ClassiCal MeMories/Modern identities Paul allen Miller and richard H. armstrong, series editors Reflections of Romanity DiSCOUrSeS Of SUbjeCTiviTy in imPerial rOme riCHard alston and efrossini sP entzou The OhiO ST aTe UniverSiTy PreSS / COl UmbUS Copyright © 2011 by The Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alston, Richard, 1965– Reflections of Romanity : discourses of subjectivity in Imperial Rome / Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou. p. cm. — (Classical memories/modern identities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1149-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1149-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9250-1 (cd) 1. Latin literature—History and criticism. 2. Self in literature. 3. Subjectivity in litera- ture. I. Spentzou, Efrossini. II. Title. III. Series: Classical memories/modern identities. PA6003.A45 2011 870.9'353—dc22 2010039574 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1149-6) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9250-1) Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Text design by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Για τα αγγελάκια μας, το Βασίλη και το Στέφανο only connect. e. M. forster, Howards End Contents Series Editors’ Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1 Introduction. Talking to Strangers: Classical Readings and the Modern Self 1 Chapter 2 Home Alone: Terror and Power 27 Chapter 3 Death and Love: Rationality and Passion 65 Chapter 4 Private Partners and Family Dramas 107 Chapter 5 Living with the Past: Tradition, Invention, and History 141 Chapter 6 Imperial Dreams: Being Roman in a World Empire 193 Chapter 7 Epilogue 225 Bibliography 231 Index 241 Series Editors’ Foreword Talking to strangers can be dangerous. We tell our kids not to. They look so familiar, but looks can be deceiving. Who knows who these people are? Of course, the whole possibility of conversation depends on us not know- ing these people, on a certain constitutive opacity and hence danger. If the other were completely known to us, if the other were not estranged from us, there could be no conversation, indeed there could no meaning. For the absolute presence of the self to the other would not only eliminate the other, and hence the possibility of our exchanging meanings in a conversation, it would also eliminate meaning itself. The possibility of one thing referring to another, of language and signification, is that those things not be the same. Thus in a sense we are always talking to strangers, and we cannot be ourselves or form meaningful existences for ourselves outside that conversation. But at the same time, stranger danger is real. The other always threatens the integrity of the same, the possibility of identity. Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou offer us a conversation. It is one held between a variety of strangers, some stranger than others. It begins with the recognition that something strange is happening “in the historical period roughly defined by the reigns of Nero and Trajan (c.e. 54–117).” In the texts of what in a more self-confident time were known as “Silver Age” Latin literature—Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny—there is an evident unease. Latecomers in an age of relative peace and stability, immensely talented heirs of an immense tradition, they seek to carve out a place for themselves in the conversation that had become Latin literature. But when the script had already been written, on the political level ix x series editors’ foreword by Augustus and his successors and on the literary level by Vergil, Horace, Livy, and the elegists, then how do you perform it with a degree of authen- ticity? One of the great problems, indeed, for the writers of the “long first century” is how do they perform Romanness authentically without falling into parody? This predicament is one that is not unfamiliar to the inhabitant of the postmodern condition. We too live in a world where there is no outside, no alternative order whose essence we are meant to perform. For Tacitus, Pliny, and Seneca, what was the alternative to the Roman imperial order? They had received it and they could judge it, but they could not step out- side it or remake it. They performed their status as civis Romanus always under the ironizing shadow of their own, structurally necessary bad faith. The citizen of the global economy faces the same dilemma: how to perform his or her own status as a citizen of the United States, the UK, Europe, or China, without falling into inauthenticity by accepting a Walt Disney com- modified version of individual and communal identity, or irony by assum- ing inauthenticity as the theme of one’s existence, or denial by adopting a fundamentalist refusal of that inauthenticity whether in its various religious or political forms. The Roman of the long first century thus becomes a good conversation partner for the postmodern reader: the inhabitant of a global system she inherited but did not make, who is consequently suspicious of the narratives that underwrite that system but still unable to replace them with new narratives no longer parasitic on the old. These Romans, then, are our intimate others. They are people we can talk to because they are not us, but though strangers, they are not unintel- ligible. Instead they occupy that middle position that Socrates in the Lysis says makes friendship possible. The wholly good man and the wholly evil have no need of friends. The completely good man as a self-contained and perfect whole has no need of any other. He is the principle of self-identity, really more a god than a man. The wholly bad man, in so far as he would reject all good things, would also have no need of friendship, which all agree to be good. The friend, then, like the conversation partner will always be in part a stranger, but still recognizeable: the good but not perfect man, the bearer of a certain resemblance to ourselves, yet not our simple reflection. Alston and Spentzou make the strong case that the Romans of the long first century could be such friends and conversation partners. As is common once we start talking to strangers, even while recognizing the dangers they present, their friends become our friends. The people whose conversation we already find most enriching in turn enrich the conversations of our new friends. In the case of Alston and Spentzou, these old friends, the friends from our own community, are Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and