but Varro’s account (LL 5.148–50) suggests a range of potential inXuences. See note 5 above. 59 Farrell (1997: 383).

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that comforting sense that it is available as a knowable contemporary space), distanced by its literary and antiquarian tone (arma uirtusque seems to foreshadow, depending on chronology, Vergil’s more famous arma uirumque—‘arms and man’—at Aeneid 1.1) and undermined by Livy’s dependence on words signifying myth, legend, and story. The splendour of this Curtius’ visual presence highlights his total disappearance—his deuotio is completed, unlike that of the Wrst Curtius—and emphasizes the sacriWcial, visual, and even performative and theatrical qualities of the scene. The folkloric qualities of this account are also striking. This really is a katabasis, here in the Forum. But how can a damp and swampy place straightforwardly accommodate a yawning but dry chasm? This is a chasm which is by turns vastly empty and full of the potential to turn to a watery vortex, based on Livy’s terminology: specus and uorago.60 Livy’s two accounts, then, set a series of ideas in motion that have implications for how one understands and experiences a stroll through the Forum: (a) the Lacus was once a palus; (b) the Forum was once a battleWeld; (c) the Forum is subject to sudden, terrifying, and inexplicable ruptures into a void beneath; (d) the Forum has a propensity to swallow up Roman archetypes (be they the typical oVerings, that failed to close the void, or the second Curtius); (e) equestrian elevation leads to a fall; and (f) inscription into the city’s fabric is no guarantee of either unchanging permanence or uncontested identity.

PA R A D I N G O N M Y R E I G N : AU G U S T US A N D THE TRANSVECTIO Speculating on Livy’s interest in what happens when one rides—and is therefore carried aloft—through a space that is just about to become both Roman and the Forum Romanum, we may in fact Wnd that riding on horseback (in the Xesh, or in bronze or marble) is an activity best approached with caution. Indeed, the view from above that the 60 Contemporary Rome’s dried up Forum is under-laid by the Cloaca Maxima (cf. Ovid, Fasti 6.401–4), but its contents (Rome’s waste) are rather diVerent to the indigenous waters of early Rome.

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equestrian achieves has interesting and complicated implications for navigating the Augustan city and understanding the relationship between triumphator, citizens, and the spatial syntax of Rome.61 The act of riding a horse into battle may only have been a lingering semantic echo in equestrian identity by the late Republic, making Augustus’ reinvigoration of the transuectio parade, held on 15 July (the feast day of Bona Dea) an evident (re-)invention of tradition. This parade had its notional origins in very real military traditions of Roman identity, commenced outside the city walls at the Temple of Mars on the Via Appia—also the point of assembly for the army prior to a campaign—and proceeded through the Forum to the Capitol.62 The dynamics of the transuectio are particularly interesting given that they mirror another parade that had the Capitol as its goal: the triumph. The last full triumph celebrated by someone outside the imperial family would eventually be that of L. Cornelius Balbus in 19 bce (over the Garamantes). Augustus’ eventual reservation of the triumphator’s march to the Capitol for his own family makes, I think, his enthusiasm for the transuectio particularly topical. Reviving the participatory qualities of the transuectio oVered Romans a chance to witness and participate in a recreation of their own collective military heritage as a society composed of outstanding individuals collaborating harmoniously. Moreover, the transuectio focused collective identity via a procession that continued to assert Rome’s divine history (the procession led to the Capitol) but which was also mediated through Augustus’ own interest in the equestrian class.63 This would sit well with Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ later characterization of the transuectio as a parade of military splendour and Roman identity (Ant. Rom. 6.13.4). 61 Favro (1994) is one of the Wrst to investigate the impact of the triumphal parade on the morphology of Roman urbanism. Her description of what she terms the choreography of the triumph, and its changes over the course of the Wrst century bce, underlies my discussion, but I also recommend Plattus (1983)’s excellent study of the semiotics of the Porta Triumphalis and the procession’s movement from outside to inside the city. 62 This parade may have been instituted as late as 304 bce, by Q. Fabius Maximus Rullianus and P. Decius Mus (the censors)—see Livy 9.46. It was certainly still happening in the late Republic—as recorded by Plutarch, Pompey 22.4–6. 63 In the triumph, as Holliday (1997) discusses, the spectacle was a combination of the individual triumphator, his troops and spolia, and the ‘signs’ of foreign triumph depicted visually in paintings evoking the key scenes of the campaign. See also, now, Brilliant (1999) and Beard (2003). Beard (2003: 40) on the tension surrounding the triumphator speciWcally as image and representation is also pertinent here.

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Augustus’ close interest in the Equites as a socio-political group is made most strikingly clear in his public assumption of the censorial role at these parades, where he carried out the examination (recognitio) or formal conWrmation of equestrian status. A hundred and Wfty or so years later, Suetonius was still highlighting Augustus’ concern to make continuity a feature of this parade. In this version, the parade continues to connect contemporary Rome to its past and foundation, and to focus attention on the next generation of Equites.64 This reinvention of past spectacle with a prospective imperative is also a feature of the lusus Troiae, another equestrian activity enthusiastically integrated into Augustan scenography. As I have been suggesting, the equestrian perspective that the transuectio seeks to tame and authorize is in fact far too compromised to admit straightforward correlation with an uncomplicated notion of Roman identity—and particularly when put on display in a space that contains such vigorous associations with pre-Republican mythography. Like Livy, Vergil’s temporal modelling frequently enacts several versions of past, present, and future within the same narrative space. Commemoration of Troy’s past becomes, in Vergil’s Aeneid, a primer for how Rome’s future will be mapped out, whilst that future itself exercises an inexorable pressure on how history is rewritten. Redrawing Anchises’ role in the escape from Troy in terms of his son’s mission to reinscribe Troy in Italy, Vergil then tells us that the equestrian display that Ascanius leads itself becomes in turn a way of deWning future Rome in Trojan terms (Aeneid 5.596–602). The theatricality of the scene is vivid (Aeneid 5.551–2). This pageant of a new hybrid identity emphasizes an intense relationship between future (male) Romans and warfare, mediated by the skill of horsemanship, but it is undercut when Ascanius must abandon the games (Aeneid 5.667–9, 674) and re-engage with the Trojan women in order to avert catastrophe.65 64 Suetonius, Augustus 38.3. Augustus (RGDA 14) and Tacitus (Ann. 1.3) both tell us how the Equites engaged in some tactical reciprocity, pleasing Augustus by acclaiming Gaius and Lucius as principes iuuentutis. On the iconography of the parade (on funerary monuments) see Veyne (1960). For Augustus and the transuectio see also Dio 55.9.9, 55.31.2. 65 See e.g. Suetonius, Augustus 43.2; Dio 48.20.1, 51.22.4; and Ovid, Tristia 3.12.7–22. Vergil’s Aeneid is, we might suspect, the Augustan locus classicus for these games. On the games in Vergil, and their implications, see most recently Theodorakopoulos (2004),

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Taken together, this makes (Cassius Dio’s record of) a comment ascribed to Maecenas particularly revealing: When children turn into youths, they should turn their minds to horses and to arms and have paid public teachers in each of these departments. In this way from their very boyhood they will have had both instruction and practice in all that they will themselves be required to do on reaching manhood, and will thus prove more serviceable to you. (52.26.1–2; trans. E. Cary)

Behind much of this lurks the unspoken anxiety that without ritualized and even teleological engagement with cavalry-style military training, future Rome would decay.66 Why should this have been the case? One answer—picking up on my earlier comments on Hegel—might be bound up in a wariness that Augustus might endstop the processional pageant of Roman history (as outlined by Livy and Vergil in particular). Reimagining a kind of controlled gallop (of the sort that public cavalry manoeuvres could display) as the lusus Troiae, and returning Rome’s gaze from the triumph to the assertively mortal transuectio parade, both oVer ways of internalizing and aestheticizing the key aspects of conquest and imperium where it mattered most—in the city itself.

M O RE T H A N J U S T A GA ME : THE EQUESTRIAN PERSPECTIVE Livy’s interest in his two Curtii as equestrians draws a wide range of contextual horses and riders into his account; the politics of horsemanship and control are, of course, intensely polyvalent, and not just at Rome. There is, however, a particular pointedness to Livy’s deployment of equestrians amidst his multiple layers of topographical but also Miller (1995). Purcell (1995a: 340) suggests that the signiWcance of equestrian statues (and, perhaps, equestrianism tout court) oVers a persisting remnant of archaic and even pre-Roman consciousness—cf. Dusˆanic´ and Petkovic´ (2002). 66 This, of course, makes Hegel’s historiographical thinking a particularly useful model. We can see this process starting to take shape in Horace’s Satires (2.2.9) and Odes (1.8.1, 3.24.51, 3.2.2), but it can even be traced back some years to Cicero’s defence of Caelius (11), and his De Diu. (2.4).

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meaning—we should note that other versions of Livy’s Wrst aetiology fail to emphasize equestrian connotations. The contemporary Forum, as strolled through by Livy’s audience and commented on by Livy himself (8.13.9), was cluttered with equestrian monuments celebrating military excellence and Roman virtue. Notable examples include quasi-mythical Wgures such as Cloelia,67 and more straightforwardly historical Wgures such as C. Maenius and L. Furius Camillus, cos. 338 bce,68 and Q. Marcus Tremulus, cos. 306 bce.69 In addition, more recent statues honouring Sulla, Pompey, and Octavian added to the clutter of the Forum, increasing the sense of narratological disarray that Livy alludes to. These monuments gave their immobile riders an elevated perspective and made them an object of Rome’s gaze, whilst also celebrating individual and collective military excellence and Roman virtue. By the Wrst century bce, real live Romans were increasingly commemorating and indeed scripting their own prowess and excellence in this manner, making any viewpoint across or through the Forum into a synoptic but also necessarily selective engagement with the bricolage and detritus of spectacular history.70 Livy’s strategic emphasis that it is in his contemporary Forum that the Wrst version of this story occurs (hic) 67 Livy 2.13—the statue to Cloelia, the woman who alone escaped from Lars Porsenna, was erected by the State. Dusˆanic´ and Petkovic´ (2002: 71–2) draw connexions between Cloelia, Horatius Cocles, and Marcus Curtius. For alternative versions of this ‘Cloelia’ statue, see Walker (2005: 269). 68 Livy 8.13.9. 69 Livy 9.43.22; cf. Cicero, Phil. 6.13. The statue was erected outside the Temple of Castor. 70 Scrolling through the entries under ‘Equus’ in the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae yields a wide variety of named results, including another near the Temple of Castor (L. Antonius—tr. pl. 44 bce), and many clustering around the Rostra. Although not interested in equestrian monuments per se, several recent studies oVer a good background. Wallace-Hadrill (1990) is excellent on reading honoriWc imagery at Rome; Gregory (1994) deals with the politics of portraiture; Tanner (2000) oVers a speciWcally socio-cultural perspective; Edwards (2003: 47–57, 64–8) discusses the reinvention of conquered artworks as part of a Roman honoriWc scheme; cf. Favro (1994: 154, 159) on triumphal simulacra and Roman cultural identity. Edwards’s neat formulation of the need to factor in ‘slippages between statues as captives, captivating statues and statues of captives’ (2003: 68) is spot-on, and applies equally well to my discussion of equestrian monuments as captives of Livy’s res gestae. On the relationship between statues and memory, a reading similar to my own, see Gowing (2005: 133). For a related discussion of Augustus’ summi uiri, see Gowing (2005: 139–45).

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is, therefore, peculiarly complicated in the Augustan politics of Forum space. Self-commemoration as an equestrian monument in the Forum came to a halt under Augustus; perhaps because, like the triumph, this practice had longstanding associations with the cursus honorum. We may Wnd, in Augustus’ reinvigoration of the transuectio, a substitute for these sculptures as a performance of ‘equestrian’ identity, albeit as part of a collective and annual event rather than as a mark of individual heroics or distinction. This shift in the kind of equestrian iconography allowed in the Forum may, I suggest, lurk behind Livy’s contradictory accounts of the Lacus Curtius. His accounts suggest that equestrian presence in the Forum, however monumental, triumphant, or accoutred in historical pageantry, is unstable. Such a subtext makes sense, given the continuing semiotic liveliness of equestrian statues; we see similar issues at stake a century or so later, for example, in Statius’ poem on Domitian’s huge, new equestrian statue (Siluae 1.1). Indeed, Statius explicitly connects this versiWed statue to the back-story of the Lacus Curtius by making a damp and decaying Mettius Curtius emerge brieXy from his resting place in a very watery lacus, in order to deliver an encomiastic address to the new equestrian Domitian.71 This is not, however, simply a classical topos, and the continuing signiWcance of such monuments resurfaces with much more recent equestrian statues, such as Falconet’s Peter the Great (Fig. 13).72 There is a sense, then, whereby Livy’s duality and strange approach to tackling and destabilizing the Lacus Curtius aetiology is making a signiWcant point which has implications for much more than just his own narrative: even in mythic form, and despite the revamped transuectio, equestrians of all sorts cannot expect to be immortalized in an uncomplicated fashion in the Forum, or for that matter in any public, politicized space. A striking aspect of Livy’s aetiologies is that both Curtii are, literally, equestrian Wgures trapped forever in the Forum—always available for reinvention, and bogged down in History and its eZuvia. This also makes for an immediate divergence between the kinds 71 On Statius, Siluae 1.1 see Newlands (2002: 46–73) and Spencer (2002: 185–7). On Curtius’ speech (Siluae 1.1.74–83) see Newlands (2002: 60–5). 72 On Falconet’s Peter the Great, see Balina (in this volume) and e.g. Grosskurth 2000; for details of its history, see Schenker (2003).

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of gaze available to them, and those which are available to textual audiences: foot soldiers and other citizens. Moreover, with the key exception of participation in the transuectio, the equestrian elevation that both Curtii achieve is particularly and increasingly unavailable to an Augustan audience. The position of these Curtii—looking down from horses, or looking up from horses being swallowed by a swamp or chasm—is unique; at one and the same time these equestrians are conceptually both below (in the swamp or chasm) and raised above their audiences. For Curtius number two at least, elevation on horseback might also function as a moral quality, but, even in concrete terms, mounted Wgures suggest high status and even e´lan. Mapping this back onto both of Livy’s Curtii, the ethical and political implications of equestrianism makes them simultaneously outstanding and abased Wgures; such an emphasis on the ambiguities of perspectivism is echoed in the replacement of Book 1’s Capitoline spectators, the Sabines, with the looming gods on the hills overhanging the Forum in the second version. Yet if the transuectio is to become the last chance for Romans hoping to experience a ride through the Forum, and with the triumph close to being closed down, in eVect, into an imperial pompa (parade), the Forum continues to be a place associated with equestrian ‘activity’. By the late Republic, of course, this was already instantiated daily by the static equestrian statues that formed a key part of its population.73 By an intriguing quirk, Livy makes the day of the transuectio the day of the dedication of the Temple of Castor, by the Lacus Juturnae in the Forum (2.42.5); this, too, has implications for my argument.74 Livy’s connexion of the two events acts as part of the broad backdrop to his second causa for the Lacus Curtius. According to Livy (2.20.12; 2.42.5), the temple was vowed by the Dictator Postumius during the Battle of Lake Regillius (493 bce) when things were going badly for Rome—a strong echo of Romulus’ vow of a templum to Jupiter Stator. Livy makes no mention of why 73 Duret and Ne´radau (2001: 303) suggest that we should make a direct connexion between the importance of equestrian statues at Rome and the iconography of the triumph. Favro (1994: 160) rightly comments that, even after the triumphal parade had ended, ‘concrete reminders kept the ritual alive’. 74 Duret and Ne´radau (2001: 302) also Xag up this connexion between Castor and the Equites.

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the site was chosen, but other accounts tell how the Dioscuri were said to have watered their horses at the Lacus Juturnae after the battle.75 It is plausible that a statue group of the Dioscuri with horses might have formed part of the decorative scheme of the Lacus Juturnae.76 Dionysius certainly makes a speciWc topographic and conceptual connexion between the route of the transuectio, the Temple of Castor and the Lacus Iuturnae (Ant. Rom. 6.13.4, 5). This further enhances the prospect of equestrian statuary groups entering into a lively dialogue with living Romans and reminding Romans of the immanence of divine intervention and the inescapability of key Roman events. Moreover, the equestrian qualities of the Dioscuri make these cognitive allusions work extra hard—in eVect, bundling them into a processional guide to movement through the Forum. Such a group, and indeed the Forum’s other equestrian statues, suggest a kind of synchronic pageant of history that connects ‘present’ monuments, conXicting causae, and a continuum that reaches back even into pre-Roman history. In this context Farrell’s discussion of Roman memory again comes into play, and in particular, his focus on Cicero’s implication of the Dioscuri in the invention of mnemotechnics.77 Turning back, then, to the transuectio, we Wnd that one kind of equestrian glory in the Forum (the annual parade) is on the cusp of replacing another (monumental equestrian commemoration of Roman excellence and identity). This is happening at a time when the starring role in what was an almost annual triumphal parade is also disappearing from most e´lite citizens’ grasp, and the parade itself is undergoing a signiWcant realignment in the early stages of its route.78 75 Cf. Dionysius, Ant. Rom. 6.13.1–3, 4. The Dioscuri are again supposed to have appeared at the Lacus Juturnae after the Battle of Pydna in 168 bce (Florus 1.28.15; Valerius Maximus 1.8.1). 76 See Steinby (1996b: 169) on the very damaged statue group discovered by Boni. 77 Farrell (1997); Cicero, De oratore 2.351–3. 78 Favro (1994: 152). Favro (1994: 156–7) describes the typical route of the Republican triumph. As she notes, the speciWc variants of which monuments were particularly ‘featured’ by the route would depend on who the triumphator was, but the Theatre of Marcellus does eventually seem to have added a distinctive new Julian/ Augustan element to the route. It would not have been complete when Livy was composing his history, but the space had already been cleared of temples by Caesar, in preparation for the new theatre.

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The two equestrian Curtii of Livy’s causae and their odd Lacus are interesting, then, for a whole range of reasons—not just as prototypes for statues, equites or triumphatores. We can also Wnd in these stories hints of a nexus of myth that connects a pre-Roman world to Rome’s foundation mythology, and even the signiWcance of horses for Etruscan culture—a retroactive feature of equestrianism that makes direct connexions between horses and Rome’s monarchical period.79 The stories drag together earth tremors and natural disaster, the relationship between gods and citizens, and the city as an entity understandable in terms of other cities.80 The transuectio in particular is important for understanding Livy’s Lacus Curtius because of its route, its vector, and its replacement of the triumph as a performance of citizen excellence and success. This in turn connects it back to the individual aristeia-anddeuotio of Livy’s second aetiology. Like the emphatically Roman transuectio, the second account of the Lacus Curtius perfects the symbiosis between citizen and state—perhaps because the second Curtius, unlike the Wrst, can identify securely as a Roman citizen.

. . . G R I N D I NG TO A HA LT Encapsulating the dilemmas and polyphony, and in particular the mutual interdependence of sites, texts, and cultural history, are Figures 3, 4, and 5. In Figure 1 we see Wrst a palimpsestic and multilayered vista across the Forum, looking NNW past the Capitol and up to the Victor Emmanuel monument. It constitutes a paradigm for Rome’s continuing vitality as a site that generates stories and sightlines, which

79 Livy 2.5.2 recounts the legend that the Campus Martius traditionally belonged to Tarquinius Superbus, and only became public land after his expulsion; Dionysius, Ant. Rom. 5.13.2 oVers an alternative—it was a space dedicated to Mars which Tarquinius Superbus annexed for himself. The Trojan Horse, of course, is never wholly absent. 80 We might even make connexions between both Curtii and their ‘plunges’ and the Athenian culture game—the apobates. Livy’s interjection of Neptune at the beginning of the Wrst account of the Lacus might also Wrm up the link when we remember the story of Athens’ foundation as a result of a competition between Poseidon and Athena.

Fig. 3 View across the Forum Romanum, from the Palatine (20 August 2005).

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Fig. 4 Suggested restoration of the Lacus Curtius. Originally published in Ch. Huelsen, The Roman Forum: Its History and Its Monuments, trans. J. Benedict Carter (2nd edn, New York: G. E. Stechert, 1909), 144, Fig. 75, drawing by Tognetti.

could also be interpreted as a modern city struggling to overwrite or escape from a persisting classical simulacrum. But as Figure 5 (a view up from the Lacus Curtius) demonstrates, a diVerent angle and focus show just how free each individual visit and visitor is to read meaning and coherence into the space. These two images make available to us simultaneously a crumbling jumble of ruins and an orderly archaeological site. Finally, as Figure 4, a reconstruction of the Lacus Curtius, suggests, a visitor to the Forum might all the time be looking through the debris and bricolage and seeing a ghostly, perfect marble monument, Wlling in the gaps with the readings that our knowledge of texts and our intellectual baggage have provided us. In Livy’s Wrst Lacus Curtius, ostentatiously mythic narrative is clothed in a deadpan historicizing account that tricks the eye into Wnding the bulrushes still shimmering behind the altars and dry marble of the Augustan Lacus; in his second account, annalistic rhetoric is deployed to demonstrate how easily history can segue into mythic motifs, contaminating the historiographical project as a whole. If the Augustan Wx on Rome is to work, it has to be able to accommodate gossip, multireferentiality and conXict, because that’s what real cities are. Livy’s use of diVerence when explaining the Lacus Curtius approaches Augustan ‘permanence’ by suggesting that it is only through embedding multiple ways of seeing and experiencing a site (at once the Forum is swamp, political space, decorated cultural gallery pulsating with voluble monuments, and site of a lake) that it

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gains permanence and a holistic solidity. In Attali’s terms: ‘it is the entire set of signiWcations constituted by the experience of habitation that alone can give the relations of city and time their meaning’.81 Livy’s position—writing down a past that is simultaneously so Other and inaccessible, and also so intensely implicated in the here-and-now of early Augustan Rome—is in many ways comparable to our own. The ‘Western’ tradition still looks back to Rome, through centuries of cultural milestones, to Wnd commonality with the anxieties and urban identity of the West’s ur-Empire. We both are and are not all Romans: as the Harvard Project on the City’s ‘Roman Operating System’ (R/OS) for programming urban form suggests, our cities continue to reXect and to be judged against paradigms that

Fig. 5 View from the Lacus Curtius (ground level) towards the Curia, on the right (restored in the 1930s to give a sense of its appearance after Diocletian s renovation), and the Arch of Septimius Severus (left). In the centre stands the church of SS. Luca and Martina, connecting the Forum Romanum to the Fora of Caesar and Augustus. The relief, depicting the Sabine M. Curtius, is a replica of the original, which is currently in the Capitoline Museum (16 August 2005). 81 Attali in Koolhaas et al. (2001: 277).

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originate particularly in the vistas that Augustan authors describe and canonize.82 ‘Classical’ Rome, just like Livy’s vision of ‘Republican’ Rome, remains tantalizingly omnipresent, drawing together the city’s legendary qualities of simultaneity and historicity. Time ‘when’, matters; but it involves making a decision about how to look back through ‘history’, taking a panoramic, synoptic perspective, or zeroing in with a close focus on one instant. Livy’s massive historiographical project attempts all these angles; in doing so, it itself becomes a highly inXuential and retroactive monument, and does so at that particular point in Roman history when discourses of change and permanence were colliding (and, in the process, creating Augustus). In Hegel’s terms, if one denies the dialectic and conXict within (Livy’s) stories, then the stories stop generating coherence and meaning. From a Deleuzian perspective, we could modify this to suggest that it is by introducing uncertainty and problems, gaps, and questions of authenticity into his account that Livy makes it continue to matter.83 That this endeavour can work is testament to the continuous processes of revision, reception, and reiteration that have guaranteed the city of Rome’s place in the (Western) urban imagination. 82 Andraos et al., and Attali, in Koolhaas et al. (2001: 10–23). 83 Cf. Attali’s take on Deleuze in Koolhaas et al. (2001: 276–7).

2 ‘In the name of the father’: Ovid’s Theban law Micaela Janan

A S TRA NG ER I N A STR AN G E L AN D When Ovid turns to epic in the Metamorphoses, he eschews the genre’s preoccupation with either founding or defending polities;1 instead, he constructs a largely ‘pastoral’ epic of sinister bent.2 There would seem to be no place for Rome in a landscape where cities Wgure largely as backdrops established perfunctorily at the beginning of a tale, mere names isolated in wilderness. Rome and her history are indeed curiously patchy presences in the epic. From 13.623 onwards, the Metamorphoses does nominally contain the story of her founding. However, Ovid divides the story of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy, the founding of Alba Longa, and the reigns of the early Alban and Roman kings into hasty summaries bracketed between leisurely divagations into extraneous narratives. Anius’ magical daughters (13.632–74), Polyphemus’ love for Galatea and revenge on her lover Acis (13.740–897), Circe’s passion for Glaucus and her retaliation against his beloved Scylla (13.898–14.74), all these stories and more interrupt the Roman narrative, swallowing most of the space in 1 Such as Troy, Ithaca, Thebes, Persia, Colchian Aia, Carthage, Rome—the centres of attention in, respectively, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Antimachus’ Thebais, and Choerilus of Samos’ Persica (both late Wfth century bce), Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, Naevius’ Bellum Poenicum, Ennius’ Annales, and Vergil’s Aeneid. 2 On the eclipse of the city in favour of the countryside in the Metamorphoses, see Hardie (1990: 224).

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the poem’s last books.3 The Roman past that does appear in the poem receives short shrift, as exempliWed in the fact that Ovid devotes just Wve words to raising the city’s walls (festisque Palilibus urbis / moenia conduntur).4 Moreover, the lines’ very structure denies these Wve words the status of a satisfactory consummation to the city’s birth: Ovid carefully breaks the phrase between two lines with enjambement, so that the words themselves do not coincide with any structural endpoint, and he places the key verb with which Vergil memorably ends his epic, condere, in an unmarked position at the middle of a line. Has Ovid truly nothing to say about, or to, the urbs aeterna, the city that eclipses all other objects of desire in his exilic poetry?5 To the contrary, he does address Rome, but parabolically. Philip Hardie has cogently argued that the origins and early history of Thebes recounted in Metamorphoses 3–4, which follow three generations of Thebans until Cadmus and Harmonia Xee in despair,6 darkly represent Rome and Roman history.7 Yet even as allegory, Ovid’s Thebes is decidedly . . . weird. The landscape around Ovid’s storied ancient city not only regularly entraps the Thebans but also refuses to obey even the most fundamental laws of time and space, to a degree remarkable even within the fantastical Metamorphoses. I argue that the chimeras arising from this pitched battle between Thebes and ‘Nature most unnatural’ reXect an ideological crisis in Ovid’s contemporary Rome. They mark where existing categories of thought ultimately fell short

3 Cf. Hardie (2002a: 192). 4 ‘The walls of the city were established on the festival of Pales’, Metamorphoses 14.774–5. R. J. Tarrant’s Oxford Classical Text edition is my source for the Latin text of the Metamorphoses (see Tarrant 2004); all translations are my own, and aim for faithfulness to the original rather than eloquence. 5 Cf. Miller (2004), with references to previous bibliography. 6 There are only two ‘interruptions’ to the Ovidian mythohistory of Thebes. The Wrst is the tale of Echo and Narcissus; yet Narcissus’ story is intimately tied to the Theban cycle by details that mark him as a substitute for Thebes’ most famous mortal son, Oedipus: see Loewenstein (1984: 41–5); Hardie (1988: 86); Gildenhard and Zissos (2000). The second is an excursus into Orchomenos (about forty miles north-east of Thebes) that ends with Bacchus’ punishment of the Minyeides (4.1– 415). However, since that tale involves Thebes’ most powerful son establishing his worship in a nearby Greek city, it is closely related to the Theban cycle thematically. 7 Hardie (1990: 224).

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of comprehending the profound contradictions central to the city and to the principate.8 Of course, Thebes has a hoary history of embodying atopia. When Hardie reads the Theban cycle ‘otherwise’, seeing the city as Rome’s negative model, he looks to Froma Zeitlin’s thesis that wild Thebes already functioned in Wfth-century Athenian drama as an antiAthens. In histrionic Thebes, she observes, ‘Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis, to the self, the family and society, but these are displaced upon a city that is imagined as the mirror opposite of Athens . . . events in Thebes . . . [instruct] the spectators as to how their city might refrain from imitating the other’s negative example’.9 Similarly, Ovid underlines the Thebans’ status as doubles of the Romans by emphasizing their two polities’ common genealogy. He calls the Thebans proles Mauortia (‘oVspring of Mars’, 3.531), drawing attention to the divine ancestor Romulus and the Cadmeioi have in common.10 But Ovid’s Thebes reXects an even more speciWc intervention in Rome’s mythohistory: Hardie calls the Theban cycle an ‘anti-Aeneid’ that undermines the programme of Vergil’s epic. The ktisis of a great antique city ultimately fails, insofar as the founder, Cadmus, abandons the city, defeated by the ravages of kinstrife and divine persecution upon his family and polity. The city’s origin shadows forth that defeat, stained as it is with bellicosity. Where the Wrst-generation Cadmeioi are ominously Mars’ progeny, the forefathers of autochthonous Thebes, the Spartoi, magically spring from a monster— from the teeth of a dragon slain by Cadmus. Like Romulus and Remus multiplied, they immediately engage in general fratricide.11 This nest of Vipermen is an early hint of that fantastic, dreamlike, and menacing countryside betokening the failure of civilization to overcome savage nature. Thebes’ landscape also sprouts monstrous expanding and contracting serpents, and weirdly perfect springs that multiply uncannily across the city’s environs (as we shall see below). 8 Paul Allen Miller has elegantly demonstrated that Roman erotic elegy is a symptom of exactly this historical aporia of cultural symbolization (Miller 2004: esp. 18–19); his analysis has guided my own thoughts on this aspect of Ovidian Thebes. 9 Zeitlin (1986: 117). 10 Anderson (1997: 391). 11 Hardie (1990: 224–5).

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Thebes’ teratical multiplicity contrasts sharply with the simple, uniWed vision of Rome at the poem’s close, and would seem to oVer the Romans much on which to congratulate themselves. The end of Metamorphoses 15 piles conspectuses of Rome one on top of the other, beginning with Jupiter’s vision of a worldwide peaceable kingdom united in justice under Augustus (15.829–35). As if to conWrm this prospect, the assassinated Julius Caesar ascends to the heavens at the close of Jove’s speech to become both spectacle (a comet, then star) and spectator. Gazing down upon the earth, Caesar sees the whole of it subjected to Rome—and more to the point, to his ‘son’, Augustus Caesar (15.843–60). No monsters, no chaos, just a more perfect union brought about by Augustus’ rule. But in drawing this pretty picture of the harmonious empire, Ovid likens Augustus to Jupiter himself as ‘father and ruler’ (pater est et rector uterque, 15.860). In fact, the king of the gods cuts a poor Wgure as either. Both his fatherhood and his (sexual) domination are particular causes of Thebes’ suVering, and from the Metamorphoses’ very Wrst book his savage autocracy darkens his portrait (as I shall show presently).12 If Jove as Lord of Misrule Wgures the emperor, how harmonious can Augustus’ kingdom truly be? How diVerent from Ovid’s Thebes, where, after the benevolent Cadmus, King Pentheus attempts to force upon his subjects a version of national identity as austere as Augustus’ own?13 And are Thebes’ political woes merely coincidental to her environmental malaise? What does it mean—for Rome as well as for Thebes—that the Wrst and only city to assume substantial shape within the Metamorphoses springs from harsh imperative, and looks physically less like civic pride than a psychotic’s 12 Although the only Theban death Jupiter directly causes is Semele’s, he does so because of Juno’s machinations—which points to the wider eVect his rapes and his paternity have on Thebes. His sexual subjugations of Europa and then of Semele repeatedly stir up Juno’s wrath against the city. He compounds the oVence by placing his and Semele’s son Bacchus in Ino’s care, thus making her and her family prime targets for Juno’s wrath. 13 Augustus’ legislation on marriage and adultery (the leges Iuliae de ordinibus maritandis and de adulteriis coercendis) are the obvious examples of his paternalistic attitude toward his subjects, since together they signiWcantly expanded the state’s role in regulating sexual relations (Treggiari 1991: 60–80, 277–98). But even more telling is the emperor’s control of the smallest details in citizens’ lives. For example, he notoriously forbade access to the Forum, Rome’s prime political space, to anyone not clad in the quintessential Roman garment, the toga (Suetonius, Aug. 40.5).

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nightmare? The answers to these questions unfolded below reXect where and how, both for Thebes and for Rome, the structures of understanding that conWgure civic reality founder most dramatically. A strange surrealism colours the harrowing circumstances of Thebes’ founding. Agenor of Tyre sends his son Cadmus to Wnd his sister Europa after her abduction by Jupiter, forbidding his son to return if he cannot discover her. Predictably, Cadmus cannot outwit Jove; guided by an oracle from Apollo, he determines to establish a new city for himself and his followers in Boeotia. Searching for water for sacriWce, his followers encounter a lonely spring; next to it is a cave marked by a vine-arch wherein hides a monstrous snake. The snake slays the Tyrians, but is killed in turn after Cadmus discovers the slaughter (3.6–94). The bizarre details of the snake’s two hostile encounters with the Tyrians exceed even the generous parameters of mythic logic, defying all rationality as the narrative unfolds. The serpent changes eerily in magnitude and force. Its size when it attacks the men is twice that of the constellation Draco (3.43–5),14 but when Cadmus kills the beast and pins it to an oak tree it has mysteriously shrunk to the height of that tree (3.90–2).15 Moreover, this single oak stops a beast that, twelve lines and no signiWcant wounds earlier, easily mowed down the woodlands in its path (3.80).16 The strangeness of the serpent-haunted landscape metastasizes across the Theban cycle. Immediately after recounting Thebes’ 14 Both Friedrich and Anderson observe that the snake has raised only about half its body-length into the air in order to survey the forest, and even that much does not yield to the constellation Draco in extent (Friedrich 1953: 103; Anderson 1997: 343) ‘if you could see it all’ (si totum spectes, 3.45)—meaning, if you could straighten out the winding string of stars that make up the constellation and behold its entire length at once. The idea of treating a constellation as so much snarled yarn matches the fantastic plasticity with which Ovid endows the Theban landscape (A. A. R. Henderson 1981: 47). Friedrich also remarks the snake’s eventual diminution to the length of the oak tree. 15 Edgar M. Glenn explains the snake’s initial magnitude as expressing the fear of Cadmus’ men (Glenn 1986: 30). But Cadmus is not notably more courageous; for example, the Spartoi terrify him and cause him to reach reXexively for his weapons, until one admonishes him that he has no part in the conXict (3.115–17). Why does Cadmus not see them or the serpent as larger than life, if terror is at the root of such a hallucination? 16 Anderson (1997: 346).

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founding, Ovid turns to the doom visited upon Actaeon, Cadmus’ grandson. His misfortune is to surprise the goddess Diana bathing; angered, she transforms him into a stag whom his own hunting hounds rend. He unwittingly stumbles upon her bath because, exhausted from the hunt, he sought refreshment; like his uncle, he Wnds his menace in a lonely spring next to a cave marked by an arch (3.157–62). The unusual combination of features that mark the serpent’s lair—cave, spring, arch—behave just as magically as the serpent itself: they reproduce themselves across time and space to reappear at Diana’s bath. It deWes probability that elements from the site of Cadmus’ Wrst loss (his men) should recur uncannily at the site of his second (his grandson). However, no less improbable is the appearance of Diana’s retreat. Ovid insists that the site has come into being with no artiWce (arte laboratum nulla, 3.158), but that nature’s eVorts nonetheless look like art (simulauerat artem / ingenio natura suo, 3.158–9). The water is perfectly pellucid, the grass runs clear to the edge of the water, both details indicating that not a pebble or speck of mud mars the environs (3.159–62). An arch has even been spontaneously hollowed from the stone. Notwithstanding Ovid’s emphasis on the venue’s naturalness, his elaborate description of the locus amoenus’ weird perfection impresses us rather with the site’s artiWciality and its anomaly. SpeciWcally, the grove’s studied artlessness evokes the ars topiaria of the pleasure-garden, the cunning manipulation of nature for purely aesthetic enjoyment that the Romans reWned to the highest degree.17 Though designated ‘the environs of antique Thebes’, the grove’s appearance instead evokes Rome, thus blurring distinctions between Greek nature and Roman culture, exurban sanctuary and urban pleasaunce. The impeccable site, and sight, of Diana’s grove invites Ovid’s readers to see not only their city but also themselves reXected in the tale—and not just as gardeners. Ovid implicitly constructs his audience as another of the Theban cycle’s unfortunates, Narcissus. The serpent’s and Diana’s founts anticipate Narcissus’ fatal pool, also unnaturally and incredibly perfect (free from mud, surrounded by grass, touched by nothing animate or inanimate, not even the sun, 17 Grimal (1969: 88–95, 406–7); Purcell (1987b).

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3.407–12). There, Narcissus fatally comes to ‘know himself ’; by extension, the events that Xow from Cadmus’ and Diana’s founts oVer Ovid’s Roman readers equally disturbing knowledge of themselves and of what lurks beneath the shiny surface of their city.18 But exactly what knowledge? How do we conceptualize all these uncanny features of the Theban landscape as a totality—the miraculously waxing and waning serpent, the punctiliously repeated features of the menacing loci amoeni, the immaculate pool? Together they mark Thebes as the site of a supernatural Nature, as if the very earth were instinct with a violation of the natural order. Yet we witness no theurgy here that would cause this loss of reality, not as when (nearer the middle of the Theban cycle) Bacchus horriWes the Tyrrhenian sailors by making ivy grow from oars and shipmasts, and by conjuring images of tigers and lynxes (3.664–71). Rather, something has gone amiss in Thebes that fundamentally impairs the logic of its physical world. These strange details of the Cadmeioi’s Wrst and second encounters with their unfolding doom look like nothing so much as hallucinations. Yet they cannot be attributed to any one person’s psychosis, since these prodigies appear to diVerent people at widely various times—to Cadmus’ men, then to Cadmus, then (a generation later) to Actaeon. It is as if these fantastic visions accrued to the whole of Thebes, or at least to the line of the Cadmeioi and their followers. In order to read this collective psychosis accurately, we need to reframe our understanding of the symptoms. Jacques Lacan oVers a reading of hallucinations that maps them onto the social, cultural, and institutional forces that move through the subject and shape the apprehension of phenomena.19 Hallucinations represent a disturbance in the way we understand the world, in the categories of understanding that Lacan collectively labelled the ‘Symbolic’. Any 18 According to Augustus, a sheen he himself bestowed. Suetonius records the princeps’ boast that he ‘found Rome brick and left it marble’ (Suetonius, Aug. 28); the Res Gestae carefully lists his building and renovation activities (RGDA 20–2). 19 See Lacan’s discussion of hallucination as a symptom of psychosis generally in his essay ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ (Lacan 1966: 531–83/ 1977: 179–225) and his seminar on the psychoses (Lacan 1981a/1993). See also Bowie’s lucid discussion of Lacan’s conceptualization of hallucination in particular, and of psychosis in general (Bowie 1991: 106–10).

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system of categories only functions to the extent that each can be distinguished from the others. The Symbolic therefore fundamentally crystallizes the principle of alterity, the idea of distinction that prevents us from experiencing the world as a homogenous continuum. The question we must ask is not, why are the Thebans psychotic?, but, what has so disturbed Thebes’ Symbolic that distinctions between ‘astronomically huge’ and ‘merely large’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘artiWcial’ and ‘natural’ have disappeared? Surprisingly, we cannot turn for explanation to the usual crimes that besmirch Thebes’ history in the form of category-violations. Ovid banishes from his purview the city’s better-known acts of incest and kin-carnage, the deeds that confuse distinctions between ‘mother’ and ‘wife’, ‘father’ and ‘foe’, ‘brother’ and ‘enemy’. Jocasta, Laius, Oedipus, Polynices, and Eteocles do not appear in his narrative of the city, nor, for that matter, anywhere in the poem.20 In an epic notably unsqueamish about family scandals, it is worth remarking that the only other polity’s history so egregiously expurgated is Rome’s: Ovid expunges from the poem not only Romulus’ murder of Remus, but Remus’ very existence.21 Yet in what looks like nothing so much as a return of the repressed, what Ovid banishes entirely from Rome re-emerges in diVerent form at Thebes’ very genesis. Ovid preserves the essence of the Labdacids’ history in his record of their progenitors the Cadmeioi by extracting from their category-violations the underlying notion that makes them signiWcant: the law. The Labdacids’ confusion over kinship relations and the protocols that accrue to them (killing and embracing the wrong people) sketches in nuce not only the misperceptions that plague the Cadmeioi, but also the way discrimination entwines with social prohibition to subtend the law. It is from this aboriginal vitiation of Thebes’ law that her hallucinatory landscape arises, as I shall show. 20 Unless you count as an appearance Themis’ throwaway half-line predicting Polynices’ and Eteocles’ mutual murder: ‘Wentque pares in uulnere fratres’, ‘Brothers will inXict equal wounds upon each other’ (Met. 9.405). 21 Numitor regains the Roman throne from his usurper-brother Amulius ‘with the aid of his grandson’ (nepotis munere, 14.773–4), meaning Romulus alone. Ovid thus contradicts the account of, e.g., Livy 1.5.7, which records both Romulus and Remus as aiding the coup d’e´tat.

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‘ W I T H D EVOT I O N ’ S V IS AG E / A N D P IO US ACT IO N’ Ovid quite naturally focuses on law in recounting Thebes’ foundation and early history; law is the very idea upon which the polity, the regulated human community, ineluctably rests and the notional frame that deWnes both oVence and punishment. However, Ovid’s Thebes is an anomaly, which dramatizes law more in the breach than the observance. It takes its origins from transgression, from an act of cruelty. Thebes owes its existence less to a providential nomothetes than to Agenor’s spurning of his son, Cadmus. Such an act of familial harshness is not unique among foundation stories.22 However, Ovid focuses upon the way this particular instance exempliWes law gone awry by introducing for the Wrst time in the Metamorphoses an oxymoron he will revisit often: the coincidence of pietas and villainy.23 Agenor’s command to Cadmus to Wnd his sister or else remain in exile (3.3–5) renders the Tyrian king facto pius et sceleratus

22 A parallel story can be found in Telamon’s banishment of Teukros, the halfbrother of Aias, in anger over Aias’ death shortly after the Trojan War. Apollo then directs Teukros to found a new Salamis in Cyprus (Euripides, Helen 68–163). 23 For example: under the guise of reuniting two sisters, Tereus movingly persuades Philomela’s father to entrust her to himself, all the time plotting to rape her (ipso sceleris molimine Tereus / creditur esse pius laudemque a crimine sumit—‘Because of the eVort he puts into his crime, Tereus is believed to be dutiful and earns praise for his evil intention’ , 6.473–4); Procne in turn determines to kill her son as vengeance for her husband’s violation and mutilation of her sister Philomela (scelus est pietas in coniuge Terei—‘For Tereus’ wife, crime is scrupulosity’, 6.635); Aeetes’ daughters, deceived by Medea, unwittingly murder their father while trying to renew his youth (his ut quaeque pia est hortatibus impia prima est / et, ne sit scelerata, facit scelus— ‘because of [Medea’s] exhortations, according as each daughter is Wlial, she is the Wrst to be unWlial, and lest she be criminal, she commits a crime’, 7.339–40); Meleager’s mother determines to avenge her son’s murder of her brothers by ending his life (impietate pia est —‘she is sisterly because she is unmotherly’, 8.477); Amphiaraus’ son Alcmaeon avenges his father by killing his duplicitous mother (ultusque parente parentem / natus erit facto pius et sceleratus eodem—‘avenged upon one parent for the sake of the other, their son will be dutiful and criminal by virtue of the same act’, 9.408–9); Myrrha’s father praises her as pia for her wish to have a husband like him, when she knows her wish is born of her illicit love for him (pietatis nomine dicto / demisit uultus sceleris sibi conscia uirgo—‘at the word devotion, the maiden, conscious of her own wickedness, hung her head’, 10.366–7).

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eodem (‘dutiful and criminal by virtue of the same act’, 3.5). Franz Bo¨mer observes: Das is oVenbar nicht nur ein rhetorisch wirkungsvolles und von Ovid gern variiertes . . . und nahezu sprichwo¨rtliches . . . Oxymoron. Diese Vorstellung geho¨rt auch zu tieferen Bereichen des ro¨mischen Glaubens. Sie stellt eine der urspru¨nglichen Komponenten des spa¨ter so komplexen Gebildes der ro¨mischen pietas (I 204) dar, na¨mlich die pietas der consanguinei.24 This is obviously not just a rhetorical oxymoron—[though] striking, enthusiastically varied by Ovid and almost proverbial . . . This concept belongs to the deeper realms of Roman belief. It constitutes one of the original components of the later quite complex structure of Roman pietas (I. 204) namely, the pietas of blood-relatives.

Bo¨mer’s gloss connects Agenor’s command with law, with law’s speciWc instantiation in the conXicting claims of social protocol organized but not rationalized under the rubric pietas; he thus indicates how this Phoenician imperative speaks to Roman precepts. But in cross-referencing Metamorphoses 1.204, Bo¨mer points to the way in which these contraries of pietas reXect a perverted polity— or, rather, two. In the aberrancy of eternal and divine Olympus, both ancient Thebes (as embryonically present in Agenor’s severity) and contemporary Rome Wnd their counterpart. The verses to which Bo¨mer speciWcally refers Wnd Jove calling the gods to council; the king of the gods lashes them into indignation over the human wrongs he allegedly witnessed and suVered when visiting earth. But Ovid soon draws into view recent events in the Roman empire by comparing the Olympians’ moral outrage to the horror Augustus’ people felt at a foiled attempt on the emperor’s life. Confremuere omnes studiisque ardentibus ausum talia deposcunt. sic, cum manus impia saeuit sanguine Caesareo Romanum exstinguere nomen, attonitum tanto subitae terrore ruinae humanum genus est totusque perhorruit orbis. nec tibi grata minus pietas, Auguste, tuorum est quam fuit illa Ioui.

24 Bo¨mer (1969–86: 1.446).

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[The gods] all rage together [with Jove] and, with burning eagerness, they demand to know who has dared such things. Just so, when the traitorous hand25 was rabid to destroy the Roman people with the blood of Caesar’s heir, the human race and the whole world trembled, thunderstruck from their tremendous terror of sudden catastrophe. Nor was the devotion of your people, Augustus, less pleasing to you than was that [devotion of the gods] to Jove. (1.199–205)

Bo¨mer has juxtaposed to Agenor’s order two instances, one mythical, one historical, in which the ethical claims of pietas cannot be made logically consistent. The obvious example of this is Jove’s proposal to destroy the entire human race in order to punish Lycaon, the only man whose oVences against pietas the god speciWcally describes (1.188). The Xaws in Jove’s case have been remarked often.26 To summarize brieXy: by Jove’s own account, everyone began to worship when he entered Arcadia as a manifest god. Only the Arcadian king Lycaon mocked his subjects’ reverent prayers, then compounded the oVence against pietas by attempting Wrst to murder Jove and then to feed him human Xesh (1.220–30). On this Ximsy evidence, Jove claims that all humanity is corrupt beyond recall and must suVer for it (1.242–3).27 Most surprising of all, he saves Lycaon from the general destruction (albeit transformed into a wolf, 1.232–9)! Jove’s confrontation with Lycaon establishes a story-pattern repeated several times in the Metamorphoses (‘god punishes scorner of the gods’), but only this and one other instance of it expose comparably thorny conceptual Xaws in pietas. Non-coincidentally, that twin instance takes place in Thebes, the third point in the triangle of corrupt polities elucidated above: Olympus—Rome— Thebes. Jove’s reprisal against Lycaon foreshadows his son Bacchus’ revenge upon Pentheus, another lone-inWdel king among a sea of apparent converts (3.577–733). Although the son is more restrained than his father (Bacchus does not punish wholesale for Pentheus’ 25 Manus could also mean ‘band’, and indicate multiple assassins; I translate it as ‘hand’ and construe it as metonymy for a single enemy, because that matches the comparandum, Lycaon as a lone foe. But whether the attempted murder Ovid had in mind was an unaided eVort, or a conspiracy, makes no diVerence to my argument. 26 Anderson’s commentary oVers an excellent line-by-line analysis of its weaknesses (Anderson 1997: 168–76). 27 He spares Deucalion and Pyrrha, but only as an afterthought (1.324–9).

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fault), he maddens Pentheus’ mother and aunt murderously against the king, so that they rip him apart in a Bacchic fury (710–33). Here, too, pietas eerily accommodates ethical antipodes: just punishment for a god’s le`se-majeste´ is also kin-murder. Because all three instances of pietas are linked by comparable ethical paradoxes and similar venues, each ampliWes the disturbing eVect of the other two. Each underlines the degree to which these ethical contradictions inform the very idea of The City. But to return to heaven and the world’s infancy: even more conceptually intricate than the thematic repercussions of Jove’s outrage is its Olympian development. The gods’ reaction to Jove’s brief sketches an even subtler example of pietas subverted than either wholesale noyade, or intimate carnage; it raises more interesting questions about just how the word Xoats free of any dependable moorings of meaning. Why do the Olympians greet such clotted, sadistic reasoning with enthusiastic approval, and what is the logical consequence of calling that approval pietas? When Jove fulminates over human wickedness (ora indignantia soluit, ‘He spoke in outrage’ 1.181; frementi, ‘angrily haranguing’ 1.244), his fellow gods show their pietas (204) by blustering right along with him (confremuere, 1.199, an Ovidian neologism). Yet can we take their ardour purely at face value? Just after Jove has reminded the Olympians of the diVerence in power between himself and them (uos . . . regoque, 1.197), some of the gods ratify his plan verbally, others ‘play their parts by approving wordlessly’ (alii partes adsensibus implent, 1.245). The theatrical metaphor in partes implere28 construes the council’s responses as a passion play enacted for Jove’s consumption—one in which both speaking and not speaking mean exactly the same thing.29 Jove’s will trumps all other considerations in determining (in all senses of that word) the will of the council. Their pietas cannot be construed in isolation from their position of subjugation.

28 Lee (1953: 99); Bo¨mer (1969–86: 1.99). 29 The fulcrum on which the contrast turns might not be words, but sound—i.e., between voiced, but wordless, approval, and silence, since adsensus can mean approbation voiced only within the mind. But the exact sense does not matter to my argument: whatever the speciWcs of their diVering behaviours, both groups are assumed alike to have ratiWed Jove’s plan.

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Ovid compares the gods’ approval to the pietas Augustus’ people tendered him on the occasion of his mortal danger. Exactly which attempt on Augustus’ life this was we cannot tell: Suetonius says that there were many such conspiracies against Augustus (Aug. 19; cf. Dio 55.4.3), but which one Ovid had in mind the poet does not specify.30 Floating free from history, the comparandum both reproduces and magniWes the complications of the Olympian council. Once again, a would-be assassin has assaulted pietas, this time oVending doubly. Every citizen owes both civic and Wlial devotion to the emperor, who embodies the state and is ‘father of his country’ (pater patriae). Punishing the assassin, the inpia manus (1.200), therefore constitutes a defence of pietas. Yet the rapidly expanding scope of his oVence strains logic: an attempt on the emperor’s life Wrst threatens all Romans, then immediately inspires universal fear of world cataclysm (1.201–3). In a few quick jumps, we see Rome’s swelling borders encompass the entire world, while Augustus assumes his place in the centre of it all. The expressed fear of chaos come again implies the most stringent reprisal against the emperor’s would-be assassin, just as fear of universal chaos provokes Jove’s deadliest response to humanity’s putative wickedness.31 The claims in both instances are 30 Some scholars assume that Ovid refers rather to Julius Caesar’s assassination, e.g. Haupt and Ehwald (1915); Lafaye (1928); Lee (1953); Otis (1970: 99); Albrecht (1999: 179). However, the point of comparison is an attempt that failed, just as Lycaon’s plots against Jupiter did not succeed (Anderson 1997: 172). Also, Bo¨mer points out that the adjective Caesareus (which Ovid introduced into Latin) nowhere else in the poet’s oeuvre refers to Julius Caesar. Bo¨mer summarizes the arguments for reading Caesareo sanguine as Augustus’ mortal peril, and cites both the ancient resources and modern scholarship pertinent to the question (Bo¨mer 1969–86: 1.87–8). 31 Augustus did not err on the side of gentleness when responding to real or perceived threats. For example, in dealing with cases of treason, Augustus broke with what had become accepted custom in the late Republic: the right of a citizen to avoid enforcement of a capital charge by voluntarily going into exile where he would. By contrast, Augustus began either to specify the place of exile (as he did when he relegated Ovid to Tomis) or to Wnd ways to enforce the death penalty even upon those who had chosen Xight. C. W. Chilton remarks that ‘during the last century of the Republic citizens became immune, in practice and then in theory, from the inXiction of the death penalty’ (Chilton 1955: 73). But in his analysis of the treason trials of Augustus’ reign, he concludes that ‘Augustus by arbitrary action extended the scope of the law of treason and went beyond its penalties’ (Chilton 1955: 76). The fates of Aulus Terentius Varro Murena and Fannius Caepio exemplify this extension. Both were found guilty of conspiracy in 22 or 23 bce (presumably under the lex Julia de

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patently hyperbolic. Threats to pietas are adduced to authorize an exaggerated reaction (a reaction speciWed in Jove’s case, implied in Augustus’) and also to organize the two respective polities, divine and mundane, into unities revolving around one linchpin. The historical fact that there were too many attempts on Augustus’ life to pin down Ovid’s reference itself undermines this picture of universal solicitude for the emperor. But when Ovid himself directly addresses the emperor in these lines, the denotative content of his words conveys the opposite of such ambivalence. Just whose hyperbole does he record? The Olympians’ subservience has now been transferred to the narrator: it is Ovid’s voice that extravagantly equates Augustus’ demise with the world’s end, and characterizes universal dread of this as pietas. The poet’s obsequiousness implicitly condones any response to the inpia manus, however severe. How can the same voice imply that the Olympians’ pietas toward Jove is toadying, but then adopt their obsequiousness when describing the pietas of Augustus’ subjects? What does the word mean if it can shelter beneath its aegis both sadism and sycophancy—the exaggerated reprisals of the rulers, and the self-serving approval of their subjects? maiestate) and condemned to death—as the traditional formula had it, to interdictio tecti et aquae et ignis (‘banishment from shelter and water and Wre’). Voluntary exile would normally have satisWed this sentence, but both men were instead waylaid while Xeeing into exile and put to death. Lawrence J. Daly argues convincingly that Augustus exceeded the legal parameters of interdictio in ensuring that both were executed. Not all scholars agree with his analysis (a summary of the range of views appears in Daly (1983 and 1984), but they are all of one mind in regarding the deaths of Murena and Caepio as a problematic break de facto, if not de iure, with tradition. Nor is this pattern of judicial harshness apparent only to modern scholars. Dio generally characterizes Augustus as having a vicious temper that aVected his actions as a jurist. He relates an anecdote in which Maecenas came across Augustus holding court and about to condemn to death many of the accused. Maecenas narrowly averted this by tossing into Augustus’ lap a tablet inscribed, ‘Arise at last, executioner!’ (Dio 55.7.1–2). There is an exception more apparent than real in Dio’s and Seneca’s rhetorical fables of Augustus’ clemency toward the conspirator Gn. Cornelius Cinna. Suspected of plotting against Augustus while he was in Gaul, Cinna was supposedly pardoned at Livia’s behest (Dio 55.14–22; Seneca, Clem. 1.9). Yet even these authors acknowledge that such clemency was unprecedented. Seneca has Livia characterize Augustus’ previous pattern of responses to such attempts as seueritas (Clem. 1.9.6). Dio’s Livia remarks that not only has Augustus killed ‘many’ (pollous), but that his motives for doing so are assumed to be far from impartial: he has condemned out of resentment, greed, fear of the brave, envy of the virtuous (55.18.5).

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The dramatic frame within which Ovid deploys pietas at 1.204 makes it impossible to recover its meaning unambiguously, precisely because he speaks to the emperor (204–5). Addressed directly to Augustus, pietas cannot enjoy a purely constative status. By comparing the devotion of the Olympians to that of Augustus’ subjects, Ovid implicitly praises the emperor as a man who inspires loyalty, and implies that whatever vengeance he takes against the plotter sets right a wrong, just as Jupiter says his own reprisal will (Met. 1.240–3). Yet aimed at the emperor, the sentence can only be Xattery. As Paul Allen Miller has pointed out: Flattery only functions to the extent that it calls attention to its own excessive, hyperbolic nature. It is the sly rhetorical wink that says, ‘this is a compliment’, that says ‘I am exalting you and recognizing the power diVerential between us.’ The court poet is thus always already both Xatterer and ironist . . . He cannot praise without recognizing the subordination that makes that praise possible and necessary, and in so doing, calling into question the nature of that praise.32

Pietas both must, and cannot, mean what it says in the address to Augustus: in order for the sentence to be Xattery, the devotion of the emperor’s subjects must be understood as sincere. But as Xattery, we cannot ignore the rhetorical nature of the compliment and free the word of irony. Even so soon in the Metamorphoses’ use of pietas (this is only its second appearance in the poem), its exact value is already hopelessly problematized in a way that sets the stage for the ethical contradictions of Agenor’s command to Cadmus. Both passages revolve around authority (Jupiter, Augustus, Agenor) ‘laying down the law’, yet each constitutes a disturbance in the Symbolic such as I have argued accounts for Thebes’ surreal landscape. If by saying pietas Ovid both means what he says, and its opposite, if the same deed can make the doer both pius and sceleratus, loyal subject and sycophant, why cannot a serpent be both astronomically huge and merely large at the same time, why cannot the same landscape montage be both here and there in space and time, be contrived and artless? 32 Miller (2004: 228). Miller cites Videau-Delibe (1991) as the germ of the idea that the court poet is ineluctably caught between irony and Xattery.

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To be sure, Ovid elaborates the contradictions of pietas throughout the Metamorphoses. When Procne avenges her sister Philomela by killing her own son, when Meleager’s mother ends his life for ending her brothers’, when Alcmaeon murders his mother to punish her betrayal of his father, their acts reveal how easily bloodthirst can cohabit with duty. But those future paradoxes are all present in nuce in Agenor’s command to his son—and nowhere else in the poem does Ovid unfold in such detail the consequences of these paradoxes for the polity’s basis in law. No notion of the Good can secure the authority of King Agenor’s injunction. His harshness toward his son contradicts his fatherly devotion to his daughter, so that his order can at best articulate the internal conXicts of pietas rather than take refuge under its authority. That his command has force despite its internal logical incongruity exempliWes the law’s absolute status: Cadmus obeys the decree of his father and sovereign because it is the law, not because it is truthful, just or even expedient. I do not here claim insight into Cadmus’ consciousness: the text records none of his reXections on the command except his wish to avoid his father’s wrath when he cannot Wnd his sister (3.7). We may imagine that Cadmus Wnds his father’s dictum unjust, ridiculous, demeaning—or, in contrast, that he considers it completely within Agenor’s patria potestas and kingly right. My point is that his father’s decree does not depend for its eVectiveness on Cadmus’ subjective impression of it. Ovid articulates the command’s own self-negation (sceleratus/pius) such that he obviates obedience based on reason; all that he leaves Cadmus is compliance on the basis of acknowledging authority.

‘O LD FATH ER A N TI C K TH E LAW’ Ovid sketches in Agenor a father dictating to his son and a king charging his subject with a task. Notwithstanding that the prepotent authority exacting Cadmus’ obedience is twofold, it is of little personal substance. We know nothing about Agenor’s nature other than that his son fears his anger (3.7), despite the fact that Agenor catalyzes one of the two Tyrian emigrations to yield a mirror-city

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to Rome. The other is Dido’s. Not surprisingly, Ovid has modelled his story of the Tyrian king upon Vergil’s tale of the queen who founds Carthage, to the extent that both revolve ultimately around questions of pietas. The obligations owed between Agenor and Cadmus are as contradictory and elusive as those between Dido and Aeneas. But Ovid’s spare, harsh portrait of Agenor contrasts markedly with Vergil’s opulent, nuanced depiction of Dido. Dido wildly threatens the Trojans (Aeneid 4.384–6, 544–6), but acts of generosity have preceded her words of rage and save her from appearing merely vicious or autocratic. She contemplates revenge, yet ultimately leaves it to her descendants to settle the Wnal score with Aeneas’ posterity (Aeneid 4.604–29). When by contrast Ovid reduces to harsh abstraction the ultimate human cause for storied but doomed Thebes, he throws into relief what is at stake in the founding of cities under the rule of law. Sketchy Agenor embodies an odd collocation of ideas: Ovid yokes the advancement of civilization to a relentlessly abstract, austere, even cruel agent whose commands entwine ethical antipodes. How do we explain this? The contradictions of paternal authority Agenor exempliWes have been best addressed by Lacan, who saw the signiWcance of paternity not as the biological oYce of speciWc individuals, but as a social abstraction with broad cultural signiWcance. Lacan’s ‘Father’ is the abstract principle of legislative and punitive power the paternal role exempliWes, with all the potential for harshness that that implies.33 Hence Lacan punningly glosses the role of father as the ‘Non/ Nom-du-Pe`re’ (also know as the ‘paternal metaphor’). The Father’s prohibitive force (his ‘No’) is reducible to a substanceless though potent signiWer (his name). But the insubstantiality of paternity also points to the son’s ability to inherit that name and to occupy the 33 Especially in so patriarchal a society as ancient Rome, where the structure of governmental authority reXected in detail the authority of the paterfamilias. As W. K. Lacey points out, the chief positions of authority in Rome (e.g., the consulship) sketch a conceptualization of state dominion diVerent from any Greek society’s. Rome’s oYces were few in number, but conferred on the magistrates who occupied them broad discretionary powers over a wide sphere of responsibility. The occupants of these oYces were thus more like parents to the governed than like functionaries merely enforcing the detailed and speciWc demands of a legal code; they were able to act and to improvise within broad limits. Not by accident were senators called patres conscripti, nor Augustus eventually honored as pater patriae (Lacey 1986).

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place of the father. Moreover, this abstract family romance has a wider political dimension: the Father functions as the principle of injunction that informs the law, and so informs the very basis of the ordered human community.34 Agenor’s Xintiness exaggerates a facet of the Father’s punitive power, but spawns a double heritage. His son Cadmus becomes a good king, solicitous of his men,35 willing to atone even for unwitting oVence against the gods.36 Yet he reigns over a city regularly besieged by supernatural cruelty. How is it that the son goes so right, and his polity so terribly wrong? Agenor’s dictum and the absolute obedience it commands represents en germe the Father’s law, but its harshness also shadows forth the obverse of the law’s cool austerity—its cruelty, that which makes Agenor sceleratus—and sketches a conceptual basis for Thebes’ woe.37 His pitilessness toward his son undermines the structural necessity that, as king and father, doubly the guarantor of the law’s neutral status, Agenor be detached and impartial. 34 ‘C’est dans le nom du pe`re qu’il nous faut reconnaıˆtre le support de la fonction symbolique qui, depuis l’ore´e des temps historiques, identiWe sa personne a` la Wgure de la loi’, ‘It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function, which, since the dawn of history, has identiWed his person with the Wgure of the law’ (Lacan 1966: 278/ 1977: 67). 35 Finding his men slain by the serpent, Cadmus swears either to avenge them or join them, albeit the odds are clearly against his defeating the monster on his own (3.55–9). 36 Pondering Thebes’ misfortunes in his old age, Cadmus oVers to be changed into a snake if his killing the monster serpent were the oVence that brought such trouble upon Thebes. Both he and his wife Harmonia are so changed (4.563–603). 37 I have elsewhere argued that ancient philosophy and literature—the Sceptics and Epicureans, Livy and Propertius—testify to a lively sense of the law’s capacity for cruelty insofar as it is a system of cross-referenced and mutually deWning rules ultimately ungrounded in any secure meaning, or ‘truth’. This cruelty is inherent rather than contingent, insofar as it is most extreme not when law is ignored, but rather when law is practised in its utmost rigour (Janan 2001: 138–52). This conforms to the Metamorphoses’ Wrst and most striking picture of law—a source of terror. The Golden Age is Golden because its spontaneously virtuous people need not fear the force of law. Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae uindice nullo, / sponte sua, sine lege Wdem rectumque colebat. / poena metusque aberant, nec uerba minantia Wxo / aere ligabantur, nec supplex turba timebat / iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine uindice tuti. ‘Golden was the Wrst age established, which—with no avenger, of its own accord, without law—cultivated trustworthiness and virtue; punishment and fear were absent, nor were threatening words strung together on the posted bronze tablets, nor did a fawning crowd fear the face of its judge, but they were safe without a defender’ (Met. 1.89–93).

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This is hardly an idea new to the ancients: Cicero gave the ideal that the law and its human instruments should be neutral magisterial articulation in De republica. He refutes the Greek philosopher Carneades’ claim that only the varying shapes of self-interest and utility peculiar to each society stand behind the law, not justice; if there were such a thing as autonomous, neutral justice, laws would not diVer between countries (Rep. 3.8–11). Cicero responds that laws diVer from nation to nation only when and where they fall short of natural law, which is universal, unchanging, unaVected by time, place or agents (Rep. 3.22). Legislators and magistrates should be this law’s neutral instruments: ideal statesmen govern the people as the mind governs the body (Rep. 3.22). Cicero’s mind/body metaphor implies a power whose ultimate interest mirrors the good of the governed: a sane mind cannot pursue interests at variance with those of the body that houses it. He conWrms this implication in a letter to Atticus that preserves a part of De republica that our manuscript did not: Consumo igitur omne tempus considerans, quanta uis sit illius uiri, quem nostris libris satis diligenter, ut tibi quidem uidemur, expressimus. Tenesne igitur moderatorem illum rei publicae quo referre uelimus omnia? Nam sic quinto, ut opinor, in libro loquitur Scipio: ‘Ut enim gubernatori cursus secundus, medico salus, imperatori uictoria, sic huic moderatori rei publicae beata ciuium uita proposita est, ut opibus Wrma, copiis locuples, gloria ampla, uirtute honesta sit. Huius enim operis maximi inter homines atque optimi illum esse perfectorem uolo.’ Therefore I spend all my time considering how great must be the strength of that man whom I have with considerable energy limned in my books (as it may seem to you). Do you grasp, then, that moderator of the republic from whom we want all things? For in the Wfth [book], I think, Scipio says: ‘As a safe course is the aim of the pilot, health of the physician, victory of the general, thus the aim of this governor of the republic will be a blessed life for its citizens, so that [their life] may be secure in wealth, rich in resources, well endowed with glory, honorable for its virtue. I wish that man to be the accomplisher of this, the greatest and best work among human beings.’ (Cicero, Att. 8.11)

‘Scipio’s’ words make it clear that the best statesman administers the commonwealth so as to promote its welfare without regard for his personal interests or prejudices, just as the pilot, the physician, and

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the general serve others and not themselves in the ideal practice of their professions. Cicero’s unselWshly aloof statesman aligns with one end of the spectrum of the Lacanian Father’s possibility, with the magisterially aloof Father of the law, the one whose ‘No’ is absolute, but unbiased. By contrast, Agenor Wgures the outrageous Father who embodies the sadistic, senseless underside of the law. In his study of Lacan’s work on the paternal function, Michel Silvestre has cannily described this demon-father, le Pe`re jouisseur or the ‘Father of Enjoyment’.38 As one of its connotations, ‘enjoyment’ here trails some of the Lacanian sense of ‘the point of breakdown in a logical system’. The internal and occluded contradiction in law between its appearance of austere neutrality and its dark substratum of violence and cruelty produces as its symptom the obscene Father. Thebes begins here, sprung from a crisis in the law and in the function of the one who imposes law. The nature of Thebes’ trials point to the mooring of the law—the Father qua punitive power—gone awry. Or, more accurately, glimpsed awry and thus revealed. The Father of Enjoyment is not a ‘bad, false’ father whom one might replace with a ‘good, true’ father. Rather, He embodies a perverse feature within paternity itself arising from the oYce of imposing rules, of laying down the law. Law is itself a form of radical violence, of crime, insofar as it demands our obedience regardless of our subjective appreciation of its rationality, morality, or utility.39 Yet that is not to say that this principle is always embodied in exactly the same way. DiVerent historical circumstances aVord the vantage from which the arbitrary nature of the Father’s power is more evident, or less so, depending upon the capacity of existing Symbolic categories to cover its nakedness. Under conditions where the Father’s ultimate autocracy remains hidden, He in his Symbolic capacity guarantees the neutral stature of the law precisely in virtue of being an ‘empty’ signiWer without a signiWed. His community coheres through his capacity to be a signiWer that ‘means everything’ insofar as it does not mean anything in 38 See Silvestre’s essay ‘Le pe`re, sa fonction dans la psychanalyse’, in Silvestre (1993: 237–69), especially the section entitled ‘Le-pe`re-la-jouissance’, 244–9. Lacan himself discusses the sadistic father most fully in Seminaire VII, esp. ch. 13, ‘The Death of God’ (Lacan 1986: 197–209/1992: 167–78). 39 Zˇizˇek (1991: 34).

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particular, and thereby enables everyone to recognize himself/herself in it. As a corollary nullity, the law He anchors is in running order only when it is void of the speciality that is prepossession—when it is ‘blind’ and thus raised above particular passions.40 By contrast, the suspicion that the Father’s decrees originate in sadism or self-interest undermines the law as a putatively self-consistent, just system. It is this contrast between the blind and the self-interested Father that Tacitus draws when he famously summarizes the two conXicting posthumous evaluations of Augustus’ reign. One opinion holds that pietas for his adoptive father left Augustus no other option upon Caesar’s assassination than to resort to civil war and to hunt down Caesar’s killers; the other viewpoint notes drily that vengeance smoothed the way to the Princeps’ own assumption of power (Ann. 1.8–10). What is crucial to note here is that both valuations assess exactly the same historical data; only the causal narratives into which each estimation inserts these res gestae—only their integrations into the Symbolic universe—diVer radically. The value of negative capability was hardly lost on Vergil: he made his Father/King Aeneas a self-abnegating Wgure who contrasted strongly with his epic predecessors, such as the wilful and passionate Achilles and Odysseus. Aeneas’ kenosis is crucial to his status as the proto-Romans’ organizing centre: he is the vessel of the Roman future, to whose collective promotion individual desires must be sacriWced.41 Until the last books of the epic, Vergil sequesters Aeneas from the particular passions that inspired his deceased heroic peers and that laid waste their communities (e.g., Achilles’ angry refusal to help the Greeks defeat Troy, and Odysseus’ pitiless slaughter of the suitors, the Xower of Ithaca’s youth). Aeneas’ belated access of perfervid wrath erodes his statesmanlike status: he kills young Lausus, obscenely overmatched in battle (Aeneid 10.810–32), then Turnus as the Rutulian prince begs for mercy (Aeneid 12.930–52). These acts most put into question Rome’s viability, insofar as they exemplify the triumph of furor over the detachment necessary to the polity’s governance and coherence. But Ovid drives the ideal of leaderly kenosis all the way to its logical limit: not by accident do the Metamorphoses’ last three books reduce 40 Zˇizˇek (1992a: 156).

41 Quint (1993: 83–96).

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Aeneas and Numa, the very types of the Roman ideal king, to frames for other people’s stories. Ovid borrows and exaggerates the Vergilian Aeneas’ quintessential self-eVacement when he minimizes the narrative of Aeneas’ voyage, while making him and his followers little more than a plot device for eliciting other people’s tales.42 Numa he demotes to the same status: the Roman king has little function in the plot of the epic other than to provide a pretext for the story of Myscelos’ founding of Croton, and for Pythagoras’ long harangue on metempsychosis and vegetarianism (Met. 15.1–478). Agenor might at Wrst glance seem to Wt this sparse proWle: he is certainly a shadowy Wgure in Ovid’s history of Thebes, and to that extent could be thought of as an empty signiWer. Yet irrational anger marks him with particularity and partiality: having chosen his daughter over his son, Agenor forces his son to Xee patriamque iramque parentis (‘his father’s country and his wrath’, 3.7). The Phoenician king’s originating ferocity conjures up the obscene Father, and consequently the city amiss. Thebes’ subsequent history unfolds this original Xaw as a series of deadlocks inscribed not only into her society but also into the realm of the divine, and eventually into the physical itself (as in the supernatural landscapes discussed above). As we have seen, Thebes’ Wrst citizens signally fail to cohere as a community: the Wrst act of the Spartoi is to engage in inexplicable and spontaneous civil war. Only Athena’s intervention eventually halts the slaughter (3.102–30). As if proxies for Oedipus, Polynices and Eteocles, the dragon-brothers enact the internecine strife that quintessentially characterizes the myths Ovid excluded from his narrative, the strife that will ultimately destroy every Theban dynasty and Thebes itself.43 But after the Spartoi, Ovid’s Thebes suVers at the hands of gods rather than men, as if the misery had waxed too large for mere human agents, however supernatural their origins. Only the 42 E.g., Anius and his daughters (as mentioned above), Met. 13.632–74; the Sybil, 14.122–53; Achaemenides, 14.167–222; Macareus, 14.223–319; Picus and Canens, 14.320–440. 43 The mythic history of Thebes ends with her sack by the Epigonoi, the sons of the seven heroes who enlisted in Polynices’ cause to retake the city from his brother Eteocles. The ‘After-born’ set out to Wnish what their fathers left incomplete at their deaths (Il. 4.405–10). Polynices’ and Eteocles’ quarrel thus indirectly inspires this group’s destruction of Thebes.

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gods, the hypostases of the Father’s absolute authority, can now represent the expansive, insatiable vengeance of Pe`re jouisseur.

TH E EM PTY LAW Cadmus Wrst experiences this malevolently augmented punitive power in his new land when castigated for slaying a monster. The huge serpent whose teeth will supply Thebes her Wrst aborigines destroys her Wrst immigrants. It devours Cadmus’ men in their pious quest for water needed for ritual sacriWce to Jove (3.26–49). After Cadmus has killed the serpent and stands contemplating its immense body, a voice admonishes him, quid, Agenore nate, peremptum / serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens (‘Why, son of Agenor, do you stare at the slain snake? You, too, will be gazed at as a snake’, 3.97–8). Ovid had in passing called the serpent ‘Mars’ snake’ (Martius anguis, 32), another elliptical reference to the divine progenitor the autochthonous Thebans share with the Romans. Ovid is enigmatically spare compared with, say, Ennius’ (fr. 35–51 Vahlen) or Livy’s (1.4) account of how Ilia’s rape causes Rome to exist. But by banishing Mars from the stage as an actor, and admitting only his bestial familiar, Ovid distills this founding moment to its essence—to the violence and savagery materialized in the serpent’s teeth, the substance that Cadmus will sow, and upon which Thebes literally rests. The fratricidal bloodshed Ovid erases from his account of Rome’s founder, when displaced onto Thebes, is bred into its autochthons’ supernatural bones. On the level of pure plot, Ovid’s description also evokes the tradition that makes the snake sacred to the war-god, and its death a source of anger to him.44 But Ovid contradicts previous mythic tradition by juxtaposing the killing and the prophecy, insofar as their proximity insinuates a causal connection between Cadmus’ augured transformation and the serpent’s death.45 Most commentators do not 44 Scholiast on the Iliad (
A Il. 2.494 ¼ 4F51); Euripides, Pho. 931–5. 45 Of the extant sources that precede Ovid, Euripides’ Bacchae has Bacchus cryptically refer to Cadmus’ and Harmonia’s changing into snakes as ‘what the oracle

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even attempt to articulate a just relation between the punishment and Cadmus’ actions.46 His intentions are praiseworthy, to avenge his men’s horrible deaths (3.58–9), nor could he have known the snake’s sacred status. Yet Cadmus’ oVence in killing the snake uncannily mirrors the paradox of Agenor’s iniquity in ordering his son to Wnd Europa or stay exiled. Once more, a man stands at the conjunction of contradictory ethical claims, Cadmus like his father caught between pietas and scelus. But this time one of the claims only becomes visible as breached: Cadmus learns too late that his vengeance for his men’s death oVends the snake’s divine patron. The obscure voice belatedly foretelling Cadmus’ retributive metamorphosis points to a peculiarity in the structure of the law that governs Thebes. Thebes’ law (an idea that includes the often mysterious unwritten set of prohibitions and injunctions that govern her citizens’ fates) is a form empty of content. It enjoins upon its subjects an absolute duty to follow its injunctions; there is, for example, no amelioration for Cadmus merely because he had good intentions, or for his just life and just rule afterwards. Yet these injunctions are unknowable except as already violated. This empty but implacable form of the law visits its consequences not only upon Cadmus but also upon Actaeon, Semele, and (more gently) upon Tiresias. Actaeon oVended Diana by stumbling unwittingly upon her bath (3.141–2, 175–6); Semele innocently asked for an embrace from her lover Jove that she could not survive (287–8); both are killed. Tiresias of Zeus says’ (æe ‰ ºªØ ˜Ø , Bacch. 1333), whereas Ares appears as the saviour who will eventually convey them to the Fields of the Blessed (Bacch. 1338– 9). However, a long lacuna precedes this prediction; it is just possible that the missing lines contained a reference to Ares’ wrath. Apollodorus oVers no explanation as to why Cadmus and Harmonia change into snakes, but has Zeus convey them to the Elysian Fields (ApB. 3.5.4); Hyginus states that Ares destroyed Cadmus’ children out of anger at his snake’s death, and may imply—given that he mentions Cadmus’ and Harmonia’s transformation into snakes—that they also owe their transformations to this cause (Fab. 6). However, he does not say so explicitly. It must be noted that, since Ovid precedes both Apollodorus and Hyginus by nearly two centuries, the mythographers’ evidence as to what versions the Roman poet may have known is open to question. 46 As far as I am aware, the single exception is Edgar M. Glenn (Glenn 1986), who blames Cadmus for not inferring from the snake’s monstrous size and the wood’s virgin nature that he was encroaching on sacred territory. His remark bizarrely assumes that Cadmus ought to have carefully studied the conventions that governed the Metamorphoses before colonizing Boeotia.

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ignorantly struck a pair of copulating snakes and was transformed into a woman (though he regains his gender by the same act several years later, 323–31). All these stories describe the arc of unwitting transgression and iron punishment characteristic of the Theban most saliently absent from Ovid’s cycle—Oedipus. Though Ovid silently banishes Oedipus from his Thebes, he yet compels Cadmus and his fellow Thebans to act out again and again the conceptualization of law that governs Oedipus’ doom. To be sure, other characters in the Metamorphoses suVer, often at the hands of the gods, often arbitrarily; however, relatively few of these punishments accrue to transgressing completely unpredictable taboos, visible only as trespassed. Only two clear examples exist outside the Theban cycle, Dryope transformed into a tree after plucking a Xower that hides the nymph Lotus (9.326–93) and Ocyrhoe become a horse after prophesying Achilles’ future (2.635–75).47 Yet these two are isolated instances, each singular in its book. Ovid uniquely clusters in his Thebes a number of tales structured on the Oedipal principle that fault can only appear in retrospect. Cadmus killing the serpent, Actaeon seeing Diana naked, Tiresias striking the copulating snakes, all fall into this category. The same kind of trap eventually closed upon Ovid himself. Augustus relegated him to Tomis in 8 ce, ostensibly on the grounds of having published the Ars amatoria twelve years earlier. However, Ovid’s exilic poetry partly blames his exile upon an oVence against Augustus whose nature he will not specify. This oVence he represents in the same terms with which the Metamorphoses excuses Actaeon’s crime: it was a mistake, not a crime of intention.48 To the degree that the Metamorphoses’ representation of such juridical pitfalls foreshadows Ovid’s banishment, the poem reveals just how accurately it reXects imperial Rome as another city (re)born into empty law. But I defer fuller discussion of this point until, in the next section, I have 47 The Xood in Metamorphoses 1 that destroys humanity for the fault of Lycaon alone might also qualify, because (as I have noted above) it is never entirely clear how humans so oVended Jove. But again, this is an isolated incident within the text. 48 Scite, precor, causam (nec uos mihi fallere fas est!) / errorem iussae, non scelus, esse fugae—‘I beg you, be aware (for it is not right for me to deceive you) that a mistake, not a crime, was the reason for my banishment’, Tr. 4.10.89–90. On Ovid’s evaluation of Actaeon’s transgression, see n. 52 below.

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laid the foundation for understanding the juridical inanity under which Thebes labours. Thebes’ diabolical law reXects and intensiWes the force of its originator. Both Thebes’ law and Agenor as its Pe`re jouisseur pose a set of self-contradictory commands. The contradiction of Agenor’s order to ‘Wnd your sister or do not return’ accrues to himself, the commander, as he oVends against pietas in the very act of conforming inXexibly to its injunctions (3.5). In Thebes, the gods’ implicit injunction to the artless doomed magniWes and distorts this inconsistency, so that the paradox now accrues to the command itself: ‘obey a prohibition whose content you cannot know in advance’. Ovid’s representation of Theban law reveals it as the ultimate instantiation of impossible demands, an arc that stretches from the internal contradictions of pietas to the gods’ jesuitical traps. Before this side of the law, we are all always guilty.

V IRG IN A N D MO N S TE R Though a number of stories within the Theban cycle illustrate this empty law, Ovid was at pains to mark one as most fully mirroring the story of Thebes’ foundation and elaborating the principles that govern its origin. I have already mentioned the repeated landscape features that Wgure both in Cadmus’ and Actaeon’s fate. But the story of Actaeon’s encounter with Diana also repeats the narrative sequence of transgression that Cadmus’ encounter with the snake established: an intrusion upon maiden territory and a censured vision constitute trespasses of a prohibition that only becomes visible ex post facto.49 Apollo directed Cadmus to follow a heifer who nullum passa iugum curuique inmunis aratri (‘has never suVered the yoke and is free from the curved plow’), and to found his city wherever she rested (3.10–13). This virginal beast led him to a virgin land, unsettled by human beings. There he found the spring where the serpent dwelt in a wood ‘untouched by the axe’ (3.28–34). The snake’s

49 Barkan (1986: 42–3).

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association with purity belies its malignity, yet killing it earns Cadmus punishment and censure for staring at the snake (3.97–8). Diana also punishes Actaeon for accidentally intruding upon chaste territory; her pool is ordinarily remote from trespass (3.157). Assuming that he has seen her naked, she contemptuously challenges him to tell of that forbidden sight, when his transformation will make it impossible: nunc tibi me posito uisam uelamine narres, / si poteris narrare, licet (‘now you may say that I have been seen by you with my clothes oV—if you can say it!’ 3.192–3). As Diana reproduces for Actaeon his grandfather’s Wrst bitter taste of Boeotia, she also mirrors Cadmus’ serpent-enemy.50 The snake was an object of terror and visual fascination, beautiful and repellant at the same time: it shimmered with gold and Xaunted a crest, its eyes glittered with Wre, but its body swollen with poison housed triple tongues and three rows of teeth (32–4). So, too, does Diana’s sinister majesty visually dominate her encounter with Actaeon; the camera’s eye of the narrative focuses on her form, barely noticing Actaeon until he becomes a stag.51 Maidenhood personiWed associated with maiden space, she bathes in a secluded pool, like the serpent. She overawes and destroys the trespasser—as the snake does Cadmus’ men, and nearly Cadmus himself. In punishing the unwitting oVence, Diana’s retribution against Actaeon resembles the mysterious god’s threat to Cadmus; the god’s threat in turn mirrors Agenor’s menace to his son. The numinous voice forecasts Cadmus’ transformation, implicitly foretelling punishment for an act that ipso facto the divinity deWnes as a crime. In turn, the voice that foretells retribution both mirrors and reWnes the logic of Agenor’s parting injunction to Cadmus, because it retains sadistic implacability while removing choice. In theory, 50 Barkan infers the parallel between Diana and the serpent on the grounds that the goddess is ‘placed in the center of, once again, a locus amoenus’. He does not elaborate the other details that point up the resemblance (Barkan 1986: 44). 51 By the end of the Diana-Actaeon story, the reader cannot oVer a single physical detail to Xesh out Actaeon’s portrait, where by contrast she can describe what weapons Diana doVed to bathe (javelin, quiver, arrows, 166), what clothing the goddess was wearing (a palla, 167), how her hair was arranged for the bath (bound up in a knot, 170), what her relative height was compared to her attendant nymphs (she was taller by a head, 181–2), what colour suVused her face when rage at Actaeon’s intrusion possessed her (the red of a dawn or dusk, 183–5).

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Cadmus might have found Europa, as Agenor demanded, but he cannot ex post facto choose not to have killed the snake. Diana repeats this turn of the screw by also making the law’s demand unknowable except as denied: Actaeon cannot know that he is in danger of violating her implicit requirement—‘do not (say that you have) see(n) me naked’ (192–3)—until he has already trespassed against it.52 But more than simply repeating the signiWcant details of Cadmus’ tortured role in Thebes’ early history, the Diana-Actaeon story expands the consequences of the Father’s cruelty into the realm of the erotic. When Diana steps into the grove and before our eyes, the narrative’s focus plays over the goddess’ ‘maidenly limbs’ (164) and ‘loose-Xowing hair’ (169); both are poetic erotic topoi, as Bo¨mer notes.53 At the same time, the poet carefully catalogues each nymph’s separate service to Diana—catching her cast-oV garments and weapons, binding up her hair, unfastening her sandals, dipping urns and pouring the water over her naked body (165–72). Borrowing from the conventions of erotic poetry, the details of Diana’s elaborate toilette represent her as a desirable puella, while at the same time emphasizing her dominance over all others. Organizing all around her in a relationship of subordination and ministration to her physicality constructs Diana, not just as an object of desire but as the object of desire. Yet she attains this status by being unattainable. Just how do erotic desire and a virgin goddess meet conceptually? They meet as another face of Pe`re jouisseur, of implacable necessity wedded to Wxed impossibility, but embodied in a particular shape—that 52 Ovid underlines the parallel with Cadmus’ conundrum posed by the empty law by insisting on evaluating Diana’s execution of Actaeon within the conceptual parameters appropriate to law. He thus represents the youth’s death not simply as the consequence of godly pique but as an index of the law’s functioning. The Ovidian narrator carefully weighs Actaeon’s intention, for example, concluding that his oVence is not a scelus (142) but a Fortunae crimen (141). He also assesses whether the boy’s punishment Wts his trespass, reporting that some censure Diana’s retribution as ‘more violent than is just’ (uiolentior aequo, 253), while others praise it as ‘worthy of her strict virginity’ (dignamque seuera / uirginitate, 254–5; I have more to say about this division of opinion below). These statements focus the reader’s attention on the criteria that pertain to judging formally a criminal oVence, and to judging its judgement. 53 Bo¨mer (1969–86: 1.494–6).

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of the fatal Lady of courtly love.54 The forbidden Lady is one expression of the vicissitudes of desire, which Ovid articulated in his own Amores, Heroides, and much of the Metamorphoses (Echo’s vain pursuit of Narcissus restages them just outside his Thebes, 3.370–401). Ovid consistently dramatizes erotic desire as a study in impossibility: the lover pursues, addresses, and celebrates the beloved, but can never really be said to possess the object.55 Such utter futility combined with universality conforms to Lacan’s idea of the sexual non-relation, whereby the very condition of desire’s possibility makes it unfulWllable. Desire springs from the subject’s constitutive internal division that drives him or her to seek (vainly) a putatively lost wholeness.56 The lover ultimately longs to be recognized as a subject by another subject, unconditionally. But since this request can only be directed to another divided subject, an unconditional answer is impossible, a ‘yes’ not haunted by doubt and unrepresented desire.57 The forbidden Lady palliates this impossibility by converting it into prohibition: the sexual relation no longer appears non-existent, but forbidden instead. But turn over this coin, and you will Wnd the Father’s ‘No!’ The Father’s law ultimately reXects the subject’s internal scission, insofar as the desire that motivates submission to prohibition also propels erotic pursuit. The wish for wholeness pursues recognition, but whether by fulWlling a lover’s demands or by bowing to the protocols of cultural institutions, whether by striving to be ‘beloved’ or ‘good

54 As Lacan himself acknowledges when he is articulating the psychoanalytic signiWcance of courtly love (Lacan 1986: 182–3/1992: 153). 55 As Hardie has observed and brilliantly elaborated (Hardie 2002b: esp. 30–1). 56 The subject is principally split by language—self-evident in the fact that the subject who speaks is never exactly coincident with the subject of the speech. The person who says ‘I laughed’ may or may not be laughing at the moment she speaks, and thus obviously diVers from the subject, the ‘I’, of the sentence (Cf. Lacan 1973: 127–30/1981b: 138–42), where Lacan illustrates this concept by means of the Liar’s Paradox). But the idea of a primordial lack in human beings as the motive force behind desire can be traced back to the ancient world; its most magisterial articulation is Plato’s Symposium. In this dialogue, Aristophanes’ tale speaks of an aboriginally divided being that perpetually seeks its lost other half (Symp. 189c–93d). On a more rareWed plane, Diotima’s speech outlines the principles of substitution and displacement that palliate original need; with philosophy’s guidance, these principles can lead the desiring subject to the ideal Good (Symp. 201d–12a). 57 See Janan (1994: 28–31, 66–8), for a discussion of the Lacanian texts relevant to the idea of the sexual non-relation.

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citizen’ or ‘model child’, makes no essential diVerence.58 Yet the nadir of the prohibition these various kinds of requirements embody is the empty law before whom we are all unworthy and all proleptically condemned—the law of Pe`re jouisseur. The Lady’s version of this unconditionality appears not merely as a simple ‘no’, but as arbitrary, impossible demands. Diana instantiates this particular face of woman that mirrors the Father of Enjoyment’s iron exactions and combines it with fatal fascination. Not by accident does Actaeon replay his grandfather as a Cadmus ensorcelled by the inexorable.

TH E LA DY VA N I SH E S Given that Diana appears as the quintessential object of desire (thus presumably the cynosure of all eyes) and that the oVence she speciWcally punishes is being looked at, it is odd that no one—not we the readers, the narrator or Actaeon—can be said unambiguously to have seen Diana’s alluring form directly. The only person the text notes, without qualiWcation, as seen is Actaeon himself, blundering into the grove (uiso . . . uiro, 178–9). Once glimpsed, though, we abandon his viewpoint entirely, and behold nothing but nymphs wailing, beating their breasts, running to cover their mistress. We do not again focus on Diana until the nymphs have already surrounded her. At this point in the story, a passage describes the blush that suVuses her face ‘when seen without her clothes’ (uisae sine ueste Dianae, 185). Indeed, she is without clothing, but not without her nymphs as a visual barrier. Though technically naked, she is completely surrounded by her compact crowd of shorter attendants; Actaeon (and we) can still see her only from the neck up (178–82). Her sarcastic injunction to Actaeon to boast of having seen her naked seems to presume he did so, yet it is not clear what he saw in all the Xurry. In point of fact, all she challenges him to do is to boast of having seen her naked, a quite diVerent oVence, and something she might expect from a young man’s bravado rather than his actual experience. But did he even see her face clearly? Certainly we do not: 58 As Lacan indicates in his essay, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’ (Lacan 1966: 793–827/1977: 292–325).

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at the precise point where we at last focus on her visage, it disappears from view. Ovid dissolves her countenance into a picture of the sun striking clouds, describing thus the color of Diana’s angry Xush.59 This reluctance to look at Diana directly logically concurs with her status as Woman, that is to say, as the socially-constructed idea(l) of the feminine. The erotic puella in whose image and likeness Ovid models Diana expresses one aspect of this collective conceit. The tale’s odd coyness in describing the goddess slyly suggests that she is just as much an object of fantasy as the puella. Ovid had already implied Diana’s chimerical status in his description of her bath, insofar as its erotic power depended on the mediation of several layers of intertext, poetic conventions from his own and others’ work. He pressed into service these allusions to literary hypostases of woman in order to represent the bathing Diana’s allure. Ovid’s alternately conventional and elliptical descriptions of Diana indicate that woman can never function ‘in herself ’, but only when approached by indirection. Looked at straight on, her allure disappears, as it does when the text baZes our Wnal sight of the icily angry Diana. Instead of describing a beautiful face, Ovid gives us only the inhuman: clouds and sun (183–5). Bo¨mer rightly perceives that the comparison underlines Diana’s inhuman terror: ‘Der Zorn der Go¨ttin ist fu¨rchterlich; seine Gewalt darzustellen, dafu¨r eignet sich nur der Vergleich mit den Elementen’ (‘The anger of the goddess is appalling; in order to depict its force, only comparison to Nature is suitable’).60 Face to face with Diana, Ovid gives us, not beauty, but the elementally pitiless and the subject’s destruction. However awful Ovid’s vision of Diana may be, constructing her on the model of the Fatal Lady indicates her fundamental status as a fantasy who materializes the antagonisms internal to Thebes. She does not originate the corruption that plagues Thebes, she is merely its symptom, mirroring as she does the Father of Enjoyment.61 The antagonisms she betokens originate (ultimately) in Agenor’s command to Cadmus and the aberration in the Father’s function 59 Ovid shows no similar qualms when representing how Daphne looks to Apollo: he goes over every part of her body, albeit not in graphic detail (1.497–501). 60 Bo¨mer (1969–86: 1.498). 61 ‘Tout abri ou` puisse s’instituer une relation vivable, tempe´re´e, d’un sexe a` l’autre ne´cessite l’intervention—c’est l’enseignmentent de psychanalyse—de ce me´dium qui

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that it represents. As outlined above, the (proto-)Theban environment has already evidenced the Father’s corruption before Diana ever appears in Ovid’s narrative, in snakes that magically grow and shrink, and movable, anachronic, too-perfect landscapes. Thebes sprouts freaks of nature as a logical corollary to a fundamental disturbance in its Symbolic. In so doing, Thebes again evokes its implicit twin-city: in his own day and afterwards, Ovid’s Rome produced ever more extreme monstrosities in the spectacles of the arena and the slave monster-market. Carlin Barton has linked the Romans’ growing fascination with the grotesque to the growth of imperial power, to the consolidation and reWnement of an autocracy that eventually became as absolute as Agenor’s, Diana’s, or Jove’s, imputing to itself divine status.62 But even the Wrst principate reduced all Romans to the status of subjects and clientes, though citizens of a nominal republic. Like Barton, but in greater theoretical detail, Miller has argued that the chasm opened between emperor and citizens—an incommensurability like that between human and god— made nonsense of previous ideological categories for understanding the world and one’s own place within it.63 From this traumatic event issued freaks, of which the Metamorphoses’ humans degraded into animals by godly whim were but the Wrst earnest. Though Diana by her own hand demotes Actaeon from human to deer, her status as a fantasy only obliquely visible seemingly makes her rendezvous with the prince an encounter ultimately missed. Yet whether either sees the other directly, Diana and Actaeon do mirror one another (as Leonard Barkan and John Heath note);64 the semblance and diVerence they embody is crucial to Ovid’s unfolding Theban narrative. Both goddess and young man are hunters, and, being tired, both seek relief in the cool wood. However, their direct encounter engenders antagonism between the two, drawing a diVerence between them by turning Diana into violating subject, Actaeon into violated est la me´taphore paternelle’, ‘Any shelter in which may be established a viable, temperate relation of one sex to the other necessitates the intervention—this is what psycho-analysis teaches us—of that medium known as the paternal metaphor’ (Lacan 1973: 247/1981b: 276). See also Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s discussion of Wlm noir as an exfoliation of the consequences of the paternal metaphor failing (Zˇizˇek 1992a: 149–69). 62 Barton (1993: esp. 85–90, 176–89). 63 Miller (2004: 12). 64 Barkan (1986: 45); Heath (1991 esp. 240–1).

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object. Diana, whom the narrative constructs as Actaeon’s double, is also his rival and deadly enemy.65 This is not so remarkable: the two have simply played out the kind of disastrous encounter between god and mortal in a secluded place the poem often describes.66 What is remarkable is that Diana returns Actaeon to himself by destroying him: in the Wrst moments of his transformation, when his own dogs snap at his heels and his death is certain, he can declare unequivocally—but only silently—Actaeon ego sum: dominum cognoscite uestrum! (‘I am Actaeon: acknowledge your master!’ 230).67 This savage denouement sketches a third conWguration of the logical consequences from the Father’s devolution into Pe`re jouisseur. In the face of the Father’s ‘No!’ deteriorating into senseless, impossible demands (originating with Agenor, repeated and ampliWed in the serpent’s divine patron, and culminating in Diana), the subject cannot sustain himself, his integrity. Rather, he splits in two, into himself and his double, with whom he engages in antagonistic struggle. Rather than Wnding his lost wholeness in addressing the other, he encounters only the most grotesque and painful recapitulation of his constitutive internal division— Actaeon-deer.

JUDG ING DIANA Ovid’s summation of the judgement rendered on Diana’s grisly vengeance against Actaeon weaves together the separate strands of law and the erotic, the Father and the Lady, that we have traced through Actaeon’s story. We are told: 65 The struggle between doubles brieXy sketched between Diana and Actaeon will be fully realized in the encounter between full cousins of Cadmus’ line, Bacchus and Pentheus. 66 Cf. Segal (1969). 67 Barkan rightly points to this line as evidence of Actaeon’s self-recognition, but claims that here Actaeon has ‘for the Wrst time’ a sense of his own identity, that he ‘discovers himself ’ (Barkan 1986: 45–6). I Wnd no evidence for this primacy, nor do I believe as he does that Actaeon’s ‘identity has been multiplied’. To say that ‘the transformation has turned Actaeon into subject and object at once, into victim and human perceiver’ is merely to articulate some of the antipodes into which the subject’s aboriginal internal division splits him.

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rumor in ambiguo est: aliis uiolentior aequo uisa dea est, alii laudant dignamque seuera uirginitate uocant; pars inuenit utraque causas. (Ovid, Met. 3.253–5) Opinion is divided: to some the goddess seemed more savage than was just, others praise her and call her worthy of her exacting virginity. Each group Wnds reasons.

The starkness of the second opinion seems inexplicable (how did poor startled Actaeon’s accidental intrusion threaten Diana’s virginity?), until the next line supplies the perspective from which it is articulated: sola Iouis coniunx non tam culpetne probetne eloquitur, quam clade domus ab Agenore ductae gaudet et a Tyria conlectum paelice transfert in generis socios odium. (Ovid, Met. 3.256–9) Only Jove’s wife does not disclose whether she blames or approves; she rejoices in the destruction of the house derived from Agenor and she transfers the hatred drawn from her Tyrian rival [Europa] to the other members of the family.

The sudden focus on Juno’s animadversions reveals that the debate over the justice of Diana’s act transpired among the gods. Not by accident does Ovid set the debate in the divine sphere, the realm of the absolute: Diana’s apologists have banished the human considerations of motive and intent that might otherwise soften their judgement. But Juno’s ad hominem evaluation of Actaeon’s fate reveals the dark underside of this absolutism: her joy in his death is equally willing to banish considerations of motive, intent, or even agency in selecting objects of retribution (little diVerence to her that Actaeon had nothing to do either with Europa’s or Semele’s connections to Jove). Her revealed cruelty casts suspicion on the unarticulated motives of her punctilious peers. Juno is the unlovely truth of the laudatores Dianae. She is also the uglier side of Diana’s relation to the Father. Diana’s numinously alluring presence—the riveting dawn of her anger that paralyzes Actaeon, the fascination of her seuera uirginitas that banishes all other considerations from her evaluators’ minds—masks the Father,

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in the sense that she obscures the subject’s traumatic relation to the Father and to what really underpins His law. In order to centre a uniWed polity, the Father must remain ignorant of the dark licentiousness and cruelty that ultimately inform his judgements, the sadism behind the pious severities of the gods that Juno’s vindictive ruminations throw into relief. His law must be presumed universal and neutral in order to function; its commerce with enjoyment—with the irrational and libidinous, epitomized in Pe`re jouisseur—must remain hidden. Diana, however eye-catching, merely measures the degree to which the Father has been fatally indiscreet in Theban history. And for that matter, in Roman history, as Ovid himself had reason to rue. After the Metamorphoses, the exiled poet revisited the DianaActaeon story. He chose the Wgure of Actaeon to represent himself as an unwitting oVender in Tristia 2’s long apologia to Augustus. The logic of this allegory casts the emperor in the roˆle of Actaeon’s punisher, Diana (Tristia 2.105). Actaeon’s reappearance in the poetry of a subject banished at his emperor’s command highlights what is already implicit in the Metamorphoses’ story: the perverse conundra of the (Theban or Roman) citizen before Pe`re jouisseur’s law, and its seductive, destructive contradictions embodied in Diana. In Tristia 2, Augustus (like Diana) assumes the place of the elegiac puella, of the quintessential object of desire. Ovid (as exclusus amator—and the ‘locked out lover’ pose has particular bite, here) pleads with the emperor to remove the barrier that stands between the poet and his desire—reintegration into Rome, the one civic community in which Ovid desires membership. Augustus has, in fact, become Rome: in Ex Ponto 2.8, when Ovid gazes upon the emperor’s image, he ‘seems to see Rome’ (uideor mihi cernere Romam, Ex Ponto 2.8.19)—imperialism with a human face.68 But far from being a mere nullity who holds the state together by allowing its citizens to recognize their various selves in the emperor’s blank neutrality, it is now the task of the citizen to discover and to reXect the emperor’s desire. Tristia 2.121–38 remarks that Augustus was merciful to Ovid because he let the poet live and spared him a Senate trial. As Miller has noted, the consequences of such a trial would likely have been worse, because:

68 Green (1994: 326); Miller (2004: 218).

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the very fact of a public trial on charges brought by Augustus would have required all who wished for the princeps’ favor to demonstrate their loyalty by demanding the harshest penalty. Is the poet’s thanks ironic here or insincere? How would we know the diVerence: for it is the very denial of the due process of law owed a Roman citizen that constitutes the emperor’s mercy.69

The very fact that summary judgement could be construed as clemency shows the extent to which Rome’s law has revealed itself as Thebes’ empty law: the accused is always already guilty, whether judged by emperor or Senate. ‘Justice’ consists of the Father’s human instruments scrambling to magnify his displeasure, so as to visit it mordantly upon his oVender. Ultimately, Ovid’s Thebes is less a place where the paternal function that founds the law and the polity has gone awry than where our ignorance of its true nature lies in tatters. In that sense, it mirrors the end of Vergil’s Aeneid, which founds Rome upon an act that seemingly resolves the internal tensions of pietas, at least momentarily. Aeneas avenges his young comrade Pallas by killing Turnus, the boy’s murderer and Aeneas’ only rival for control of Italy. Vengeance and virtue join hands in the sacriWce: furor returns but imperium sine Wne is vouchsafed. Ovid traces the same coherence between these antipodes of pietas and furor, to radically diVerent ends. Ovid forces upon us the knowledge that the conXict between bloodlust and duty that characterized mythic Thebes, on the one hand, and both contemporary and embryonic Rome, on the other, is no conXict at all. They are only the recto and verso of our traumatic encounter with preSymbolic chaos, an encounter in which the Father—Agenor, Aeneas, Augustus—is our (illusory) shield. At the heart of the city that law built lies chaos, cruelty, and malign enjoyment. 69 Miller (2004: 229).

3 ‘I get around’: sadism, desire, and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal Paul Allen Miller

‘How’s a fellow supposed to get around in Rome?’ ‘Where’s the action?’ ‘Nights can be dangerous. Watch out for muggers!’ ‘Things aren’t like they used to be.’ ‘In the good old days, the streets were safe, a man could speak his mind, and sex was easy.’ ‘Even a moral reformer like the princeps should appreciate that.’

Roman elegy and satire are the two urban genres par excellence. Each of them is self-consciously staged in a cityscape. Their pages teem with the life of the urbs aeterna: drunken young men crooning by torch light outside their beloved’s windows and beating up passersby, dinner parties with exotic dishes and sexual escapades, temples that double as singles bars, and the bustle of the street crowded with slaves, lictors, courtesans, bauds, and pimps. It is no wonder that both formal verse satire and erotic elegy have no precise analogues in the Greek tradition—they are genres that presume both a large cosmopolitan urban environment and a tradition of personal libertas (freedom of speech): a combination not to be found in Athens, Alexandria, Pergamum, or Jerusalem.1 Yet the genres themselves, while they are profoundly related in their urban thematics, their manifest ironic even satirical aims, and their subjective modes of presentation, ultimately portray very diVerent 1 Miller (2005: Introduction).

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ways of navigating through the city. In this essay, I will examine four representative passages, two each from satire and elegy. At the same time, I shall examine two from the beginning and golden age of Augustan rule, and two from its autumnal period and the age of empire. In the process, I shall chart both historical changes within these two discourses as well certain generic constraints. My speciWc focus will be the logic of images and our enjoyment of them: how do we get from one scene to the next as we trace our way through the city in our respective genres? Lacan and Bakhtin will provide my theoretical framework. According to Lacan the basic movement of desire is metonymic. Within the Symbolic world of the speaking subject, we slide from one substitutive satisfaction to the next. Each signiWer is enchained to the following one in a movement that is at once purposeful and theoretically inWnite.2 My concentration in this essay will be on limning the speciWc nature of that metonymic displacement within these poems’ urban landscapes. Where Gilbert Highet may have claimed that the satirist cries, ‘I am a camera, I am tape recorder’ (1962: 3), what Lacan shows is that the movement from one image to the next, far from being a simple mimetic reproduction of the Roman street, always traces a movement of desire. When Juvenal moves from the image of Mevia bare-breasted Wghting a boar to Crispinus’ Wngers sweating under the weight of his enormous ring (1.22–30), he is charting a series of speciWc investments of the reader’s enjoyment in these images. We slide from mingled titillation and disgust to revulsion and jealousy, with a Wnal overlay of sadistic attraction to the Wlth of bodily Xuids when they are combined with the gaudy displays of the nouveaux riches. The same is true when Tibullus moves from calling for more wine so that he can pass out in the tavern where he presumably lies to addressing plaintive pleas to his mistress’s cruel door (1.2.1–6).3 The transition is neither logical nor mimetic, but instead follows the path of desire’s dreamwork through the urban streets, from drinking bout to paraclausithyron. My contention is that the movement of desire in satire is essentially sadistic; the desire of the reader is led from one scene of grotesque 2 Lacan (1991: 201–2; 1986: 143, 340); Janan (1994: 117); Fineberg (1991: 10, 158). 3 See Miller (2002: ad loc.).

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degradation or uncrowning to the next by an enchainment of scenes of debasement. The moral and political order aYrmed therein acts as a screen for the pleasure derived from the scene itself, even as this ideological screen is reinforced and draws libidinal energy from the violence inherent in the scenes of degradation. The movement in elegy on the contrary follows the dictates of the pleasure principle. It is essentially carnivalesque.4 Each uncrowning, each momentary setback, each ironic swerve, each evocation of death leads to the next symbolic substitution, the next promise of satisfaction. Elegiac anarchy is found in precisely this relentless metonymic progression from one scene of pleasure and its frustration to the next. Bakhtin through the opposition he draws between the satiric and the carnivalesque allows us to think about these two diVerent movements of uncrowning and overturning without collapsing them one into the other.5 Lacan, in contrast, through his careful investigation of the metonymy of desire and the logic of enjoyment allows us to sketch the way in which these movements proceed through both the structure of the poem and, hence, through the structure of the urban environments they engage. Together these two diVerent, but I would argue ultimately complementary, theoretical constructs allow us to see how the genres of satire and elegy, each in turn, solicit the reader’s enjoyment and yet deploy it in fundamentally diVerent ways. Thus while elegy will be only a short-lived genre, dependent upon an open space of renewal in which the reader’s enjoyment can continually be reinvested through the Wgure of an elegiac subject who is both inside and outside the structures of elite power,6 satire will ultimately prove itself far more adaptable to the cityscape of empire. Where elegiac carnival assumes an inherent multiplicity of power and the possibility of an alternative to the discourse of the centre, satire’s sadistic enjoyment can conWne itself, as Juvenal notes, to talking about the dead (1.170–1). The indictments it issues not only do not require the possibility of reinvestment and renewal, but positively cathect with its lack. When the streets are Wlled with foreigners, mountebanks, and ambitious parasites (Horace 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.9; Juvenal 1 and Juvenal 3), when the emperor’s wife is a whore (Juvenal 6), when all that the 4 Bakhtin (1968; 1984: 125–7, 160–4); Miller (2001). 5 Bakhtin (1986: 135). 6 Miller (2004).

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promise of a late-night visit from some little hotty produces is a soiled night shirt (Horace 1.5), diYcile est saturam non scribere (Juvenal 1.1.30). My Wrst example will be Horace, Satires 1.2. In this poem, Horace plunges us into the teeming streets of Rome to illustrate two ostensible propositions: (1) moderation in all things; (2) easy sex is to be preferred to dangerous adultery. The street-corner moralizing, however, is little more than a cover for an investigation of the seamy side of Roman life as Horace introduces us to whores, quacks, talking penises, as well as raped and raping slaves. This passage illustrates well, on the cusp of the principate, the inherent sadism of satire. Next is Ovid’s Ars amatoria. The passage we have chosen instructs the reader on the best places in Rome to Wnd a girl. Most of the buildings mentioned in it were erected by Augustus or his entourage and, as the Res Gestae (4.19–21) makes clear, the princeps regarded his building projects as a point of pride. He could not have looked favorably upon Ovid choosing those same buildings as the site for a programme of seduction in direct contradiction to his own programme of moral reform. Nevertheless, we slide from one site of seduction to the next with an ironic smile. The streets here are much the same as those described by Horace, but the structure of the reader’s enjoyment is fundamentally diVerent. That diVerence, I would submit, has less to do with that between the beginning and the apex of the principate, or with the inherent temperaments of the two poets, than with the diVerence between the satiric and the elegiac genres. My third passage, also from Ovid, is found in Tristia 2. Here Ovid revisits the same landscape described in the Ars. His ostensible point is to prove that the Ars is no incitement to adultery. Yet, in context, the argument quickly comes to associate Augustus and the geography of Rome with the very vice the princeps had been the Wrst in Rome to legislate against (lex Julia 18 bce). The centralization of focus and the consequent restriction of the ironic Weld of play in which Ovidian elegy was accustomed to sport, in turn, foreshadows the genre’s own impending doom as a vital artistic endeavour. My Wnal passage is the description of the perils of travelling through Rome at night in Juvenal 3. Here we move from falling tiles to night slops dropped on the poor pedestrian’s head, to a direct mugging. The ostensible purpose of this tale of humiliations is to

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prompt moral outrage, but the rhetorical enchainment of images prompts a smile of sadistic pleasure instead. The empire of satire and the empire of elegy are reminiscent of each other, but while Ovid longs for return from his exile, Umbricius cannot wait to leave Rome.

B EYO N D T H E P L E A SU R E P R IN C IP L E : H OR AC E , S ATI RE S 1.2 Satires 1.2 has been entitled ‘Moderation in All Things’ and ‘In Moechos’.7 This duality in title reXects not only the shifting focus of Horace’s diatribe but also a certain asymmetry between the putative message of the satire and an exorbitant or eccentric position it constructs for its audience’s enjoyment. In point of fact, this is not a poem about the middle way at all, but one structured around the almost instantaneous transition between extremes. The majority of the poem consists of a series of vignettes taken from the Roman street that narrate (on the denotative level) an oscillation between what Freud would call the pleasure and the reality principles— between the desire for pleasure and the attempt, in the name of pleasure, to avoid pain. Nonetheless, the discourse of the satirist always exceeds the stable terms of this oscillation, in spite of the commentators’ best eVorts to assure us otherwise. Thus, Rudd in his admirable study cites a stable Platonic subtext for Satires 1.2 and 1.3 in the Lysis’ claim (214C) that ‘Bad men are never the same and never consistent’. He then asserts as the corollary of this principle that the Horatian aurea mediocritas or ‘golden mean’ is the stable foundation of 1.2’s condemnation of sexual excess. The rhetoric of the satire, however, constructs a position that by its very nature violates the bounds that are intrinsic to its message.8 As Freudenberg memorably puts it, ‘what is the ‘‘horny mean’’ between matrons and slaves that every idiot’s penis, if it could talk . . . would tell him to be happy with?’9 The

7 Rolfe (1962: ad loc.); Anthon (1886: ad loc.). 9 Freudenberg (2001: 16).

8 Rudd (1982: 23–7).

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reader is at once plunged into, titillated, and revolted by a teeming world of Xute girls, adulterous matrons, castrated adulterers, and slaves who are both raped and raping. Our desire is solicited and violated, and then from the safety of our reading couches we are solicited to desire that very violation as the substance of our enjoyment. We slide metonymically from one enormity to the next, as the very possibility of moderation, of a Wrm delineation between pleasure and pain, between same and other, is consistently and radically called into question, all in the name of a vanishing middle ground, which, as represented by the voice of the elder Cato and the satirist himself, would stand for the very possibility of a normative Romanitas.10 There is, then, something excessive about this satire, a kind of grotesque protuberance that Wgures the unintelligibility of desire and the way(s) in which it always exceeds the terms that seek to frame it. As such, that very excess is simultaneously also Wgured as a lack, a kind of black hole of intelligibility, that in its necessary violence and negation serves as an icon of death in the guise of, or better yet at the very moment of, the erotic.11 The journey beyond the pleasure principle is a journey through pleasure to the drive for its transgression and negation. Poem 1.2 is not in the Wnal analysis a poem about balance but about its impossibility, or rather the simultaneous necessity of a balance and its beyond. Take Tigellius, for example, generous to all the Xute girls and mountebanks that swarmed the Roman street. His opposite number, in order to avoid the charge of prodigality, will not give a penny to a cold and hungry friend: Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici, mimae, balatrones, hoc genus omne maestum ac sollicitum est cantoris morte Tigelli. quippe benignus erat. contra hic, ne prodigus esse dicatur metuens, inopi dare nolit amico, frigus quo duramque famem propellere possit.

10 On the genres of satire as predicated on the ‘submerging of the great signiWers of Romanitas’, see Larmour (2004: 58). 11 On the satiric grotesque and its link to death, see Miller (1998), as well as Keane’s gentle corrective (2002: 14–15).

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The fraternal orders of Xute girls, quacks, panhandlers, actresses, and acrobats, this whole class is saddened and aggrieved by the death of the singer Tigellius. Indeed, he was generous. In contrast, this fellow, for fear that he be famed a spendthrift won’t give a destitute friend the means to fend oV cold and hard hunger. Horace, Satires 1.2.1–6

Here, we have mirror opposites, the miser and the spendthrift, each in pursuit of pleasure and either social recognition (benignitas) or the evasion of social pain (prodigalitas). But there is something more: Tigellius is dead. Amidst the Xute girls and peddlers of quack remedies, the low pleasures of the teeming street, there is a grotesque corpse, and yet that corpse forms part of our enjoyment. The humour doesn’t function without it, and the pairing of Tigellius with the anonymous miser’s amicus, on the verge of perishing from cold and hunger, collapses without the inert presence of Tigellius’ dead body. We move from Xute girls and the sexual pleasure for which they stand to the low comedy of street performers, actresses, and others whose social station leaves them open to physical intimidation, sexual appropriation, and death: each image is oVered in turn for our delectation and ostensible ediWcation (dulce et utile, Ars poetica 335). This structure is repeated throughout the satire. No real hope for moderation exists, since, as Horace observes, people in pursuit of the pleasure principle inevitably overcorrect in their encounter with the reality principle: uitant stulti uitia, in contraria currunt (‘when fools avoid vices, they run into their contraries’) (24). Throughout 1.2, a set of alternatives is presented, but always with a moment of excess, a moment of obscene material enjoyment that cannot be folded back into the simple logic of alternating contraries and an ideal middle point. Nil medium est (‘there is no mid-point’, but also ‘there is nothing in the middle’) (1.2.28). Maltinus wears his tunic too low, his opposite number too high. What ‘sticks out’ is precisely the inguen obscenum (‘obscene groin’ 1.2.25). The search for moderation leads us to images of albi cunni (‘white cunts’ 1.2.36), anal rape (1.2.44), talking penises (1.2.68–72), and an admonition to rape a slave boy or girl whenever a raging erection threatens (1.2.116–18). Adultery leads to endless woe. The one who eschews adultery destroys his family fortune, and hence reputation, on expensive call girls

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(1.2.53–62): malum est ubicumque (‘danger is everywhere’ 1.2.63). Rome is a city experienced through extremes.12 In each case, the manifest or denotative lesson of ‘nothing to excess’ contains a surplus of sadistic enjoyment for the audience. The presence of that enjoyment cannot be accounted for within the explicit terms of the satire. The alternation between extremes that characterizes the pursuit of the object of desire as portrayed within 1.2 does not include a position for the voyeur whose enjoyment rests not simply on a smug self-satisWed moralizing, but on a simultaneous surrender to the thought of the rough pleasures portrayed therein (e.g., ‘grinding other men’s wives’ 1.2.35) and their equally rough punishment (e.g., ‘broken doors, barking dogs, and all-but violated buttocks’, 1.2.128–33). Moreover, it is that very separation of the position constructed for the audience, its exorbitant or excessive nature, that is in turn foundational of it experiencing that pleasure. The audience thus Wnds itself situated in a position oddly homologous with the excess of which satire is both a chronicle in its depictions and an exemplar in its rhetoric: that is, in a position that is ultimately beyond the pleasure principle, the realm of death. The homology of these two positions, of satire and its audience, in turn, is what allows both the construction of the Rome of satire and the possibility of that Rome’s functioning as an object of enjoyment for the very audience whose life it claims to depict. The sadistic nature of this structure of alternation and excess, which characterizes both the rhetoric of the satire and the place of enjoyment constructed for its audience, is less surprising than at Wrst it might seem since, as Freud tells us and Lacan conWrms, the reality principle is not so much opposed to the pleasure principle as its reXex, a kind of mirror image.13 The closed system of the pleasure and the reality principles must logically posit its own beyond—what Freud labels the death drive—if it is not to collapse into a meaningless self-identity that can neither bring itself into being nor come to rest. Only a position beyond these pendulum swings could be separate, could Wgure the negative inert presence that is the death drive, the metonymic presence of Tigellius’ corpse, and the icon of the 12 I owe this happy formulation to Diana Spencer. 13 Freud (1961: 1–5); Lacan (1986: 42–3).

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audience’s sadistic enjoyment, and thereby constitute a position that makes that enjoyment possible. Freud’s theory of the death drive is less about some dubious principle of Thanatos, which is forever opposed to Eros,14 than about the structural necessity of an irreducible moment of excess that both ‘disturbs the harmonious circuit of the psychic apparatus run by the ‘‘pleasure principle’’ ’ and is ‘inherent to it’ as the third position logically necessary to construct it and the reality principle.15 As Zˇizˇek observes, it is precisely the impossibility of Wnding a stable centre, a mean between the demands of the pleasure principle and its own reXex, the reality principle, that the death drive Wgures. This exorbitant or excessive moment founds the oscillation between the two principles but can never be Wgured within it except as a moment of radical negation that the closed circuit of the pleasure and reality principles must both presume and deny.16 They must presume that negation because, as Aristophanes recognized in the Symposium, without lack, without a certain primal violence, there can be no desire and hence neither pleasure nor its deferral. And yet those same principles must deny that negation, for it represents that which cannot be strictly conceived of as either the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. To return to the example of Aristophanes’ myth, the moment of separation itself does not Wgure in the pursuit of the Androgyne’s object of desire except as the repetition of its ground and the antithesis of its Wnal consummation. Death, the beyond of the pleasure principle, then, is the undiVerentiated excess, the black hole that swallows drive, desire, and the structure of diVerences upon which individual identity is founded. It is the enjoyment of that violence, and the pleasure of annihilation, that ultimately threatens the pursuit of pleasure itself. This is the sadistic pleasure of Cronenberg’s Crash, Madame ButterXy’s suicide, and Kill Bill’s choreographed violence. To return to Zˇizˇek’s explication: the psychic apparatus Wnds a sort of perverse pleasure in this displeasure itself, in the never-ending, repeated circulation around the unattainable, always missed object. The Lacanian name for this ‘pleasure in pain’ is of course enjoyment (jouissance), and the circular movement which Wnds 14 Pace Marcuse (1966). 16 Derrida (1980: 304–5).

15 Zˇizˇek (1992a: 48), his emphasis.

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satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object, the movement whose true path coincides therefore with its very path toward the goal, is the Freudian drive.17

Or to borrow Horace’s more Laconic terms, Nil medium est; malum est ubicumque (‘there is no mean; danger is everywhere’). Satire 1.2’s deadly moments of sadistic excess constitute not only what many commentators have observed to be the coarser aspects of the poem (e.g., talking penises) but also the sites where direct appeal is made to the audience’s presumed desire (e.g., Xute girls, brothels, slave boys and girls). This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the image of matronae (‘respectable married women’) as albi cunni (‘white cunts’), which is at once erotic and inherently violent: for, as John Henderson observes, the reduction of woman to cunt presumes ‘sexual relations on the model of (depersonalized) ‘‘violent assault’’ (117, impetus)’.18 The same violent and reductive gesture occurs later in the satire when Horace advocates choosing a sexual partner in the same way as kings purchase horses (1.2.86–9). The horse is wrapped from top to bottom, lest its beauty distract the buyer from noticing a lame hoof. Yet, what is the buyer of love to inspect if not the ‘beautiful haunches, head, and neck’ of his potential partner. It is no lame hoof he fears, but a dysfunction in the organ suited for the task at hand. Woman thus becomes reduced to the sexual oriWce and its potential penetration, only now with a bag on her head. To understand the structural function for the satire as a whole of this passage describing the albus cunnus, it needs to be cited in full: nil medium est. sunt qui nolint tetigisse nisi illas quarum subsuta talos tegat instita ueste; contra alius nullam nisi olenti in fornice stantem. quidam notus homo cum exiret fornice, ‘macte uirtute esto’ inquit sententia dia Catonis, ‘nam simul ac uenas inXauit taetra libido, huc iuuenes aequum est descendere, non alienas permolere uxores’. ‘nolim laudarier’ inquit ‘sic me’ mirator cunni Cupiennius albi. There is no middle ground. There are those who refuse to touch a woman whose ankles are not covered by the matron’s sewn-on Xounce. This other 17 Zˇizˇek (1992a: 48).

18 Henderson (1999: 186).

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guy, however, won’t touch a woman who is not standing in a stinking whorehouse. A certain man of note was greeted by the divine sentence of Cato, when he left the whorehouse, ‘let you be honored in manhood/virtue! For it is proper that young men come here, and not grind other men’s wives the moment savage desire dilates their veins’. ‘I don’t want to be praised in this fashion’, says the admirer of a white cunt, Cupiennius. Horace, Satires 1.2.28–36

In the commentaries, this passage is normally passed over quickly with an embarrassed comment that cunnus is synecdoche (‘part for the w/hole’) for mulier (‘wife’). Prostitutes, we are told, dressed in black, and the stola of the matrona was white. That’s all there is to it. We clear our throat and go on. Nonetheless, it must be recognized that on the denotative level the commentators have it right. Otherwise the opposition has no point. Moreover, Cupiennius’ desire is precisely synecdochal. The Xounce signiWes the pleasure that Cato’s whorehouse reduces to a cunnus. The reduction of the mirum to the utile is precisely the enactment of Freudenberg’s ‘horny mean’, which constitutes pleasure as a form of sadistic enjoyment, and which is then portrayed through Cato as coterminous with Romanitas itself. The logic of images points toward an unassimilable excess that is simultaneously an absence or hole, an albus cunnus. We begin with the assertion that there is nothing in the middle—nil medium est—an evocation of lack and negation, that calls to mind Irigaray’s memorable: ‘horror of nothing to see’.19 Lack and absence are moments of death and castration in the phallic economy and yet also the objects of desire per se as Wgurations of the insertive oriWce.20 We then modulate into an evocation of erotic desire as either social violation—adultery with matronae, which as lines 41–6 make clear leads to death, castration, and/or anal rape at the hands of slaves—or fetishistic attachment to the Wlth of the fornix (‘whorehouse’). This opposition is then juxtaposed against the godlike Cato’s invocation of the fornix itself as the site of virtue and manhood’s proper exercise, 19 Irigaray (1985: 26). 20 My formulation here is deliberately generic, since, as Horace makes clear more than once in the satire and, as ancient sexuality recognized perhaps more freely than we other Victorians, the anal and the vaginal are from this perspective functionally indiVerent.

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as opposed to the phallic pounding of other men’s wives.21 The structure of opposition and excess remains consistent throughout. The emphasis is less on moderation than on the swelling of the veins by taetra libido (‘foul pleasure’) foreshadowing lines 116–18’s incitement to the rape of one’s domestic slaves, tument tibi cum inguina, num si/ ancilla aut uerna est praesto puer, impetus in quem/ continuo Wat, malis tentigine rumpi? (‘when your loins swell, if a houseborn maid or boy is nearby on whom an immediate assault may be made, do you prefer to burst with an erection?’). Thus Cato’s godlike admonition to moderation and the respect of traditional matrimonial rights becomes, on the latent level of image if not on that of manifest denotative content,22 an invitation to the audience to endorse a moment of phallic enjoyment and aggression as manhood or uirtus: implicitly portrayed as either the reeking sweat and semen of the bordello or the grinding, like a mill stone (permolere), of other men’s wives. The bustling Roman streets thus simultaneously become the site of sadistic pleasure and the moment of that pleasure’s negation: the lack, the void, which phallic pleasure must both enjoy and desperately try not to see. In this context, to gloss the immediately following cunni . . . albi (‘white cunts’) as metonymy for women dressed in white is clearly inadequate. As the alliterative cunni Cupiennius makes clear, it is the desire (cupiens) of the cunnus per se that is in question, and serves simultaneously as the poetic, erotic, and spatial complement to the venae inXatae (‘dilated veins’) of Cato’s anecdote, even as the image itself ostensibly represents the opposite of the ater cunnus (‘black cunt’) that haunts the fornix. Lest there be any doubt on the necessity of maintaining the literal reading of cunnus, even while accepting its metonymic status, the poet makes the case clear when he imagines Fausta’s lover Villius addressed by his own prick. It is self-evident that the cunnus in question in lines 69–71 is not to be understood Wguratively: numquid ego a te/ magno prognatum deposco consule cunnum/ uelatumque stola mea cum conferbuit ira? (‘Do I demand from you a cunt born of a consul and wrapped in a stola when my passion roils?’). 21 Rudd (1982: 31). 22 See Freud’s opposition between manifest and latent content in The Interpretation of Dreams (1965).

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The cunnus of line 36 is albus (‘white’), in the Wrst place, because of the skin of its bearer. The image evokes not clothing but the Xesh. It is only secondarily, once we ask why this cunnus should be any whiter than those of the fornix, that the image of the stola (‘long white dress’) comes to replace or, better yet, metonymically stand for the Xesh that surrounds the vaginal opening. Of course, even then, the explanation of the meaning of albus is not necessarily reduced to a reference to the stola, it may equally connote the colour of native Italic skin, as perceived by the Romans, in contrast to that of darker skinned slave prostitutes from Africa and the east. Yet, the contrast between black and white, which the commentators correctly if reductively perceive, is in fact present in the albus cunnus itself: for the vaginal opening, within a phallic erotic economy, is imaged as pure negation.23 It is the lack at the heart of the feminine, nil medium est, which in its very excess, its very inability to be positively represented within the phallic Imaginary, becomes the site simultaneously of sadistic violence—woman reduced to hole—masculinist erotic desire, and fear of that very excess/lack on which sadistic pleasure rests. The albus cunnus is an icon of death every bit as much as Tigellius’ corpse among the Xute girls.24 In the end, Horace’s Rome is awash in cunts. They beckon and threaten, swallow and devour. The Rome of Cato and Satire 1.2 consists of a constant unsettling alternation between phallic assertion and sadistic negation, excess and absence, the part for the w/hole. Contrary to the satire’s explicit message of moderation, then, the audience is invited precisely to enjoy the sadistic aggression that Freud sees as an externalization of the death drive, of that which is ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. In this way, the satire enacts its own motto, nil medium est (1.2.28) in the most radical sense. Not only do people not observe the mean (aurea mediocritas, Odes 2.10.5), but ultimately there is no mean—only an implicit appeal to the audience’s own moral superiority and the frisson of an encounter with death in the guise of eros, ironically presented as a balance between extremes.

23 Moi (1985: 132).

24 Compare Irigaray (1974: 306, 425).

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A R S A MATO RI A 1. 6 1– 2 2 8: TH E A M O RO U S F E A ST In many ways, Ars 1.61–228 is an exact parallel for Satire 1.2. Each poem provides a tour of the erotic pleasures available on the Roman street, Wrmly recalling these two genres’ urban setting. Each adopts an ostensibly didactic tone and mode of address and applies them to a subject matter that undercuts the seriousness of the speech genre to which they pertain and thereby produces much of the audience’s enjoyment. Lastly, each consists less of a coherent argument or narrative than of a series of vignettes, sliding metonymically from one to the next, like so many beads on a string. Yet, it is also hard to imagine two more diVerent poems. In Horace each new image represents another impossible excess that leads—and not just metaphorically—to destruction, violence, rape, and death. The acceptance of this sexualized violence is in fact the condition of our enjoyment. In Ovid, however, as we move from location to location in the new cityscape of Augustan Rome,25 we are oVered a seemingly limitless sexual cornucopia. There is something for every taste: Seu caperis primis et adhuc crescentibus annis Ante oculos ueniet uera puella tuos; Siue cupis iuuenem, iuuenes tibi mille placebunt: Cogeris uoti nescius esse tui. Seu te forte iuuat sera et sapientior aetas, Hoc quoque, crede mihi, plenius agmen erit. If you should be captured by the prepubescent and growing, an actual girl will come before your eye; Or if you desire a young woman, a thousand will please you: You won’t be able to make up your mind. Or perhaps a ripe and wiser age pleases you, This cohort as well, believe me, will be quite plentiful. Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.61–6

Ovid’s Roman street, like Horace’s, teems with the pleasures of what Bakhtin referred to as the lower bodily stratum.26 But where 25 On the structure of Ovid’s progress, see Myerowitz (1985: 97) 26 Bakhtin (1968: 368–436).

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in Satire 1.2 there is always a corpse haunting this fevered world of adulterous matrons, sexual professionals, and oriental quacks, Ovid’s Rome lies stretched out before us like a veritable sexual smorgasbord. From soup to nuts, there is more than any man can choose. Yet the Ars, as it pursues the metonymy of desire, does not simply pass from one momentary satisfaction to the next. It punctuates that movement with a series of carnivalesque uncrownings and overcomings. True, Ovid does not feature the grotesque degradation that Bakhtin sees as the hallmark of Rabelais and the medieval carnival tradition. His is the more muted carnival of the rococo, a genteel and euphemistic world in which the gaping albus cunnus of satire has no place.27 Nonetheless, the force of the sexual in the Ars is felt most powerfully in the movement of a carnivalesque overturning that at once subverts the monologic seriousness of the existing structures of power, and, at the same time, reaYrms the continuing vitality of the Roman street as the site of our desire. It is an ambiguous and never purely destructive movement, one that does not destroy but seeks to relativize and revivify: [Carnival presented] a special decrowning type of structure for artistic images and whole works, one in which the decrowning was essentially ambivalent and two-leveled. If carnivalistic ambivalence should happen to be extinguished in these images of decrowning, they degenerated into a purely negative expose´ of a moral or socio-political sort, they became singleleveled, lost their artistic character, and were transformed into naked journalism.28

Carnivalistic ambivalence is precisely the eVect of Ovid’s ironic uncrownings in the Ars. Augustan power and policy are not subjected to a searching critique or even directly lampooned, but instead the literal structures of Augustan power, its cityscape, are transformed into the site of a sexual feast that cannot help but subvert its studied image of serene virtue. Thus immediately after the catalogue of the types of women available to suit the connoisseur’s demanding palate, Ovid departs on a tour of the city, in search of the Wnest and freshest dainties to be had. The Wrst stop is the portico attached to Pompey’s theatre (1.67–8). 27 Bakhtin (1968: 119); Nell (2001: 165–8).

28 Bakhtin (1984: 126).

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Pompeius Magnus had built the theatre in 55 bce at the height of his political power. It was later restored by Augustus. Its reduction to a site of seduction prepares the way for what is to follow.29 The next stop is the portico oVered by Octavia, the sister of Augustus, to the memory of her son (1.69–70), Marcellus, Augustus’ heir apparent. There may be no corpses on Ovid’s street like Horace’s, but death has not been banished. Rather it too—like the monuments which seek to stave oV its sting—is uncrowned and relativized. On the one hand, though all Rome may shine with the monuments Augustus has erected or refurbished (Res Gestae 4.19–21), one need only look at what happened to the great men of the past, like Pompey, or to the fate of those seemingly destined to be great in the future, like Marcellus, to recognize the momentary and ephemeral nature of all such structures of power. On the other hand, this is no cause for mourning or melancholia, for what is eternal in the Ars is precisely the pursuit of Xeeting pleasure. If power’s ephemeral nature were not clear enough from the Wrst two examples, the next two drive the point home. Indeed, there is a clear progression in the order through which we move from portico to portico based on the rank of the monument’s builder. We start with that of a fallen republican general and would-be autocrat, progress to one erected by the sister of the princeps, and end with the Porticus Liuiae (1.71–2), and the portico of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine (1.73–4). These last two were built by Livia and the princeps. They tie Augustus’ building programme with his project for moral reform, since it was Livia’s role in imperial propaganda to serve as the ideal spouse. Together, they represent a refoundation of the city. This is the project of Augustus’ immortality: Octavian, the new Romulus, becomes Augustus, and refounds the urbs aeterna, leaving marble and bronze where once stood wood and clay, and peace and piety where once was war and decay. The city itself was to be refashioned as the princeps’ reXection so that as one moved through space and time one moved through a space deWned by the imperial family, its temples, its porticoes, its festivals. Roman life was being re-formed so that romanitas and the princeps should become one and eternal.30 29 Hollis (1977: ad loc.).

30 Boyle (2003: 14, 42–3, 176–7).

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Yet in Ovid’s hands the immortal becomes the immoral as each monument in turn becomes a site of seduction. Moreover, as the metonymy of desire slips from one locus to the next, Livia—the emblem of wifely Wdelity—is replaced by the statues of the Danaids who line the portico of the temple of Apollo. nec tibi uitetur quae priscis sparsa tabellis porticus auctoris Liuia nomen habet, quaque parare necem miseris patruelibus ausae Belides et stricto stat ferus ense pater. Don’t avoid the portico decorated with paintings by the old masters that has Livia as the name of its author, nor that where the granddaughters of Beleus dared to prepare death for their wretched cousins, and their savage father stands with his sword drawn. Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.71–4

These last are the daughters of Danaus who married their cousins and killed them on their wedding night.31 In the blink of an eye, wifely devotion is deftly transformed into homicide, even as the violence and death implicit in the mythic subtext is itself subverted by the ongoing erotodidaxis32 that constitutes the poem’s explicit narrative frame. Authoritarian power and its necessary attempt to raise itself above time to the level of the eternal is thus Wrst subverted by death, and death is then overcome by the force of Ovid’s rococo carnival. It is not, then, that there is no violence in the world of the Ars, but it is instantly sublimated into a moment of erotic playfulness that ironically is dependent in the last analysis on the very ephemeral structures of power it seems to subvert. In point of fact, Ovid’s subversions are unimaginable outside the structures of the principate that make them possible. Ovid’s elegiac Rome is in fact insulated from the potentially deadly consequences of its own carnivalesque uncrownings. The principate has established a simulacrum of republican peace and freedom, without any of the old inconveniences, and this simulacrum in turn is the city in which the praeceptor amoris sports. It is precisely the fact that both Pompey’s death and the image 31 Barsby (1978: 21); Edwards (1996: 24); Wildberger (1998: 40–1). 32 The poet as praeceptor amoris.

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of republican civil slaughter it necessarily evokes have the same weight within the poem as the Danaids’ mythological homicides that allows the metonymic progression of the Ovidian carnival to continue apace.33 Ovid’s subversion of both death and immortality (two sides of the same coin) in point of fact always takes place within the ideological Weld delimited by the principate and its ideology of refounding the republic and promoting moral reform. Every sexy interlude (or reference point on his map) that Ovid suggests drags Augustan morality squarely into the viewer/passer-by’s frame (and frame of reference).34 After the porticoes, Ovid recommends a series of religious rites and temples as places to Wnd amorous adventure (1.75–8). From there he progresses through the forum Iulium and the law courts on his city tour (1.79–88). His attention then turns to the theatres (89– 134), before continuing on to the circus, gladiatorial bouts, and scenes of triumphal procession. He pauses to give a brief history of the foundation of theatrical performances, starting with Romulus’ using them as a ruse to lure the Sabine women. Rome’s very foundation is thus shown to rest on an act of transgressive sexuality. When the right moment comes, Romulus gives the signal and the rape begins. Yet rather than evoking fear and violence, which is nonetheless implicit in the scene and chilling when one stops to consider the implications, the discourse of the poet is that of humour and erotic attraction.35 The couplets glide rapidly from one to the next, giving little time for reXection but moving swiftly from witty aside, to cynical smile, to sly overturning: sic illae timuere uiros sine lege ruentes; constitit in nulla qui fuit ante color. nam timor unus erat, facies non una timoris: pars laniat crines, pars sine mente sedet; altera maesta silet, frustra uocat altera matrem; haec queritur, stupet haec; haec manet, illa fugit. ducuntur raptae, genialis praeda, puellae, et potuit multas ipse decere timor.

33 See Miller (2004: ch. 6). 34 Thanks to Diana Spencer for this happy formulation. 35 Richlin (1992); Murgatroyd (1982: 64–72).

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Thus they feared the men rushing upon them lawlessly. Not one did not change complexion: for while there was one fear, there was not one face of fear. One group tore out their hair, another sat in a stupor. One girl weeps silently, another calls her mother in vain. This one wails, this one falls dumb; this one remains, that one Xees. Having been taken, the girls are led away, a genial booty, the fear itself was able to make many attractive. Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.119–25

The rhetorical oppositions that structure each succeeding couplet provide an initial aesthetic distance that softens this anatomy of fear. The Wnal couplet, however, overcomes the violence of the scene and recuperates it all in the form of wit and sexual fantasy, as fear itself becomes an aphrodisiac. The punning diction reinforces that eVect. The raped/taken girls (raptae) are simultaneously led oV and wed (ducuntur). They become a pleasing booty, but also one connected with reproduction and generation (genialis). Thus Ovid tells us that we too should troll the theatres of Rome, which Augustus has refurbished, looking for women to seduce or take, because Romulus, the princeps’ explicit role model, had established the theatre for just such purposes. In this fashion, the genial cant of the praeceptor amoris rhetorically overcomes the high seriousness of both imperial purpose and traditional Roman history, as well as the violence they imply, even as the desire it names continues to trace its way through the city.

EXILE FROM MAIN STREET: T R I S T IA 2 We shall never know the exact causes of Ovid’s exile to the Black Sea port of Tomis. He lists two, carmen et error (‘poetry and a mistake’ 2.207). The error was something he was not permitted to discuss. He says he saw something that he should have reported but did not. What he saw is a matter of speculation. It is widely believed that he was privy either to one of Julia’s sexual indiscretions or to the intrigues surrounding the imperial succession. Beyond that nothing can be said. The carmen in question, however, is unequivocal. Ovid sets out to defend the Ars amatoria in Tristia 2. As we shall see, he does so by taking us on a return visit to the very sites the Ars lists as

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prime hunting grounds for the amorous rake. Yet these sites now become the proof texts for his argument that the princeps has misjudged the Ars and that it no more leads innocents to vice than do the very monuments of which Augustus himself is so proud.36 Tristia 2, thus, although often known as the Apology to Augustus, can also be seen as a travesty. While ostensibly oVering a humble defence of his life and art, the poet launches into what at times reads more like a parody.37 On one level, the poetic persona appears not to be attacking but praising the emperor, yet, as Claassen notes, ‘excessive adulation and lip-service to the emperor’s ideal of national poetry . . . create an atmosphere of criticism’.38 Still, Ovid never calls into question the legitimacy of Augustan power.39 Rather, he enters into a complex game of competing interpretations with Augustus, one in which the princeps’ own vision of the city is used to defend the poet’s appropriation of it in the Ars, even as the evocation of the Ars serves to carnivalize the vision of princeps. The crux of the poet’s argument is that he is a better reader of the poem, and of Augustus’ city, than is Augustus. But there is a catch, a rhetorical trap. The argument that Augustus has misread the Ars, mistaking an innocent jeu d’esprit for a subversive manual of adultery, is dependent upon accepting the princeps’ reading of the city’s monuments as actual instantiations of Roman uirtus. If, however, the poem is read as a catechism of vice, as it appears Augustus thought, then the very temples and porticoes that feature so prominently in it must be read as monuments to sexual subversion. Either way Ovid wins, but only so long as Augustus is willing to play the game.40 Tristia 2 is, then, both a recantation of Ovid’s earlier erotic career and its ironic vindication. The Wrst two books of the exilic poetry represent as much a continuation of the Amores and the Ars amatoria 36 Holleman (1969: 54); Wiedemann (1975: 270); Claassen (1999: 151, 225); Williams (1994: 202–3); Edwards (1996: 25). 37 Nugent (1990: 244); Kenney (1983: 150). 38 Claassen (1989: 265). 39 Evans (1983: 16–17); Habinek (1998: 151). Boyle (2003: 11) is in fact mistaken when he says that Ovid’s publication of the Tristia inverts the purpose of the princeps’ act. It would have been easy enough to silence the poet if that is what the princeps had wanted. By allowing the poet to publish, the princeps both demonstrated his mercy and publicized the reach of his power. 40 Compare Boyle (2003: 12–13).

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as they do a fundamental shift.41 Ovid in exile is an unhappy lover, an exclusus amator singing his paraclausithyron before the locked door that stands between him and the object of his desire. Now, however, what the poet seeks is not the charms of a docta puella or the thrill of transgression, but Rome itself, the Rome of the Ars and the Amores, a Rome that no longer really exists.42 The passage on which our attention shall focus is Tristia 2.279–96. It covers in condensed form the same ground as Ars 1.61–228. The order and emphases have changed somewhat, but this section of the Tristia is a recognizable recollection of the earlier passage and contains distinct verbal echoes.43 Thus, where in the Ars Ovid begins his erotic city tour with the porticoes (1.67–74), then moves to the temples and law courts (1.75–88), the theatres (1.89–134), the Circus Maximus (1.35–62), and the gladiatorial bouts (1.163–76), before Wnishing with triumphal processions (1.177–228), in Tristia 2 we begin with the theatres (279–80), then move to the gladiatorial bouts (281–2), the porticoes (285–6), and end Wnally with the temples (287–300). ut tamen hoc fatear, ludi quoque semina praebent nequitiae: tolli tota theatra iube: peccandi causam multi quam saepe dederunt, Martia cum durum sternit harena solum. tollatur Circus; non tuta licentia Circi est: hic sedet ignoto iuncta puella uiro. cum quaedam spatientur in hoc, ut amator eodem conueniat, quare porticus ulla patet? quis locus est templis augustior? haec quoque uitet, in culpam siqua est ingeniosa suam. cum steterit Iouis aede, Iouis succurret in aede quam multas matres fecerit ille deus. proxima adoranti Iunonis templa subibit, paelicibus multis hanc doluisse deam. Pallade conspecta, natum de crimine uirgo sustulerit quare, quaeret, Erichthonium. uenerit in magni templum, tua munera, Martis, stat Venus Ultori iuncta, uir ante fores. 41 See Miller (2004: ch. 8). 42 Claassen (1999: 89); Edwards (1996: 118); Bonjour (1985: 14, 16–17). 43 Labate (1987: 97); Williams (1994: 201–2); Cutolo (1995: 59).

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But if I am to admit this [that my poetry can corrupt the innocent], then plays too oVer the seeds of vice: order all the theatres to be closed. How often have the games of Mars given cause for many a transgression, when the sand covers the hard soil. Let the circus be gone; the license of the circus is injurious, there a girl sits next to a man she’s never met. Why is any portico left open, when girls stroll in this same spot where their lovers meet them? What place is holier than temples, let her who is gifted in vice avoid these also. When she will have stood in the temple of Jupiter, it will occur to her, in the temple of Jupiter, how many mothers that god has made. Next, when praying at the temple of Juno, she will be reminded of the concubines that caused this goddess grief. When she beholds Pallas, she asks wherefore the goddess raised up Erichthonius born from crime. When she will have come into the temple of great Mars, your gift Augustus, there Venus stands joined to the avenger, while her husband waits outside. Ovid, Tristia 2.279–96

Just as before the metonymy of desire leads us through the streets of Rome from one erotic encounter to the next. However, these encounters are not to be embraced but simultaneously called forth and denied. If the Ars can corrupt the innocent, then let all of Rome be shut down. The temples themselves, which are holy sites, but also intimately connected with Augustus himself (augustior) become sites of erotic incitement.44 We move from the stories of Jupiter’s numerous dalliances, to Juno’s betrayal, to the story of Erichthonius’ birth from the earth, after Vulcan’s attempted rape of Pallas and premature ejaculation. As we transit from temple to temple the stories get more explicit, the sense of moral outrage stronger. We end with the temple of Mars Ultor, erected by the princeps himself in fulWlment of a vow for having avenged the assassination of his uncle. It features a statue of Venus—goddess of sexuality and patron deity of the gens Iulia— joined with that of Mars in an allegorical representation of the imperial clan’s power in war. Iuncta, however, also has clear sexual connotations and one possible reading has Venus and Mars engaged in an act of sexual congress.45 Vir, moreover, refers to Vulcan, a representation of whom was placed outside. Venus’ husband is 44 Dickinson (1973: 172); Edwards (1996: 24–5); Boyle (2003: 179). 45 Traill (1992: 505–6); Boyle (2003: 179).

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therefore reduced to the Wgure of the elegiac exclusus amator.46 The temple that represents the fulWlment of Octavian’s vow to wreak vengeance upon Caesar’s assassins, and thus iconographically images the legitimacy of his claim to power and hence to the titles of princeps and Augustus, has suddenly been travestied into a standard scene from erotic elegy. The carnival world of the praeceptor amoris emerges triumphant in the very moment of its explicit negation: for what we have here is also a perfectly accurate description of a pious temple erected for the glory of the princeps and his clan. The elegiac interpretation of these statues, Ovid insinuates, could only occur to the same sort of fevered imagination that would be corrupted by reading the Ars.47 The necessity of this double reading, however, reveals precisely what separates the Tristia from the Ars. In the Ars, the metonymy of desire creates its own authorization. The carnivalized overturning of political orthodoxy and authoritarian power are the byproducts of the erotic traversal of the cityscape as whole. In Tristia 2, that same eroticization and carnivalization can only be enunciated through a discourse of denial, that is, through the claim that they were never really there.

J U V E NA L 3 : R EV E N G E O F T H E N E R D S In many ways this whole argument has been constructed around the question of where is the pleasure of the text. On the one hand, the answer is clear: it is in the street, in the depiction of the urban metropolis as the site (sight) of our desire. On the other, our enjoyment is equally structured by and found in the generic and ideological determinations that not only establish the nature of that street and how it is portrayed, but also the form of the metonymic displacements that lead us through these texts’ very diVerent imaginary cartographies.

46 Moreover, coming directly after the evocation of the failed rape of Pallas, it is clear that this uir is less potent than most. 47 Traill (1992: 506–7).

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In Horace, Satires 1.2, we located a sadistic enjoyment that exceeded the pleasure principle’s own relentless metonymic movement of exchange and substitution. There was a positive libidinal investment in the very excesses represented by Tigellius’ corpse, the fantasies of slave rape, anal violation, talking penises, and the black hole of the cunnus albus: all oVered under the guise of praising moderation. Although 1.2 may be an extreme example within the Horatian oeuvre, the satiric street it portrays captures the very pleasure of inXicting pain on both the self and others that the poet tries so hard to distance himself from, and to appropriate in, 1.4, 1.6, 1.10, and 2.1. Our recognition of this sadistic element in satire’s aesthetic should no more be seen as a condemnation of satire than should the recognition of an analogous libidinal investment in the Iliad ’s graphic descriptions of violent death or in the exaltations of a Wagnerian Liebestod (let alone the paintings of Francis Bacon and the novels of the Marquis de Sade). The positing and transgression of the pleasure principle are fundamental moments in the history of aesthetic experience. What Horace’s Satire 1.2 presents is a peculiarly Roman vision of this transgressive moment, which ties it to traditional Roman values, as embodied in a Wgure like Cato, to satire’s own Lucilian heritage,48 and to a strict articulation of marriage as a class and proprietary relation whose prerogatives are to be enforced by either implicit or explicit violence. These are the structures of discourse and power in which we are invited to invest our libidinal energy. In the context of Book 1 of the satires, this invitation is directly tied to Horace’s relation to Maecenas, as well as to an emergent Augustan conception of libertas, and the attempt to retool satire’s discourse of aristocratic self-fashioning so that it can play a meaningful role in the postrepublican reconstitution of the urbs aeterna.49 Ovidian elegy by contrast presents a diVerent set of metonymic displacements. The Ars operates almost completely within the dictates of the pleasure principle. We move from momentary satisfaction to momentary satisfaction. Violence and the pretensions of 48 Knoche (1975: 78). 49 Ramage, Sigsbee, and Fredricks (1974: 4); CoVey (1976: 90–1); Gowers (1993: 126); Miller (2005: Introduction).

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authority are not ignored but sublated into an erotic discourse that knows no outside. Temples, theatres, porticoes, Roman history itself—the temporal and spatial determinants of the city as a semiotic, ideological, and physical space—oVer so many opportunities for carnivalesque appropriation and travesty. With Tristia 2, this same dynamic, while not discarded, is turned inward. The Roman street becomes the scene of erotic overcoming only on the condition that it recognizes the princeps’ power to impose an alternative discourse, to close the very space that made elegy possible. Finally, in Juvenal 3, we return to the sadistic enjoyment of satire. Yet here, as in Tristia 2, the space of that enjoyment has been fundamentally transformed. Where Satire 1.2 presents a discourse of social discipline that frames the space of that enjoyment, Juvenal 3 is the satire of the powerless. Like Tristia 2, it operates within a double space that at once acknowledges its powerlessness and turns that into the object of its satire.50 Yet, unlike Tristia 2, it does not locate our enjoyment primarily in the subversion of authority in the very moment of its acknowledgement, but rather it makes the powerless themselves the object of our sadistic enjoyment. The moment of social criticism in Juvenal is always at least double-edged: on the one hand there is an indictment of the conditions that lead to the abuse of the powerless and, on the other, the discourse itself invites the reader’s libidinal investment in the very misery it so skillfully displays. Finally, this doubleness or duplicity itself is further bracketed by the fact that the speaking subject in Juvenal 3 is not the satirist, but his friend Umbricius who has decided to leave Rome. ‘Juvenal’, however, has elected not to accompany him, thereby leaving open the question of whether we laugh at or with Umbricius.51 The Wnal passage on which we shall be concentrating is 3.232–314 in which Umbricius recounts the typical day of a poor man. We begin with a description of how the sick often perish from want of sleep, owing to the constant noise that Wlls the Roman street at night: wagons Wlled with livestock and construction materials, the insults of their drivers, and those of the sleepless citizens. The rich man in 50 For further comparisons between Satire 3 and the exilic poetry, see Edwards (1996: 112, 127). 51 LaFleur (1979: 164); Winkler (1983: 221, 224); Braund (1996: 230–6; 2004: 165).

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his litter Xoats above the noise and the crowds in the street, like a giant warship atop the sea. . . . magno populus premit agmine lumbos qui sequitur; ferit hic cubito, ferit assere duro alter, at hic tignum capiti incutit, ille metretam. pinguia crura luto, planta mox undique magna calcor, et in digito clauus mihi militis haeret. The crowd which follows in a great line jams into my lower back; one attacks with his elbow, another with the litter pole, but this one hit me on the head with a beam of wood and that one with a small barrel. My shins are covered in mud, and I am trod upon by a giant foot from almost all sides, and the nail from a soldier’s boot is lodged in my toe. Juvenal 3.244–8

We are in this scene invited to pity Umbricius, and we do, but we also laugh. From the dying, sleepless victim of food poisoning to Umbricius’ Wlthy cruciWed toe, we are treated to a slapstick parade of misery oVered for our simultaneous outrage and delectation. Yet this is only the hors-d’oeuvre, the rhetorical main course is still to follow. After a brief description of a street Wlled with the burning braziers of a food distribution by a guild, we return to the image of wagons loaded down with huge slabs of marble trundling through the streets. They sway and totter before crushing a man on his way home for dinner, leaving him mangled beyond recognition as his slaves wait for him, with his simple dinner and bath prepared (254–65). The ways of death are legion; only a fool (ignauus) goes to dinner with his will unmade (intestatus) (272–5). If the wagons don’t get you, a falling roof tile or an entire tenement will. Night slops and garbage pour from the windows. Broken crockery rains down upon your head. If you survive all that, the muggers will get you. A drunken bully, who can’t sleep, tosses and turns in his bed. A nice Wght will put him to sleep. Although young and drunk, our thug is no fool. He avoids the rich man with his retinue and waits for you: . . . miserae cognosce prohoemia rixae, si rixa est, ubi tu pulsas, ego uapulo tantum. stat contra starique iubet. parere necesse est; nam quid agas, cum te furiosus cogat et idem

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Hear now the prelude to this Wght, if a Wght it is when you do the pounding and I am merely beaten. He stands in front and orders me to stop. I have to obey. What are you going to do if a mad man forces you and he’s stronger? ‘Where are you coming from?’ he shouts, ‘whose sour wine and beans have given you gas? What cobbler dines on green leeks and the boiled lips of a castrated ram with you? You won’t answer me? Speak or take a beating. Tell me where you stay; in what synagogue should I look for you?’ Whether you try to speak or withdraw quietly, it’s all the same. They still attack, then, they take you to court for assault. Juvenal 3.288–99

Not only is Umbricius poor, and not only is he beaten, but he is ridiculed for both and dragged before the law. Worse, we know the bully speaks the truth. Our speaker does reek of the poor cuisine he has shared with his friend. He swells with gas from the beans and poor wine.52 The ueruex, the castrated ram whose boiled head he has just consumed, is a symbol of his own impotence; at the same time, it is a colloquial term for a fool.53 Each new rhetorical touch reveals a new humiliation and, at the same time, creates a new cause for laughter. The ultimate outrage: the bully insinuates that Umbricius, the advocate for traditional Roman values, is really a Jew!54 The metonymic displacements in this passage are structurally analogous to those found in the Ars. We move through the Roman street from one site of enjoyment to the next, like so many beads on a string. But where Ovid in the Ars presents an erotic feast and a series of rococo travesties of monumentality, seriousness, and power, Juvenal 3 presents a series of wounds, degradations, and death. We move from the sleepless sickbed to the streets and through the legions of 52 Courtney (1980: ad loc.); Braund (1996: ad loc.). 53 Ferguson (1979: ad loc.); Braund (1996: ad loc.). 54 Courtney (1980: ad loc.); Braund (1996: ad loc.).

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humiliations and dangers to a Wnal explicit violent assault. In this context, the libertas, the freedom of speech that Horace deWnes as the essence of Lucilian satire at the beginning of 1.4 is reduced to an acid self-parody: This is the freedom (libertas) of the poor man Beaten and struck down by Wsts, he asks and prays That he be allowed to go home with a few teeth. Juvenal 3.299–301

The poor man is free to take a beating. Yet, while the irony is sharp, we grimace and laugh, and move on to the next. Roman satire, thus, while remaining the genre that deWnes itself by and through the urbs aeterna, has signiWcantly changed. What in Lucilius began as a form to establish and ridicule deviations from aristocratic norms of behaviour, in Horace was transformed into a more inward-looking genre that sought less to deWne what the city should be than to fashion a self that is capable of thriving in it. With Persius and Juvenal, this same movement toward a progressively more interiorized, self-ironizing construct is accentuated as the city is portrayed less and less as a Weld for competitive aristocratic selfassertion, and more and more as a challenge to the fortitude and integrity of the satirist’s self-construction. The streets of the city, which, in Lucilius, deWned the arena of competitive aristocratic display, in Juvenal have become an ironic allegory of the impossibility of becoming and remaining ciuis Romanus, at least in the sense that Cicero or Cato would have understood it. Yet while the history of satire charts the shift from libertas deWned as the right and capacity to attack one’s political enemies by name (Lucilius), to libertas as the right ‘to go home with a few teeth’ (Juvenal 3.301), the nature and structure of the genre’s enjoyment in relation both to the reader’s progress through the poem and the satirist’s movement through the Roman street remains remarkably constant. As we have shown in the texts cited in this essay, and as still others would corroborate, the satirist traces a path through the city that moves from one scene of excess and debasement to the next. These uncrownings and overturnings, which are the foundation of satiric laughter, are not, however, recuperated into a larger vision of either the pursuit of pleasure or carnivalesque renewal, but rather

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their enjoyment is located in the moment itself, in the image of Tigellius’ corpse or of Sejanus dragged through the city streets (Juvenal 10.56–113). Even in such anodyne and reassuring poems as Horace, Satires 2.6, with its tale of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse, the force of the poem and the focus of our enjoyment is the contrast between Horace’s Sabine refuge and the constant harassment he faces on the streets of Rome as a direct consequence of his relation with Maecenas. The Molossian hounds that chase out the mice from the urban aristocratic mansion at the poem’s end, in point of fact, can be understood to attack Horace himself in his role as retainer, and we take pleasure in that, even as we realize that we, like Horace, are in fact the City Mouse and Country Mouse combined. We too will inevitably return to those same city streets, for their violence, frustration, and titillation are precisely their allure. The same, of course, is true of elegy. The action is on the street. This is why the Tristia necessarily signals the genre’s end. Not only is Ovid now oV the street but also the basic structure of the genre’s jouissance is thereby rendered impossible. For elegiac enjoyment is precisely carnivalesque and, because of that, dependent on the pleasure principle, not its beyond. The elegiac lover moves from one investment and disappointment to the next, but it is precisely the possibility of reinvestment, of substitution, that propels him forward. Thus, the praeceptor amoris of the Ars moves serially from scene of seduction to scene of seduction, and every site of amorous encounter is also a site in the city, a momentary subversion of Augustan high seriousness and of the reality principle in the pursuit of pleasure. By the same token, Propertius and Cynthia move from late-night drunken carousings (1.3) to tearful departures and happy returns (1.8 a and b), to celebrations of the withdrawal of legal impediments to their continued aVair (2.7). The city is the site of their pleasure, politics only an impediment. Tibullus like Horace may dream of the country, but the site of his desire remains Wrmly in the city, and the trajectory it traces passes through the street and always returns before the beloved’s door (1.1, 1.2, 1.5). If, however, we were to pick one poem to sum up the diVerence between the satiric and the elegiac street we could do worse than Amores 1.2, ‘The Triumph of Love’. In this poem, the archetypical

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display of Romanitas, the triumphal procession, is travestied as Cupid’s victory parade. Yet, poem 1.2 is an ironic subversion of all that Augustan ideology wanted to refound, restore, and control55— that is, the deWnitions of uirtus, dignitas, and auctoritas in the new Roman state. It is a moment of almost absolute levity, complete with smiling references to Augustus’ mythological status as Cupid’s cousin (Aeneas being his half brother). Cupid, as he progresses through the heart of Rome, showers the adoring throng with his arrows, wounding each and all: an act of absolute madness if performed by an actual Roman general; a sadistic joke if portrayed in satire (see, for example, Juvenal on Nero’s human party-torches 1.155–7). But this is elegy not history or satire, and Cupid’s arrows deal the wounds of desire. Their bearers will quickly Wnd themselves back on the street in the company of the praeceptor amoris, cruising the temples, and looking for love in all the wrong places. Their wounds are not sadistic but carnivalesque. 55 The right to a triumph had by this time been limited to members of the imperial household, lest anyone else be able to claim a rival or superior auctoritas within the urbs.

4 Holes in the body: sites of abjection in Juvenal’s Rome* David H. J. Larmour

I am but a farce, a satire of stability Trivium, ‘SuVocating Sight’ from the album Ascendancy (2005)

S AT I R E A N D T H E C I TY The Satires of Juvenal have frequently received praise for their vivid depiction of Rome in his era, but what exactly are the sites of Rome presented to us in these poems? Many well-known locations are mentioned en passant throughout the corpus—the Forum (1.128; 2.142; 4.7; 6.58; 7.132; 10.25; 11.50; 16.47), the Capitol (1.116; 6.47– 8; 10.65; 14.91), the Campus Martius (2.131–2; 6.153–4, 524–5, 529) and numerous temples1—so that, when these are combined with references to the hills, the Tiber, the Embankment, and the three main roads out of the city (Flaminian, Latin, and Appian), they give a sense of the topographical highlights of the imperial Urbs, both those * I am most grateful to my co-editor, Diana Spencer, for reading various versions of this paper and oVering many helpful comments along the way; I would also like to thank Paul Allen Miller and Donald Lavigne who gave me numerous suggestions for improvements and additions. 1 Temples and altars: Castor, 14.260; Ceres, 9.24; 14.219; Concordia, 1.116; Fides, 1.113; Fortuna, 14.90; Hercules, 8.13; 14.90; Isis, 6.528–9; 9.22; Juno, 6.48, 386; Mars, 10.83, 14.261; Pax, 1.115; 9.23; Pudicitia, 6.308; Vesta, 4.11; Victoria, 1.113; Virtus, 1.113.

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naturally occurring and those constructed by human artiWce, Xickering in the background.2 Other locations, quintessentially urban but non-speciWc in nature—such as streets and street corners, doorways, dining rooms and bedchambers, baths and gardens, as well as the theatre, the arena and the circus—contribute to the topographical mosaic, but lack the historical and cultural grauitas that accrues to the instantly recognizable visual features of Rome, or lieux de me´moire as they have been called.3 Juvenal’s Satires function as a city-text and their mapping of Rome can be related to modern analogues— such as Joyce’s Dublin, Bely’s Petersburg, Do¨blin’s Berlin, or Dos Passos’s New York—in which a complex interweaving of the particular and the general creates a sense of epic totality.4 What works for space and place also works for the human Wgures that populate it: in his Berlin oil painting, Potsdamer Platz (1914), considered an early masterpiece of urban analysis, Ernst Kirchner foregrounds two streetwalkers, one older and one younger, but both dressed in a ‘ladylike’ manner, and places them on a circular pedestal against a backdrop of anonymous men in suits and the glowing red brick of the railway station (see Fig. 6). The scene is a blend of dark blues and black on the one hand and anaemic whites, greens, and pinkish-reds on the other, with the legs of the men and the triangular pavement jutting out, so that the scene’s sexual suggestiveness is undisguised.5 2 Hills: in gen., 8.239; Aventine, 3.85; Esquiline, 3.71; 5.78; 11.51; Quirinal, 2.133; Vatican, 6. 344; Viminal, 3.71. Embankment: 6.291, 588; 8.43; 16.26. Tiber: 5.104; 6.523; 8.265; 14.202. Roads: Appian, 3.316; 4.117–18; Flaminian, 1.61, 171; Latin, 1.171; 5.55. 3 The term comes from Pierre Nora who (2001: xx) describes it as ‘an eloquent but untranslatable neologism’, the title of his multi-volume work on the construction of the French past through symbols of identity in which national memory has been embodied (rendered Realms of Memory in one translation; see Nora 1996–8, 2001); it is picked up by Gowing (2005: 133), speaking of places in Rome ‘associated with Republican events, activities, and individuals’ and the memories they embody, when viewed from an imperial perspective. 4 See Barta (1996: 98) on Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Alexander Do¨blin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: ‘Collage or montage in these three novels is achieved by using the perspective of the walker. As he roams the streets, he is exposed to the Xotsam and jetsam of urban life—a veritable chaos of phenomena— which, when thrown together, begin to make sense . . . Readers can rearrange the seemingly unconnected pieces of trivia, as they wander back and forth in the text.’ 5 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, 1914. Oil on canvas, 200
150 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie.

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Fig. 6 Ernst Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz (1914). A famous analysis of urban space, capturing its harsh juxtapositioning of anonymity, movement, and sexuality.

Such portrayals alert us to how certain urban locations generate literary and artistic expressions of the troubled consciousnesses they embody: these cityscapes have been witness to violent political turmoil, dramatic social changes, or sudden shifts in the cultural

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identity of their inhabitants. War (and war crimes), invasion, riot, execution, repression, or enslavement leave their marks, not only on the fac¸ades of buildings or the heads of statues, but also on the mental apperception of the city by those who encounter its chronotopic complexity. In this, as in many other realms of Western urban experience, Rome serves as the archetype. In a manner not unrelated to the attempt by other city-texts to capture urban experience from an alienated perspective, Juvenal’s Satires lift the inhabitants of his Rome out of the anonymity of the mass and present them as individuals, at least while the satirical gaze momentarily rests upon them. We see this Wrst when the speaker lists his reasons for writing satire: Cum tener uxorem ducat spado, Meuia Tuscum Wgat aprum et nuda teneat uenabula mamma, patricios omnis opibus cum prouocet unus quo tendente grauis iuueni mihi barba sonabat, cum pars Niliacae plebis, cum uerna Canopi Crispinus Tyrias umero reuocante lacernas uentilet aestiuum digitis sudantibus aurum, nec suVere queat maioris pondera gemmae, diYcile est saturam non scribere. When a soft eunuch takes a wife, when Mevia spears a Tuscan boar and holds the hunting-spears with one breast bare, when one man who made my beard rasp while shaving me in my youth single-handedly challenges all the patricians with his wealth, when part of the Nile mob, when the home-born slave of Canopus, Crispinus, as his shoulder hitches up a Tyrian cloak, waves in the air a gold ring on sweaty Wngers and cannot bear the weight of a larger gemstone, then it is diYcult not to write satire. Juvenal 1.22–30

The spatial sweep of this single sentence is broad: a marriage ceremony, an arena hunt, a barber’s shop, a patrician house, a litter in the street, and the imperial court, all within the city of Rome, in addition to the references to locations further aWeld in Etruria, Egypt, and Phoenicia. All these places are viewed through the jaundiced gaze of the satirist bystander, whose discourse is provoked by the sights and sites of Rome constituted by such anomalies as Mevia or Crispinus,

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or the unnamed spado and barber. The conjunction of person and place in both Meuia Tuscum and Canopi / Crispinus Tyrias makes it clear that these individuals and locations acquire meaning through their relation to each other. In the presentation of these exemplary objects of derision, we can see what Juvenalian discourse focuses on: Wrst, the violation of boundaries (of gender by the eunuch and the ‘Amazon’ Mevia, or of social hierarchy by the wealthy barber and impoverished aristocrats); secondly, the eye-catching parts that reveal the state of the whole (pars Niliacae plebis, Mevia’s bare mamma or Crispinus’ sweating digiti); and thirdly the invasion of space by outsiders (Crispinus the Egyptian uerna in Rome or Mevia the— presumably noble—woman in the arena). On the metapoetic level, this reinforces the violation of literary boundaries which Juvenalian satire enacts as it confounds epic metre and language with ‘low’ themes, deploys the techniques of rhetoric for comic eVect, and imports the conventions of pastoral into an urban setting. All these preoccupations are mapped onto the topography of the city, so that as the collection unfolds many more such Wgures are presented to us in a cityscape made up of an apparently haphazard, yet nonetheless surprisingly comprehensive, collage of the most famous and signiWcant sites of Rome (see Fig. 7). Although their roˆle in the text often makes them more than mere names or allusions providing couleur locale, the absence of much in the way of detailed description of particular locations suggests that this is not where the main interest of the poems lies. It is the spatial and verbal meandering of the speaker which takes centre stage in the satirical performance, as it unfolds against a background of topographical ‘moments’ and Xeetingly recognizable ‘highlights’ of Rome.6 Juvenalian satire, in fact, may fairly be described as a collection of moments and highlights, often closely connected in thematic terms, but only loosely bound by the principles of rhetorical argumentation or narrative structure.7 The fragmented and disjointed structure of 6 On the musa pedestris (‘walking Muse’) of Horace (Satires 2.6.17) and his sermones repentes per humum (‘conversations creeping along the ground’) in Epistles 2.1.251, as well as the fundamentally ‘oxymoronic’ character of satire, particularly in terms of language and style, see Freudenberg (1993: 180–4). 7 Narrative incoherence is a feature of Juvenalian satire, as well as the Juvenalian urbs, for it depends for its eVects on the rhetoric of exemplarity and the cumulative weight of verbal lightning-strikes more than on a storyline. The reader is thus forced

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Fig. 7 Juvenal’s city sites/sights.

each satire—as the thread of metonymic connection is subsumed under a torrent of lurid exempla and pointed observations—is matched by the seemingly random and incomplete image of the city that emerges as the poem progresses. In both cases, however, the design is revealed to be considerably more organized than it might at Wrst appear to be. The satirist-narrator is a prototype of the Xaˆneur, who, as he strays across the physical space of Rome, wanders through an ideological landscape laden with chronotopic signiWcance that might solidify his identity as a subject, but always fails to do so.8 Satire may, in Quintilian’s terms, be ‘ours’, but in Juvenal’s version, even we to look for connections just as much on the metaphoric as on the metonymic level of signiWcation and this too evokes the complex cognitive corridors and the episodes, monuments and landmarks of toponymy and pyschogeography. On the narrow, winding streets see Sat. 3.236–67 (arto / uicorum in Xexu) and cf. Suet., Nero 38.1, angustiis Xexurisque uicorum; Courtney (1980: 186). On the Roman street in general, see the detailed and Wnely illustrated compilation by Gruet (2006). 8 Cf. Barta (1996: 5–12) on the Xaˆneur and the badaud; Duret and Ne´raudau observe (2001: 339) that Rome is ‘made for walking and Xaˆnerie’.

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(Romans) are not our own. For instance, in Satire 6, the search for anchors in traditional Roman ideals of femininity and marriage, to which the matrix of the male citizen’s identity might be securely aYxed, is undertaken at the same time as, and even primarily by means of, a journey back and forth across the public landmarks of Rome (in addition to all the non-speciWc references to arenas, streets, bedrooms, and so on): we move from the rustic caves inhabited by the shaggy denizens of the Golden Age (1–13) to the Aemilian Bridge (32), the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (47–8), the Campus Martius (153–4, 524–5, 529), the Portico of Agrippa (153– 4), the Embankment between the Colline and Esquiline Gates (291, 588),9 the Altar of Pudicitia (308), the Vatican Hill (344), Julius Caesar’s house (345), the Temple of Isis (489, 528–9), the Tiber (523) and the Circus Maximus (582–3, 590). At the end of all the wandering through Roman space and time, and after the encounters with the multifarious examples of female degeneration and wickedness, the reader is brought to a halt in an undeWned space without borders: a zone where women behave like men and men like women; from which virtue and chastity have Xed, leaving only simulacra in their stead; and where marriage oVers nothing more than deceit, dishonour, and death. If every street is going to have its Clytemnestra (Clytaemestram nullus non uicus habebit, 656), then: Where to go? Here in one telling image we have a succinct combination of the violation of boundaries, the extrapolation to the general from the particular, and the irruption of the foreign, which relies upon the eVect of placing a monstrous female from Greek myth in a Roman street, or, more accurately, in every Roman street.10 Thus 9 Cf. 5.153–5; 6.291; 8.43; 16.26. This Embankment was part of the wall of Servius Tullius and is described as follows by Platner and Ashby (1926: 354): ‘this was the agger par excellence, and long after its function had ceased it is spoken of by ancient authors as a prominent feature, and it was indeed the highest point in Rome’. See also LTUR iii (1996: 319–34); Gjerstad (1951). In 5.153–5, it is mentioned in connection with a performing monkey and in 8.43 with a hired weaver. Here, too, it appears that Juvenal is deliberately treading in Horace’s footsteps, since in his Satires 1.8.8–16 the talking Wgtree stump praises the transformation of the Esquiline from graveyard to garden by Maecenas so people can now ‘stroll along the sunny Embankment’ (aggere in aprico spatiari, 14); see also Ha¨uber (1990), esp. 16–36. 10 Cf. 2.8–9: frontis nulla Wdes: quis enim non uicus abundant / tristibus obscaenis? (you can’t trust appearances: for what street is not Wlled with stern-looking perverts?).

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has Rome’s industrial replication of Greek culture come home to roost.11 The wandering of the Juvenalian narrator, and his failure to locate the means of ‘anchoring’ himself, is of course yet another manifestation of the Romans-as-exiles theme which becomes so prevalent in imperial literature.12 My purpose here is to relate our satirist-narrator to another wanderer, the ‘exile who asks, ‘‘Where?’’ ’ in the words of Julia Kristeva, as she introduces the Wgure of the ‘deject’ in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection: Instead of sounding himself as to his ‘being’, he does so concerning his place: ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’ For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose Xuid conWnes—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding.13

In Kristeva’s analysis, subjectivity never reaches a state of stability or permanence and what we think of as the subject is, rather, merely the ‘inside’ that is presumed to exist only because it is encompassed by walls which, however, turn out to be permeable. Because the walls that might enclose the subject are never actually Wnished, or sealed, the experience of subjectivity is marked by intense ambivalence, uncertainty, and even paranoia.14 One ‘defensive tactic’ deployed in response to this threat is the notion of le corps propre, ‘the clean and proper body’, which is what we imagine we are referring to, in our fantasies of selfhood, when we speak of ‘I’ or ‘I myself ’. Yet, the sense of security which le corps propre promises is constantly undermined by the Xows that cross its skin—urine, excrement, vomit, blood, 11 I am grateful to Diana Spencer for this particular turn of phrase. 12 See, for example, Propertius 4.1 and, in general, Dench (2005) esp. Ch. 4, ‘Flesh and Blood’ (222–97). 13 Kristeva (1982: 8). 14 Kristeva (1982: 9) comments ‘We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut the subject oV from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.’

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semen, and so on—and which cause such anxiety.15 The focus on the skin or outer coating of the body as the site of the drama of abjection can be extended to an unease about borders, boundaries, and lines of distinction in general. Kristeva writes that: It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility . . . Abjection . . . is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inXaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you . . . 16

The relevance of this to Juvenalian satire should be quite apparent, populated as it is by the informer (delator), legacy-hunter (captator), seducer (corruptor), and many other such embodiments of the ‘sinister, scheming, and shady’.17 This is a world in which appearances— whether of individuals, buildings, or even names—and their reality do not match: frontis nulla Wdes (‘there’s no trusting appearances’), as Satire 2.8 has it.18 Moreover, the preoccupation of Juvenalian 15 In her discussion of why corporeal waste represents the objective frailty of the symbolic order, Kristeva (1982: 71) posits the following: ‘Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual diVerence.’ There is a Bakhtinian subtext here; Kristeva was his Wrst Western translator: see further Miller (1998), for a study of the ‘boldily grotesque’ in Roman satire from a Bakhtinian perspective. 16 Kristeva (1982: 4). 17 Delator: 1.33; 3.116; 4.48; 10.70; captator : 5.98; 6.40; 10.202; 12.114; corruptor: 1.77; 4.8; 6.233; 10.304. Cf. adulter, 2.29; 6.329, O20, 567; 10.318; adulator, 4.116. 18 The word frons, meaning forehead or countenance, also refers to the fac¸ade of a building and in Sat. 2.1–10 the speaker condemns the ‘Curios who live like Bacchanals’ not only for displaying a manly appearance while acting as cinaedi but also for Wlling their houses with busts of Chrysippus and other philosophers so as to give an impression of respectable seriousness. A similar thought about the deceptive potential of busts in the atrium is expressed in 8.19–20.

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discourse with food and consumption, as well as with various forms of expulsion and excretion—of vomit, urine, blood, and semen, but also of noise, anger, and desire—is evidence of its genesis or inspiration in the defensiveness which deWnes abjection. Satire is the most bodily of all the literary genres, for it places the body at the centre of its system of imagery and confronts its audience with humanity in its most degraded, and degrading, manifestations. In this regard, the nexus which Kristeva establishes among the body, subjectivity and order can, in the case of Juvenalian satire at least, productively be extended to the realm of space: I am thinking here not so much of the distinctions—whether real or imagined—between private and public space, but more of the holes and gaps, the Wssures and leaks in the urban fabric, which are foregrounded in the satirical cityscape.19 We have already noted that the Rome which Juvenal presents is fragmentary and elusive, thanks partly to its mixture of the general and the particular. The speaker in this kind of satire tries to ‘build walls’ to enclose the subject and to enable a recovery of the ‘clean and proper’ body, and does so by mapping his anxieties onto the physical geography of Rome. The Rome which is thus created draws our attention neither to its ‘wholeness’ nor to its ‘wholesomeness’, but to points of ingress and egress, to places of ambiguous status, and to what we might term ‘liminal zones’. It is in these zones, in fact—where the Xuidity of boundaries is most acutely experienced—that the satiric speaker is to be found on most occasions.20

19 There is a general movement from public to private space as the Juvenalian corpus proceeds and the focus shifts from outside space in Satires 1–4 to inside space in 9–14, perhaps paralleling a more ‘inward-looking’ tone than some have detected in the later books; but, by 15 and 16, we are back outside in the public realm, so any such divisions within the collection should not be pressed very far. 20 See Miller (1998: 411): ‘Roman satire, through its deployment of the grotesque, privileges by negation the closed, the solid, and the unWnished over the open, the Xuid, and the boundless . . . On the one hand, the satirist’s pose as the scold of decadence and the maintainer of boundaries requires that such a partition between same and other, masculine and feminine, and good and evil be strictly enforced. This is the essence of the ideology of the bounded form. On the other, the binary logic of the partition itself creates a kind of structural desire for the excluded, without which the boundary, and hence the satirist, could not exist.’

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Although, as already noted, detailed descriptions of particular places are not generally supplied, the ways in which speciWc locations— those sites and sights of Rome most attractive to the satiric gaze—are handled when they do appear are highly informative about Juvenalian satirical discourse’s foundation in the experience of abjection. As an example, we may consider Satire 1, which opens with the speaker being bombarded by the verses of bad poets and deciding to take his own turn as a ‘shouting subject’.21 The Wrst poem of the collection sets out the satirist’s justiWcation for writing, his subject matter, and his ties to his predecessors Lucilius and Horace, the masters of the genre. Lucilius is introduced through his geographical provenance (magnus . . . Auruncae . . . alumnus, the great foster son of Aurunca) and the image Juvenal chooses to characterize his debt to him is topographical in nature:22 he now plans to charge across the same plain where Lucilius steered his chariot (hoc . . . decurrere campo, / per quem magnus equos Auruncae Xexit alumnus, 19–20). This has been taken as referring to driving a chariot either on the battleWeld or in the circus; since at the end of the poem, Lucilius is brought back as an epic warrior (ense uelut stricto quotiens Lucilius ardens / infremuit, ‘whenever Lucilius, blazing as if with sword drawn, roared’, 165–70), the campus is perhaps more likely to refer to the plain of battle. The ambiguity is no doubt deliberate, however; what is most striking is the way writing satire is hereby viewed in terms of traversing space, and this is echoed in the collage of Roman sites which unfolds as the speaker lists the sights of Rome that provoke him to write in his 21 For this term, see Larmour (2004: 73): ‘The ‘‘shouting subject’’ announces himself as fed up with being silent and wanting to shout with the rest, to Wnd a way for his own voice to be heard, but the act of shouting reveals the subject’s alienation from the society in which he Wnds himself enmeshed every bit as much as it does his yearning for inclusion and a sense of wholeness within it.’ 22 The use of alumnus is suggestive, for its basic meaning is ‘foster son’ as opposed to ‘natural-born son’ and this deftly invites us to consider the founder of the genre as somehow always already in exile or lacking a Wxed place of origin. Cf. 6.609 (of Fortuna): suos semper producit alumnos (‘she always promotes her own nurslings’); Propertius 4.1.37: nil patrium nisi nomen habet Romanus alumnus (‘the Roman nursling has no inheritance but his name’).

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chosen genre.23 The inspiration may well be Ovidian: in Amores 3.15.2–3 the poet says that he, the Paeligni ruris alumnus (‘foster son of the Paelignian country’) is coming to ‘the Wnal turning post’ with his elegies (raditur hic elegis ultima meta meis) and imagines a stranger marvelling that little Sulmo, whose walls ‘guard the few acres of her plain’ (quae campi iugera pauca tenent, 12), should have produced such a great bard. He then frames his transition to a new genre in terms of pulling up military standards from the plain (15–16), because pulsanda est magnis area maior equis (‘a broader ground must be pounded by my mighty horses’, 18).24 The Wrst speciWc reference in Satire 1 is to the Flaminian Way, along which a young show-oV races his chariot to impress his girlfriend (58–62): cum fas esse putet curam sperare cohortis / qui bona donauit praesepibus et caret omni / maiorum censu, dum peruolat axe citato / Flaminiam puer Automedon? Nam lora tenebat / ipse, lacernatae cum se iactaret amicae . . . (‘[how can I not write satire . . . ] when someone thinks it’s right to hope for command of a cohort, who has given his worldly goods to his stables, and has used up an entire family fortune, while he Xies along the Flaminian Way at top speed, a boy Automedon? For he was holding the reins himself, while showing oV to his girlfriend in his army cloak . . .’). Here a generic youth of dissolute character, distanced by the mythological name and stigmatized by its Hellenic provenance, is set in a speciWc location, although not at any particular point on this long road, and the scene is given overtones of a race in the circus. The rushing along the road parallels the young man’s pouring out of wealth on the maintenance of stables for racing horses. The circus, itself a locus of massive outward Xows—of money, noise, and bodily Xuids—and a frequent target of Juvenal’s scorn, has in this image spilled out beyond the

23 Braund (1996: 80) goes for the battleWeld; Ferguson (1979: 113) chooses the circus; Courtney (1980: 88–9) speaks of equestrian exercises and epic battleWelds. In 2.131–2, seueri / iugeribus campi (‘[from the] acres of the stern campus’) refers to the Campus Martius, but earlier in 106 campis to a battleWeld (cf. 8.242). Juvenal is perhaps nodding to the disjunction between the ‘original’ identity of the Campus as a place for military manoeuvres and its subsequent transformation into an entertainment zone. 24 Cf. Ars am. 1.39–40; Vergil, Georgics 2.541–2; Prop. 2.10.12; 3.1.9–14; see Courtney (1980: 88–9); Freudenberg (1993: 205–7).

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conWnes of its walls to contaminate the city at large.25 Like the arena, it is a vortex into which everything gets sucked: in 11.197, we Wnd totam hodie Romam Circus capit (‘today the Circus holds all Rome’). Making the Via Flaminia, the formal route through the Campus Martius, into a racetrack, as opposed to a ceremonial highway, is a piquant demonstration of the ‘slippage’ in satire’s urban topography. In literary terms, the ‘boy Automedon’ can be assimilated to the bombastic, self-glorifying poets the speaker yearns to get away from in the opening salvo of Satire 1, and hence to a kind of anti-Lucilius, charging not across the battleWeld Wred by moral purpose, but merely along the Flaminian road for the gratiWcation of his excited girlfriend.26 Immediately after this picture, the satirist places himself in the cityscape, but in a liminal zone, taking notes at the crossroads (63–4): nonne licet medio ceras implere capaces / quadriuio, cum . . . (‘Surely then I am allowed to Wll spacious tablets, in the middle of the crossroads, when . . .’). A parade of fraudsters and criminals follows.27 By positioning himself at the quadriuium, the speaker reminds us that satire is a genre formed by the conglomeration of disreputable exempla and by the conXuence of diVerent literary forms, conventions, and techniques. Some time elapses before the next speciWc reference, when the speaker expresses surprise (113–16) that there is no Temple of Pecunia where ‘deadly’ (funesta) cash could be worshipped, along with— or instead of?— Pax, Fides, Victoria, Virtus (all listed in a single line), and Concord ‘who clatters when her nest is greeted’ (quaeque salutato crepitat Concordia nido). The joke that the Temple of Concord— located at the entrance to the Capitol—now functions only as a bird’s 25 Whether or not the Circus Maximus is always meant whenever the speaker mentions the circus is impossible to say (it clearly is at 3.65; 6.582–3, 588–90; 11.197–8, but other instances are more ambiguous: 8.59, 118; 9.144; 10.37). I am treating the circus here as a recognizable public space, but not necessarily as one speciWc location. In this, it resembles the theatre or the arena. 26 In Ovid, Ars am. 1.3–8, the speaker twice styles himself the Automedon of Love (Automedon dicar Amoris ego, 8) as he embarks upon his poetic love-manual: Amor requires the rule of Ars, just as do nimble chariots (arte leues currus, arte regendus Amor, 4). 27 The word quadriuium is rare and suggests a point of signiWcant conXuence: see Gruet (2006: 111); Juvenal may be echoing Catullus’ in quadriuiis et angiportis (58.4) which is where Lesbia services her multiple male partners.

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nest tops oV a series of sacred sites dotted across the city, including perhaps the Ara Pacis and Vespasian’s Temple of Peace, the Temple of Victory on the Palatine, and no fewer than three Temples of Virtus. These two lines encompass a signiWcant number of locations where, in theory at least, the great Roman virtues, now watchwords of imperial ideology, are embodied in architectural form. The establishment of the cult of Fides, for example, was said to have been initiated by Numa, and there was a temple on the Capitol.28 The elevation of Pecunia to the status of a virtue in contemporary Rome, the satirist suggests, ought to have resulted in an architectural incursion into sacred space which a Temple of Pecunia would represent.29 The central vignette of Satire 1, in which this topographical reference occurs, is the description of the daily dole, or sportula (95–126), which occurs in a generalized setting—the doorstep of a wealthy patron—and thus by extension throughout the city. The distribution of the handout takes place on the limen: nunc sportula primo / limine parua sedet turbae rapienda togatae (‘now the little dole sits on the front step to be snatched by the toga-clad crowd’, 95–6). This scene dramatizes the ‘outsider’ status of the satiric wanderer locked inside a cityscape from which he is alienated.30 After the sportula scene, as the diurnal sequence of events rolls on, we are given a glimpse of ‘the Forum and Apollo the legal expert’ (sportula deinde forum iurisque peritus Apollo, 128): this refers to the Forum Augusti, which according to Pliny HN 7.53.183 contained an ivory statue of 28 See Braund (1996: 101). Platner and Ashby (1926): Pax 386–8; Fides 209; Victoria 570; LTUR i (1993: 316–20): Concord; LTUR iv (1999: 67–71): Pax; LTUR ii (1995: 252): Fides; LTUR v (2000: 149–50): Victoria; LTUR v (2000: 206): Virtus. Platner and Ashby (1926: 345–6) place the Moneta (Caesaris) in the vicinity of the Colosseum, after the removal of the Domus Aurea; there was also an old temple of Juno Moneta, dedicated in 344 bce, of which we hear little after the Republican period (see 289–90). See also Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 128–69). 29 The subject of the unholy association between temples and money reappears in 10.23–5. The adjective funestus, used only here in Juvenal, meaning ‘deadly’, ‘funereal’, and ‘polluted’, makes Pecunia a Wtting cult for a city of corpses (on which see more below). Cf. 8.17–18: . . . emptorque ueneni / frangenda miseram funestat imagine gentem (‘. . . and the buyer of poison pollutes his horrible family with a statue that should be smashed’). 30 Cf. 100–1: ipsos Troiugenas, nam uexant limen et ipsi / nobiscum (‘even the ones of Trojan blood, for they too harass the threshold along with the rest of us’). See Larmour (2004: 65–7) on the sportula scene.

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Apollo (Apollinem eboreum qui est in foro Augusti). The resonances of this site are numerous, including the moment in Horace’s Satires 1.9.78 when the hapless victim of the Bore Wnally makes his escape, ‘rescued by Apollo’ (sic me seruauit Apollo).31 Thus the site oVers the chance for an epiphanic literary intersection with Juvenal’s other important predecessor in the satirical genre, Horace, whom he has already mentioned in line 51. Juvenal’s speaker, then, Wnds his way to the Forum in the footsteps of Horace.32 Some further detail about the Forum Augusti is now supplied (129–31): atque triumphales, inter quas ausus habere / nescio quis titulos Aegyptius atque Arabarches, / cuius ad eYgiem non tantum meiere fas est (‘and the triumphals, among which some Egyptian tax oYcer has dared to inscribe his titles, at whose image it’s certainly right and proper to do more than piss’). The foreign word Arabarches (tax oYcial) intrudes into the midst of the Latin sentence just as the bust of the Egyptian intrudes into the ranks of sculptured Romans. The reference is a clever one: the word Arabarches was used derogatively by Cicero of Pompey (Att. 2.17.3),33 whom Augustus’ predecessor Julius Caesar defeated; and, of course, Octavian, before he became Augustus, defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. A major element in Augustan propaganda involved stigmatizing Antony as a Roman who had gone over to Egypt and planned to move the capital there. The Aegyptius Arabarches also picks up the attack on Crispinus in the opening lines of Satire 1 (26–9). The mention of a speciWc site—the colonnade in which Augustus placed statues of Roman military heroes in triumphal garb—oVers the opportunity for a sarcastic comment on the pollution of an important public space by an inappropriate 31 Braund (1996: 103). On the Forum Augusti, see Platner and Ashby (1926: 220–3); LTUR ii (1995: 289–95). 32 1.51: haec ego non credam Venusina digna lucerna? (‘Should I not think these [vices] are deserving of the Venusian lamp?’). Juvenal, as we have seen, follows in Horace’s tracks elsewhere, including most notably in Satire 3, when Umbricius sets oV along the Appian Way, just as the earlier travellers had on their Journey to Brundisium (Satires 1.5). 33 uelim ex Theophane expiscere quonam in me animo sit Arabarches (‘please Wsh out of Theophanes how the Arabarch is disposed to me’); in 2.9.1 he calls him noster Hierosolymarius (our friend from Jersualem); we do not know if Pompey was included among the triumphatores; see Dudley (1967: 128–9); Degrassi (1937: 8).

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interloper, in this case a nameless foreigner from Egypt, who is also signalling the disruptive force of civil war. The colonnade is discussed by Gowing (2005: 139–45), who comments that ‘image and text here work together to present a fairly Wxed memory of a very select group of men; both media, sculpture and inscription, by their very nature suggest a sense of permanence and continuity’.34 The chief criterion, he says, was ‘simply a signiWcant contribution to the rise or expansion of Rome—in Suetonius’ words, qui imperium populique Romani ex minimo maximum reddidissent, ‘‘those who had raised from least to greatest the empire of the Roman people’’ (Aug. 31.5)’.35 That the choice of which famous Wgures of the Republic to include and which to leave out was determined by political and ideological considerations is obvious; Juvenal’s belittling comment on the statue and inscription of the nameless Egyptian Arabarch is thus at the same time a pointed statement about the priorities of the Roman state in his day. Since the Temple of Mars Ultor dominated the Forum Augusti,36 the speaker’s statement cuius ad eYgiem non tantum meiere fas est can be taken as an instruction for an act of vengeance in keeping with the god’s presence and a reminder of the satirist’s role as punisher.37 The urge to piss—and more—on the intruder’s image is, moreover, a moment of bodily expulsion, fundamental to the experience of abjection, and it has a striking parallel in a scene in Satire 6: I nunc et dubita qua sorbeat aera sanna Maura, Pudicitiae ueterem cum praeterit aram, Tullia quid dicat, notae collactea Maurae. noctibus hic ponunt lecticas, micturiunt hic 34 Gowing (2005: 139–40). 35 Gowing (2005: 143–4). See also Platner and Ashby (1926: 220–3); Dudley (1967: 128–9). 36 As Platner and Ashby (1926: 220) note, this temple, dedicated by Octavian at Philippi pro ultione paterna (Suet., Aug. 29.1; Ovid, Fasti 5.569–78), ‘formed the essential element of the forum as the temple of Venus Genetrix did that of the Forum Iulium’. They add that it was sometimes called the Forum of Mars because of the Temple of Mars Ultor, relying upon schol. Juv. 14.261 (in foro Martis). 37 The vengeance-taking aspects of satire are well-known; see, for example, Kernan (1959); Elliott (1960); Paulson (1967); Robinson (1971); and Rosenheim (1971). At the beginning of Satire 1, the speaker resents not being able to ‘retaliate’ or ‘pay back’ for having been tortured so often (numquamne reponam / uexatus totiens . . . ? 1–2) and that others get away unpunished (inpune ergo mihi . . . / inpune . . . ? 3–4).

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The Sites of Rome eYgiemque deae longis siphonibus implent inque uices equitant ac Luna teste mouentur. Inde domos abeunt: tu calcas luce reuersa coniugis urinam magnos uisurus amicos.38 Go now and ask yourself with what grimace Maura sniVs the air, when she passes the ancient Altar of Chastity; what Tullia says to her, sister nursed on the same breast as infamous Maura. Here at night they stop their litters, here they piss and Wll the image of the goddess with their long sprays and ride one another in turn and prance about with the Moon as witness. Then they go oV home: and you tread, when the daylight returns, in your wife’s urine on your way to see your important friends. Juvenal 6.306–13

By placing Maura next to Pudicitiam (307) and then juxtaposing coniugis and urinam (313), Juvenal emphasizes the profanation of formerly sacred space and the close connection between women and Xuids. The pissing or defecating on the Egyptian Arabarch in the Forum Augusti is imagined in a day-time setting, performed by a Roman male treating the outsider with justiWed contempt; the pissing all over the image of Pudicitia in the Vicus Longus39 by Tullia and Maura takes place at night, unwitnessed by all but the Moon (although the addressee of the morning-after scene is pictured as walking through his wife’s urine), and is an image of female dissoluteness and incontinence (longis siphonibus).40 In both cases, however, the satirist relies for 38 For the text here, I follow Clausen’s (1992) presentation of the lines (with 308 transposed before 307), rather than Braund’s without the transposition; Courtney (1980: 297) notes the confusion and suspects 307 is spurious; see also the discussion in Miller (2005: 284–5). 39 For the location, either the Vicus Longus or Forum Boarium, see Courtney (1980: 297); Platner and Ashby (1926: 433–4); LTUR ii (1995: 295–7), iv (1999: 168– 9), v (2000: 174–5); cf. Livy 10.23.6–10 on the history of Pudicitia Patricia and Plebeia. 40 Cf. 6.425–3, where the aggressive woman who attacks her neighbours is shown binge-drinking before dinner and then bringing it all up again: marmoribus riui properant (‘streams run all over the marble Xoors’, 430). The use of the rare word siphon, elsewhere almost exclusively employed in technical writings on pipes or spouts, in both Latin and Greek sources, is striking; the word collactea Wts in with the general emphasis on liquids in the passage. On Maura, we may compare 10.223– 4: quot longa uiros exorbeat uno / Maura die (‘how many men long-lasting Maura sucks oV in a single day’).

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his impact upon the conjunction of the repulsion generated by bodily outXows and a speciWc location in the Roman public space.41 Even if the wall running around the Forum Augusti, for example, was massive enough to create the impression of a hermetically-sealed enclosure,42 the satiric speaker reveals that the walls which surround Roman public space are in fact porous, unsealed, like the skin which supposedly contains the ‘clean and proper body’, so that there are constant anxieties about both outXows and inXuxes:43 earlier in Satire 1, the speaker attacked Crispinus, who is pars Niliacae plebis (‘part of the Nile mob’, 26), and an unnamed freedman who pushes his way to the front at the sportula, quamuis natus ad Euphraten (‘although born on the Euphrates’, 104). The designation of these two representatives of the foreign Other through the rivers of the regions they come from is not accidental: rivers like the Nile and the Euphrates are powerful, unstoppable Xows and in the psychogeography of the speaker they discharge themselves, and their human detritus, into Rome.44 No surprise either that the Wrst thought which comes to 41 The pissing over Pudicitia in 6.307–13 is itself preceded by a reference to the story of L. Postumius (295–7) and the two scenes are, as Miller points out (2005: 285), thematically linked: since the disappearance of poverty and the arrival of luxury, says the satirist, . . . huc Xuxit et Isthmos / et Sybaris ycollesy, huc et Rhodos et Miletos / atque coronatum et petulans madidumque Tarentum (‘into here have poured Corinth and Sybaris and Rhodes and Miletus and Tarentum, garlanded, insolent and drunk’). According to Dio Cassius 9 (39.7), a drunken man insulted the Roman ambassador L. Postumius at a festival of Dionysus in 281 bce by defecating onto his clothes. 42 See Platner and Ashby (1926: 221–2): ‘The forum was surrounded by an enormous wall, which served the double purpose of protecting it against Wre and shutting oV the view of the squalid quarters of the city in the immediate neighbourhood.’ The Forum Boarium, by contrast, they describe as a ‘large open space . . . greatly encroached upon by buildings’, so much so that boundary-stones had to be set up to protect it (223). 43 In Satire 6, for example, the Altar of Pudicitia scene comes in a passage whose opening (286–91) sets out to answer the question unde haec monstra? (‘Where do these monstrosities come from?’): in former days, we are told (289–91), women were kept from being contaminated by the hard work of handling Tuscan Xeeces (uellere Tusco / uexatae)—contrast Mevia hunting her Tuscan boar in 1.22–3—and by their husbands manning the Colline Tower when Hannibal was at the gates (proximus Urbi / Hannibal et stantes Collina turre mariti). 44 In 6.409–12, the talkative woman—who likes to discuss what is happening in the world with generals and other men—gets the latest news and rumours at the city gates and tells whoever she meets that ‘the Niphates is Xooding peoples, Welds and cities’. The content of her ‘news item’ mirrors the outpouring of talk which the

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mind at the sight of the Egyptian Arabarch’s statue is to piss or—even better—shit on it. In Satire 3, when Umbricius cites what he especially wants to get away from, he deploys similar Xuvial and scatological terminology: et quos praecipue fugiam, properabo fateri, nec pudor obstabit. Non possum ferre, Quirites, Graecam Urbem. Quamuis quota portio faecis Achaei? Iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim deXuxit Orontes . . . and those that I especially want to get away from, I will name them at once, and no sense of embarrassment will stop me. I cannot bear, fellow-Romans, a Greek City. Yet how small a portion of our sewage are Achaeans? For a long time now the Syrian Orontes has been emptying into the Tiber . . . Juvenal 3.58–62

The interjection of Graecam into the midst of Quirites and Urbem, and then the enclosing of Urbem between Graecam and Achaei as the Wrst and last words in the line, emphasize the trapped position of the speaker. In line 62, similarly, the Tiber is surrounded by Syrus and Orontes. Pollution of the water supply is a particularly eVective image, given the pivotal role played by water in deWning the site of Rome.45 Sewers are a fertile source of imagery for Juvenalian satire, for they vividly blend inXows and outXows with the category of the disgusting and reinforce hints that Rome is a giant latrine. In Satire 5.104–6, the Xowing sewer of the Subura is mentioned in the context of the menu given to the abused dinner guest at Virro’s cena: aut glaucis sparsus maculis Tiberinus et ipse / uernula riparum, pinguis torrente cloaca / et solitus mediae cryptam penetrare Suburae (‘or a Tiber Wsh spattered with grey blotches, like you a slave born on its banks, fattened on the rushing sewer and used to heading right into

narrator regards as uncontrolled and an inappropriate violation of gender roles. It has often been pointed out that Niphates is actually a mountain and not a river, and the same confusion appears in Lucan 3.245: see Courtney (1980: 314); my colleague Donald Lavigne suggests to me, however, that the name looks like an ill-informed conXation of Nilus and Euphrates and that perhaps the joke in Juvenal lies in the ‘Bushism’. 45 See Introduction pp. 18–19; see Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 267–78, 321). In 8.167–71 the boundaries of the Empire are marked by four rivers: Euphrates, Tigris, Rhine, and Danube.

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the drain under the middle of the Subura’).46 With its shops, eatingplaces, and brothels, the Subura was smelly and noisy; hence Gowers styles it the ‘stomach of Rome’.47 It is mentioned by the satiristnarrator at the very beginning of Satire 3 as a place he dislikes (ego uel Prochytam praepono Suburae, ‘I myself would prefer to the Subura even Prochyta [a notoriously barren island]’, 3.5). The last speciWc locations mentioned in Satire 1 are the tombs and cemeteries lining the Flaminian and Latin Ways (170–1): . . . experiar quid concedatur in illos / quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina (‘. . . I will try what may be allowed against those whose ashes are covered by the Flaminian and Latin Ways’). This is better than ending up as a criminal executed in the arena, which is what happens if you attack a living individual: pone Tigillinum, taeda lucebis in illa / qua stantes ardent qui Wxo gutture fumant / . . . / et latum media sulcum deducit harena (‘mention Tigillinus, and you will be alight on that torch where men burn and smoke, standing with their throat transWxed, . . . and [your corpse] traces a broad furrow through the middle of the arena’, 155–7).48 Here, the speaker deWnes the dangers of speaking out too freely—of copying Lucilian libertas, in eVect— through spatial imagery (just as he had earlier imagined Lucilius driving his chariot across the plain), this time of being dragged across the sand of the arena. The arena and poetry is not a novel pairing—after all Horace in Epistles 1.1 had famously likened his decision to stop writing lyric poetry to a gladiator’s retirement49—but there is an alarming reminder here of just how permeable boundaries are, so that the poet

46 On the cloaca maxima, see Platner and Ashby (1926: 126–7); LTUR i (1993: 288–90); Gowers (1993: 14–16; 1995). The words uernula riparum recall Crispinus, the uerna Canopi of 1.26. 47 See Gowers (1993: 15; 215). Cf. 11.50–1: cedere namque foro iam non est deterius quam / Esquilias a feruenti migrare Subura (‘for to withdraw from the forum [i.e. be declared bankrupt] is now nothing worse than to move to the Esquiline from the seething Subura’). On the Subura, see LTUR iv (1999: 379–83). 48 For discussion of the textual problem in these lines, see Courtney (1980: 116– 17); Braund (1996: 108); Miller (2005: 247). 49 Ep. 1.1.1–3: Prima dicte mihi, summa dicende Camena, / spectatum satis et donatum iam rude quaeris, / Maecenas, iterim antiquo me includere ludo (‘You, of whom my Wrst Muse spoke, of whom my last must speak, Maecenas, you seek to shut me up again in my old training-school, even though I have been displayed enough and have already been given my foil of retirement’).

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risks being hauled into the arena and the arena in turn threatens to break out of its conWnes and Xood out into the Urbs at large.50 And so the satirist embarks on a route out of the city past the burial grounds of the Flaminian and Latin roads, sending us simultaneously in opposite directions: the Flaminian Way led out of Rome to the north and the Appian to the south, with the Latin Way branching oV from it.51 The reference to the Flaminian recalls the earlier image of the young Automedon careering along at breakneck speed, showing oV, and when we connect this with the image of Lucilius on his chariot it reinforces the topographical resonances of writing satire, the quintessentially ‘urban’ genre. If the Automedon Wgure is analogous to the bombastic poets ridiculed in the opening verses of Satire 1, then Juvenal promises a diVerent kind of poetic track: one which moves ‘out of Rome’ and is more concerned with the dead than the living. Around the point where the Via Latina forked oV from the Via Appia in a southeasterly direction there were numerous tombs, and one of the major sites in this area was the Tomb of the Scipios, emblematic of the idealized Republican past.52 This will be picked up at the end of Satire 2, with its vision of the shades of Republican heroes, including the Scipios, watching in horror as Gracchus—recently wedded to a man—joins their ranks): . . . Curius quid sentit et ambo Scipiadae, quid Fabricius manesque Camilli? quid Cremerae legio et Cannis consumpta iuuentus,

50 In 2.142, an allusive reference to the Forum (the running of the Lupercalia along the Via Sacra) is followed immediately by the spectacle of Gracchus in the arena (143–8); in 16.47, the Forum is actually described as an arena: lentaque fori pugnamus harena (‘and we Wght in the sticky arena of the Forum’). For the ‘Xooding out’ of the arena into the public space of the city, one need think only of the full-scale riot which broke out in Pompeii in 59 ce following the rather too vigorous exchange of insults between the towns of Nuceria and Pompeii in the arena, described by Tacitus, Annales 14.17. 51 LTUR iv, v (1999: 117–18; 2000: 130–3): Via Appia; LTUR v (2000: 135–7): Via Flaminia; LTUR v (2000: 141): Via Latina. On the roads generally, see Laurence (1999a), esp. 13–23 on the Appian and Flaminian Ways. 52 Cf. Cicero, Tusc. 1.7.13: An tu regressus Porta Capena, cum Calatini, Scipionum, Seruiliorum, Metellorum sepulcra uides, miseros putas illos? (‘When you leave the Porta Capena, and see the tombs of Calatinus, the Scipios, the Servilii, the Metelli, do you consider those men unhappy?’); cf. Livy 38.53. See also: LTUR iv (1999: 281–5).

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tot bellorum animae, quotiens hinc talis ad illos umbra uenit? . . . what would Curius and both the Scipios, what Fabricius and the spirits of the Camilli think? What the legion of Cremera and the young men swallowed up at Cannae, the dead of so many wars, think when a shade such as this comes to them here? Juvenal 2.153–7

These are the same heroes who would have populated the colonnade of the Forum Augusti, and the arrival of Gracchus is another instance of the phenomenon of the intruder who does not belong and whose presence pollutes the space into which he enters. It is interesting that the account of Gracchus’ homosexual wedding ceremony (2.117–42) in the valley of Quirinus (in ualle Quirini, 133)—itself a location loaded with links to Romulus53—is followed by his appearance in the arena as a retiarius (143–8), intimating again that the arena is a zone of dangerous liminality where hierarchies of gender and social status are undermined; the same conjunction occurs in the double-pronged attack on the eunuch who marries and Mevia who hunts the boar in 1.22–30.54 The decision at the end of Satire 1 to talk only about the dead is much more hard-hitting than its superWcial justiWcation—Xight to a safe location from which to utter criticisms of Roman society— suggests. Two of the most long-standing preoccupations of satire are consumption (of food, money, material goods, other people) and excretion (of food, money, material goods, other people). Both the consumption and the excretion are repulsive in Juvenalian discourse, as the crossing of the boundary brings with it an intense experience of abjection. What makes Juvenalian satire diVerent from its predecessors is the close connecting of these two central 53 Cf. 8.259; 11.104–5; see also LTUR iv (1999: 180–5). 54 In 8.199–210, Gracchus’ Wghting as a retiarius in the arena is brought up again, as an exemplum of dedecus and ignominia; similar examples of boundary-crossing associated with the arena include the women training as gladiators in 6.246–67 and Rutilus in 11.5–8 who, when he should be joining the army, is entering the gladiatorial school in order to escape his creditors. Other arena references of the same ilk occur at 4.99–101; 6.103–13, 250–67.

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preoccupations to what Kristeva designates as ‘the utmost of abjection’—the corpse: No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily Xuids, this deWlement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with diYculty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border . . . If dung signiWes the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled.55

The tombs along the Via Latina are mentioned again in 5.55, in the context of having a cup handed to a dinner guest by a Gaetulian slave or the ‘bony hand of a dark Maurus’, a character ‘whom you would not want to meet in the middle of the night when you are being ferried past the tombs on the hilly Latin Way’ (et cui per mediam nolis occurrere noctem, / cliuosae ueheris dum per monumenta Latinae)— presumably because you might end up dead. Here again we Wnd the deployment of synecdoche in the ‘bony hand’ of the Maurus; the conjunction of consumption (at the cena where this is set) and the corpses of the dead; and the depiction of the city by night as especially unpleasant. A compatriot of this Maurus will, as we have seen, appear in the shape of the urinating Maura in the Altar of Pudicitia scene of Satire 6 (306–13) and the fellating one in Satire 10.223–4. And, of course, the arena is the locus of consumption and excretion par excellence: the elaborate menu of Wghts and the vast numbers of victims consumed in the Colosseum are reminiscent of a banquet on a city-wide scale, while the connoisseurs of the reWnements of cruelty are like connoisseurs of Wne food. Yet, at the same time, the spectacles are served up from the dregs, the leftovers, the excreted Others of the Empire.56 55 Kristeva (1982: 3–4). 56 The gladiator is explicitly excremental in Seneca’s anecdote (Epistle 70) of a combatant who committed pre-emptive suicide in the toilet by plunging down his throat one of the sponges on a stick with which Romans used to wipe themselves after defecating. Juvenal too preserves evidence of the connection: his vignette of the female gladiator in Satire 6 ends with her squatting on the potty (et ride positis scaphium cum sumitur armis, ‘and when ludicrously she puts down her weapons and takes up the potty ’, 264).

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In many ways, then, Juvenal presents us with a cityscape that is populated by corpses, almost a Night of the Living Dead.57 It is, moreover, only among these corpses that satiric libertas can Wnd a place to express itself. We can see now that the traversal of the cityscape occurs on multiple temporal levels, as the narrative time of the satire—close to the Formalists’ notion of the sujet—moves through the course of a day in the experience of the speaker, while other time spans—of human life from birth to death, of Roman History from its beginnings through the Republic and into the Empire, of the growth and expansion of the city, and of the genre of satire from Lucilius through Horace to Juvenal—are encoded within the broader context of the fabula.

FA REWELL AT T HE PO RTA CAP ENA In Satire 3, the drama of abjection is given expression in the expulsion or self-ejection of Umbricius from the city to take up residence in Cumae. While, as explained above, many of the most famous monuments and public places in the city are incorporated into the text, however brieXy, the only sustained piece of topographical description of a speciWc location in the entire Satires is of the Porta Capena and the nearby Grove of Egeria in this poem, lines 10–20. This is a pivotal moment in the Juvenalian corpus, for it is where the satirist’s voice is explicitly divided—into that of the narrator and that of Umbricius, who delivers his farewell speech before leaving Rome for good.58 Considerable attention has been paid to the satiric persona, as well as to the name Umbricius, whose obvious associations with umbra, shades, and the Underworld point to satire’s corpseridden fascination with the past, decay, and death.59 The journey is to take Umbricius to Cumae, a liminal zone where the entrance to the 57 See Duret and Ne´raudau (2001: 169–77) on ‘La ville des morts’. 58 There is already some splitting in Sat. 2.38–63, where a woman called Laronia, probably an adulteress, delivers a scathing attack on the dissolute males who are that poem’s primary target. 59 See Braund (1996: 177, 215, 228–36); Motto and Clark (1965).

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Underworld was located,60 and he will travel in his mule-drawn wagon along the tomb-rich Appian Way, following at least initially Horace’s path along that road in his Journey to Brundisium poem (Satires 1.5), itself an imitation of a piece by Lucilius.61 Much less attention, however, has generally been paid to the setting in which Umbricius chooses to deliver his tirade against the Rome to which he bids a melanch