The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory

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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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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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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 () 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: , 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.

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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

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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).

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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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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 melancholy but deWnite farewell: Sed dum tota domus raeda componitur una, substitit ad ueteres arcus madidamque Capenam. in uallem Egeriae descendimus et speluncas dissimiles ueris. Quanto praesentius esset numen aquis, uiridi si margine cluderet undas herba nec ingenuum uiolarent marmora tofum. hic, ubi nocturnae Numa constituebat amicae, nunc sacri fontis nemus et delubra locantur Iudaeis, quorum cophinus fenumque supellex; omnis enim populo mercedem pendere iussa est arbor et eiectis mendicat silua Camenis.62 But while his whole house is being loaded onto one cart, he stops near the old arches and the dripping Capena Gate. We go down into the valley of Egeria and its fake-looking caves. How much more present the spirit of the waters would be, if grass enclosed the pool with a green border and marble did not profane the native tufa. 60 3.4: ianua Baiarum est et gratum litus amoeni / secessus (‘It is the gateway to Baiae and a delightful coast of pleasant seclusion’); Nisbet (1988: 91–2) actually emends litus in 3.4 to limen. 61 Cf. Horace’s image of himself in Satires 1.6.104–5 as travelling to Tarentum on a ‘gelded mule’ (curto . . . mulo); Freudenberg (1993: 207) observes: ‘Whether or not Horace was a mule driver in real life, he realized the metaphorical possibilities implied in his unassuming mode of transportation, for in the terminology of rhetorical criticism, horse riding was a common symbol for poetry as opposed to traveling ‘‘by foot’’. . . signifying prose.’ 62 The textual problems surrounding the order of the lines in this passage have been amply discussed by Pearce. I have chosen to follow here the text as printed by Braund in her Cambridge (1996) and recent Loeb (2004) editions, although I am not fully convinced of the need to transpose lines in the text as it is given by Clausen. For the purposes of my own argument, the order of the lines is largely irrelevant, since I am concerned mainly with the speciWc details of the description of the grove and not so much with the order in which the various components appear. In the ‘original’ order of the lines, as Pearce points out (1992: 381), Numa meets Egeria at the Porta Capena in deWance of traditional locations further away.

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Here, where Numa used to meet his night-time lady friend, now the grove with its sacred spring and its shrine are given over to Jews, whose paraphernalia is a hay-Wlled hamper. For every tree has been ordered to pay rent to the people and, with the Camenae expelled, the grove has become a beggar. Juvenal 3.10–20

The reduction of large to small in the picture of Umbricius’ ‘whole house’ (tota domus) loaded onto ‘one cart’ (raeda . . . una) narrows the gaze of the viewer from the macrocosm of the city as a whole to the microcosm of this one archway and the single grove nearby, so that these reduced spaces, and the two Wgures that populate them— Umbricius and the speaker—are in turn representative of all their kind in Rome. Juvenalian satire works its eVects in very much this manner: its favourite devices are synecdoche, metonymy, allusion, and brevity. Consequently, it is incumbent upon the audience, particularly the implied reader or listener, to scrutinize the details for their rich complexity. This is doubly so when the fast-moving satirical gaze comes to rest for a moment on a particular place or person, for this is a tactic which lends a ‘reality eVect’ of solid and weighty three-dimensionality to the Satires, central to how they model Rome so acutely. As the gateway in the old Servian wall out of Rome on the main route to the south, the Porta Capena was a major and longestablished point of entry and exit; it was also close to the arches of the oldest of the aqueducts, the Aqua Appia, and the place where an extension of another aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia, entered the city; hence presumably the reference to its being ‘damp’ or ‘wet’ (madidam).63 The word arcus is ambiguous and could refer to the aqueduct 63 Echoed by Martial 3.47.1: Capena grandi porta qua pluit gutta (‘Where the Porta Capena rains with big drops’); one wonders if Martial’s poem inspired Juvenal, for it ends with Bassus going to the country with a wagonload of fresh produce (urbem petebat Bassus? Immo rus ibat (‘was Bassus heading to the city? No, he was going to the country ’, 15). According to Frontinus, 1.19, the channel called Herculaneus ended above the Porta Capena (supra Portam Capenam); cf. Platner and Ashby (1926: 405); Ashby (1973: 153); LTUR i (1993: 61–2, 67–9). Frontinus mentions that the Aqua Appia had 60 paces of substructure and arches above ground near the Porta Capena: see Ashby (1973: 49). On the Servian wall and the Porta Capena, see LTUR iii (1996: 319–25); Cozzi (1968: 69–72). On the gates of Rome and their historical and ideological signiWcance, see Grandazzi (1998).

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or to the gate itself, and of course ueteres emphasizes the great antiquity of the site, which was also the Wrst of the Augustan districts of Rome.64 A place of ingress and egress, through which water is brought into the city from the country on a man-made structure, to keep the population alive and sanitary, and from which Umbricius leaves for the country, because he Wnds Rome too populous and unsanitary—in moral and social terms—to sustain his existence, the Porta Capena is where inside and outside, dead and living, past and present, natural and unnatural all coincide. The oozing which is the gate’s most obvious feature here is a signiWer of the penetrable border. The Porta Capena is the site of a famous incident in Livy’s account of early Rome, after the combat between the Horatii and the Curatii (1.24–6), when the returning Horatius meets his sister ante portam Capenam and she weeps for her betrothed, one of the dead Curatii, whose cloak she sees on her brother’s shoulders: Mouet feroci iuueni animum comploratio sororis in uictoria sua tantoque gaudio publico. Stricto itaque gladio simul uerbis increpans transWgit puellam. ‘Abi hinc cum immaturo amore ad sponsum’ inquit, ‘oblita fratrum mortuorum uiuique, oblita patriae. Sic eat quaecumque Romana lugebit hostem.’ The weeping of his sister stirred the Wery youth at the moment of his own victory and such public celebration. And so, drawing his sword and at the same time upbraiding her with words, he ran her through. ‘Begone to your betrothed in your ill-timed love’ he said, ‘you who have forgotten your

64 For more on this location, see Tacitus, Ann. 15.40: plusque infamiae id incendium habuit quia praediis Tigellini Aemilianis proruperat uidebaturque Nero condendae urbis nouae et cognomento suo appellandae gloriam quaerere. Quippe in regiones quattuordecim Roma diuiditur, quarum quattuor integrae manebant, tres solo tenus deiectae: septem reliquis pauca tectorum uestigia supererant, lacera et semusta (‘that Wre caused more ill-feeling because it broke out on Tigellinus’ Aemilian estate and Nero appeared to be chasing the glory of founding a new city and naming it after himself. Rome is divided into fourteen districts, of which four remained intact, three were razed to the ground, and seven survived with a few ruins of buildings, mangled and half-burned’). Commentators believe that one of the four unscathed districts was No. 1, the Porta Capena. In 15.44, Tacitus reports how the Christians were made into human torches after the Wre; Tigellinus (Tigillinus) of course was mentioned near the end of Satire 1 in the context of the dangers of attacking a living individual (1.155–7): pone Tigillinum, taeda lucebis . . . (‘put in Tigillinus, and you’ll burn as a torch . . .’).

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brothers, both dead and alive, you who have forgotten your native-land. So perish every Roman woman who mourns an enemy.’ Livy 1.26.3–5

Although this startling execution is viewed as atrox by the onlookers, Horatius’ recent service to the state in battle mitigates the people’s desire for punishment and he is acquitted. The sister’s tomb, meanwhile, was built where she was killed (1.26.11–14). Thus the Porta Capena is the site of a famous instance of violent punishment that is more or less justiWed by the context. If this was familiar to Juvenal’s listeners, then the associations of the place might Wt in well with the ‘punishing’ and ‘vengeance-taking’ aspects of the satiric persona, especially given the contrast between Horatius’ capacity for instantaneous action and the caution which inhibits the current speaker. One is reminded of the portrayal in Satire 1.165–6 of Lucilius, who ‘as if with his sword drawn’ (ense uelut stricto) ‘roared blazing’ (ardens / infremuit) at his enemies, a strategy which in the speaker’s day will only lead to ‘anger and tears’ (ira et lacrimae, 1.168). Juvenal may well have had Livy’s Book 1 in mind for, as we shall see shortly below, the reference to Numa’s nocturnal assignations in the passage we are discussing would very likely have recalled Livy’s account of his meetings with Egeria, an account which happens to come (in 1.21) only shortly before the Horatius story. Although he will leave through the Porta Capena, Umbricius chooses to relieve himself of his reasons for abandoning Rome in the Vale of Egeria, a sacred location, into which he and the narrator must descend. The uallis and the speluncae, as enclosed hollows, provide a link with the ueteres arcus, while descendimus recalls the imagined descent into the Underworld at the end of Satire 2. In a sense, Umbricius’ reframing of Rome is analogous to the speech delivered to Aeneas by Anchises in the Underworld in the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid; there are numerous suggestions in the Wrst book of Satires (nos 1–5) that Rome is not only the ‘new’ Troy (with its own Troiugenae, 1.100), but in fact too much like the old one— Wlled with Greeks and doomed.65 The fact that Umbricius’ journey 65 For example, 1.162; 2.100, 149–51; 3.2–3, 198–9, 265–7; 4.60–1; 5.44–5. See Ferguson (1979) ad loc. and Braund (1996).

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will take him from Rome to Cumae is also suggestive: it makes his trip into a return from the Underworld, the City of the Dead that Rome has become, to a land where living as a ‘true Roman’ is, if we take his narrative seriously, still possible.66 It is also a journey back to a chronotope before the city of Rome existed. The descent takes the satirist and Umbricius outside the boundary of the Servian Wall, and oV the Appian Way; this much we can be sure of, although the exact locations of the valley, the grove, and the spring are diYcult to determine, as inside and outside space coalesce. This is no doubt by design, for, as we have seen, topographical speciWcity is not the main aim of satirical discourse; it is, rather, to milk the historical and ideological associations of these places for all they are worth.67 In Juvenal’s description, the spring and the caves are associated with the dripping arches at the Porta Capena, but the designation of the caves as dissimiles ueris immediately introduces a negative tone and alerts us to that lack of correspondence between appearance and reality which, as we have already seen, is a commonplace in satiric topography. The description from this point onward focuses upon the invasion of the grotto by foreign elements and the expulsion of the Camenae, the Roman Muses representing traditional religion. Thus the grove for the narrator is a locus of unnatural deWlement and profanation of the ‘authentically Roman’ by representatives of the Outside and, as the Camenae were ejected from it, so Umbricius will eject himself from the city through the nearby Porta Capena. Just as his whole house has been loaded onto one wagon, so the condition of 66 Interpretation of Umbricius’ characterization is fraught with diYculty and ambiguity. To some he is a reliable narrator, a representative of traditional Roman mores Xeeing corruption, to others an unreliable one, peddling a discourse riddled with internal contradictions. There is a good summary of the issues in Braund (1996: 230–6); see also now Miller (2005: 248–9). 67 See LTUR i (1993: 216), iii (1996: 325); Plutarch, Numa 13; Livy 1.21.3–4; Ovid, Fasti 3.259–76. Platner and Ashby observe (1926: 89–90) that: ‘Camenae was a general term . . . including the valley, the grove, the spring, and the shrine. The spring was undoubtedly at the foot of the southern extremity of the Caelian hill . . . The grove was around the spring, and the vallis extended north-east from this point along the south-east of the Caelian, and was traversed by the vicus Camenarum, which joined the via Appia. The spring was near the via Appia, and, according to tradition, Numa built beside it a small bronze aedicula . . . Later a temple appears to have taken its place, which is mentioned only once. The grotto of the spring had been adorned with marble in Juvenal’s time. Its water was excellent.’

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Rome can be summarized in the corrupted site (and unedifying sight) of the Grove of Egeria.68 The description of its inhabitants is blended with comments on the ‘unnatural’ appearance of the grove’s supposedly natural features—the spring, grass, caves, and trees— leading to the observation that the numen of the spring would be much more present if its waters were enclosed by grass and if marble did not violate the native tufa (quanto praesentius esset / numen aquis, uiridi si margine clauderet undas / herba, nec ingenuum uiolarent marmora tofum, 3.18–20). The gap between Past and Present, the speaker seems to suggest, could be closed, if the ‘native tufa’ had not been ‘violated’ by marble, and if the ‘edge of the water’ was ‘enclosed’ (only) by grass. The imagery and the vocabulary are signiWcant: presence as opposed to absence, green grass as opposed to white marble, and native or natural (ingenuus) as opposed to imported or constructed.69 The concern with borders points not only to anxiety about boundaries in general but also to the question of what constitutes a ‘proper’ border as opposed to a ‘false’ one that has been imposed on the natural order of things.70 The encircling of the pool by grass or tufa would be, in the eyes of the speaker and his implied viewer, entirely appropriate; an analogous ‘natural enclosing’ appears in the Golden Age of the cave-dwellers (Satire 6.4): et pecus et 68 The site takes on a metapoetic signiWcance with the connections between Umbricius and the Camenae; it is worth recalling that before Umbricius speaks the narrator concludes his list of things to avoid in Rome, mainly to do with buildings, with a bathetic reference to poets (8–10): . . . incendia, lapsus / tectorum adsiduos ac mille pericula saeuae / Urbis et Augusto recitantes mense poetas? (‘. . . Wres, continual building collapses and the thousand other dangers of savage Rome, and poets reciting in the month of August’). Apart from the joke inherent in the para prosdokian, however, this serves to link Satire 3 with the opening of Satire 1, and to give the description of the grove which follows immediately a metapoetic colouring. Pearce (1992: 383) suggests a lacuna after poetas in line 9 before sed dum tota domus . . . in line 10, and is followed by Braund (1996; 2004 ad loc.), but I am not convinced that this is necessary. 69 Later in the poem, 131–2, Umbricius comments that the son of free-born parents (ingenuorum) now escorts (cludit latus) the rich man’s slave, which Braund (1996: 197) regards as a vivid example of role-reversal. In 11.154, the speaker describes his wholesome Italian slaveboy as ingenui uoltus puer ingenuique pudoris (‘a boy of noble decency with a noble face’); the repetition of ingenuus seems designed to mock the speaker. 70 The word margine recalls its use in the opening attack on bombastic poets and the Orestes which is not Wnished even when the writing has Wlled the margin at the end of the book (summi plena iam margine libri) in 1.5–6.

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dominos communi clauderet umbra (‘[when a cave] enclosed both herd and owners in communal shade’). The marble disrupts this ‘natural enclosing’. In our passage, the word order reinforces the point: uiridi and herba enclose undas within the clause, while herba and tofum similarly enclose marmora within the line, but the collocation of marmora and tofum brings out the harsh encounter between the quintessential building material of the imperial city, probably imported, and the naturally occurring porous tufa which was popular in pre-Augustan times.71 A similar notion appears later in Satire 14 with the builder Caetronius’ ‘outdoing’ (uincens) the Temples of Fortuna and Hercules ‘with marble brought from Greece and far away’ (Graecis longeque petitis / marmoribus, 14.89–90).72 The term praesentius is intriguing: it suggests a craving for authenticity and for a correspondence between what appears to be and what actually is.73 In other words, if the grove looks wrong, then it is clear that there can be nothing of Egeria left here (just as the shrine of Pudicitia in Satire 6 is bereft, since the goddess has abandoned the land). The waters and the shrine, in other words, while retaining the superWcial trappings of the site of a numen, have, in fact, lost all contact with her.74 This parallels the situation with most of the temples and altars which are mentioned in the Satires. Indeed, the verb uiolare recurs frequently in connection with temples and divinities (e.g. Wctilis nullo uiolatus Iuppiter auro, 71 On marble, we may compare later in the poem the simple statue of Chiron, made ab eodem marmore (‘from the same ‘‘marble’’ [i.e. earthenware]’, 3.205), owned by the poor man Cordus who loses everything in a Wre, and how it is contrasted with the donations of marble and statues to the rich man after his mansion is burned down (3.212–17). 72 The sentence continues with: ut spado uincebat Capitolia nostra Posides (‘as the eunuch Posides [a freedman of Claudius] was trying to outdo our Capitol’, 14.91). The linking of the spado (a Wgure of loathing in 1.22) with an attempt to ‘conquer our Capitol’ is revealing. In 4.6–7, Crispinus the despicable outsider is pictured in porticoes, shady groves, and his houses on land near the Forum. 73 There is an echo in 11.111, as the speaker describes how people behaved in the old days: templorum quoque maiestas praesentior (‘and the grandeur of temples was more present’). 74 In 6.342–5, the speaker laments the profanation of temples by people in his own time and contrasts behaviour in the old days: et quis tunc hominum contemptor numinis, aut quis / simpuuium ridere Numae nigrumque catinum / et Vaticano fragiles de monte patellas / ausus erat? sed nunc ad quas non Clodius aras? (‘and what man then was a despiser of deities, or dared to laugh at Numa’s ladle or his black bowl or fragile dishes from the Vatican hill? But what altars now haven’t got their Clodius?’).

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11.116).75 And what makes the grove look wrong? The dissolution of the traditional borders and diVerences by which the category of ‘the natural’ is deWned.76 The grove of Egeria is thus replete with chronotopic signiWcance: it is associated with the very beginnings of Rome, and, in particular, with the man who established its religious institutions and its legal boundaries (we have already noted the mention in Satire 1 of the Temple of Fides, whose cult he introduced).77 In Livy’s narrative, Numa pretends (simulat) to have nocturnal meetings (congressus nocturnos) with Egeria for advice, because he believes he needs to put fear of the gods (deorum metum) into the Roman people, ‘lest relief from foreign dangers should lead to luxury and idleness’ (positis externorum periculorum curis ne luxuriarent otio animi, 1.19.4–5). This combination of ideas Wnds an echo in Satire 6.292–3: nunc patimur longae pacis mala. saeuior armis / luxuria incubuit uictumque ulciscitur orbem (‘now we suVer the misfortunes of a long peace. Luxury, crueller than war, has settled upon us and avenges the world we have conquered’). By Juvenal’s day, the descent into extravagance and idleness that Numa feared has taken place and is narrated to us in the very grove where he used to meet Egeria. While Numa, at the behest of the nymph, undertook a process of dividing and marking out boundaries for the early Romans (Livy, 1.19.6–7), Umbricius 75 The reference is to Jupiter’s protecting the Latins ‘when he was made of earthenware and not corrupted by gold’, i.e. was still an old terracotta statue. Cf. Wdei uiolatae (of trust betrayed, 13.6); templum et uiolati numinis aras (‘the temple and altars of the insulted god’, 13.219); porrum et caepe nefas uiolare et frangere morsu (‘it is a sin to violate or crunch with your bite a leek or an onion’, 15.9); hic gaudere libet quod non uiolauerit ignem (‘here we can celebrate the fact that [the crowd] didn’t desecrate Wre’, 15.84). 76 It is worth noting in this context that later in his speech Umbricius oVers a scene of what we might call ‘natural simplicity’, with his description of the modest clothing of the rural folk who all wear the same, even on festival days (3.172–5): . . . ipsa dierum / festorum herboso colitur si quando theatro / maiestas tandemque redit ad pulpita notum / exodium . . . (‘Even when the grandness of festival days is celebrated in a grassy theatre and the familiar farce has returned to the stage at last . . .’). The ‘grassy theatre’ is opposed to a structure made of stone or marble, which would violate the natural state of the environment, presumably. The word notum suggests ‘familiar old’ or even ‘comfortingly familiar’ and hence suited to the context. One cannot help noticing, however, that exodium (like theatrum) is a Greek word: see Miller (2005: 261). 77 For a full account of Numa, see Livy 1.17–21; Plutarch, Numa; see also Banta in this collection.

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discourses on the borders and distinctions that have become blurred among their descendants. Livy tells us that Numa’s religious organization was done so that the people could get advice ‘should there be any confusion arising from neglect of ancestral rites and the adoption of foreign ones’ (ne quid diuini iuris neglegendo patrios ritus peregrinosque adsciscendo turbaretur, 1.20.6). He later oVers a picture of Rome as a ciuitatem totam in cultum uersum deorum (‘a state completely concerned with the worship of the gods’), which its neighbours considered nefas uiolare (‘a sacrilege to harm’, 1.21.2) and he follows this immediately with a description of the grove: Lucus erat, quem medium ex opaco specu fons perenni rigabat aqua. Quo quia saepe Numa sine arbitris uelut ad congressum deae inferebat, Camenis eum lucum sacrauit, quod earum ibi concilia cum coniuge sua Egeria essent, et Fidei sollemne instituit. There was a grove, which a spring from a dark cave watered with a perennial Xow through its midst. Thither Numa often used to withdraw without witnesses as if to meet the goddess, and so he dedicated the grove to the Camenae, claiming that they met there with his wife Egeria, and he established a solemn worship of Fides. Livy 1.21.3

It seems very likely that Juvenal’s tableau of the Grove of Egeria is modelled on Livy’s Numa-narrative;78 in the lens of satire, Rome is transformed into a porous Urbs into which foreigners continue to pour their own population dregs and religious practices, swamping original Romans and their rites. In Juvenal’s vision, the religious confusion which Numa wished to forestall has occurred even in his own grove, with the arrival of the Jews. This place now typiWes the Rome of the satirist’s day, polluted with foreigners and enslaved by money-making, with the personiWcation of the paying tree and the begging wood emphasizing the point.79 In this description, people and place are 78 While there is a certain uniformity in the description of groves in general, the account of the cave and the spring, the conjunction of Egeria and the Camenae, the withdrawal to a secluded place without witnesses, the emphasis on religious activities, as well as the verbal echo of the verb uiolare, all seem to point to a Livian allusion. 79 In Sat. 6.542–7 there is a Jewish woman, ‘High Priestess of the Tree’ (magna sacerdos / arboris), who begs for money by ‘selling dreams’: see Courtney (1980: 332–3).

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merged to create a site and sight of disturbing contamination.80 Even the story of Numa, in such a setting, takes on a vaguely salacious air, as he is envisaged meeting his ‘girlfriend’ there at night (nocturnae . . . amicae). In satire the night is a time when especially nefarious people are abroad and up to no good; much of the satirical cityscape is imagined under the cover of darkness.81 Finally, we should consider the function of the Appian Way in this passage of topographical speciWcity. This was the most celebrated of all the Roman roads, called regina uiarum by Statius (Siluae 2.2.12).82 Beginning at the Porta Capena for the purpose of counting miles, the Appian Way just beyond the gate was a viewing point for the urban grandeur of Rome: it was Xanked by arches, altars, temples, and places—such as the Senaculum—designed for public ceremonies of departure (profectio) and return (reditus). Coming to the city, the traveller in the imperial era would have been dazzled by the spectacular fac¸ades and public buildings as the road proceeded past the Arch of Drusus, the Altar of Fortuna Redux, and the temples of Honour and Virtue.83 Passing through the Porta Capena, the Via This also points to the connections between Umbricius and the grove, since both are now in reduced circumstances (recalling perhaps the impoverished and humiliated Troiugenae who line up for the sportula in Satire 1.100). There are other references to Jews in Sat. 14.96–106, including that they are accustomed to despise Roman laws (Romanas autem soliti contemnere leges, 100), that they lead only the circumcised to the font (104), and that every seventh day is one of indolence (ignaua, 106); according to Courtney (1980: 110) the aforementioned Egyptian Arabarch, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was of Jewish parentage. 80 One might compare the description of the rich spendthrifts like Rutilus at the beginning of Satire 11 (1–20) and how they end up in the gladiatorial school: egregius cenat meliusque miserrimus horum / et cito casurus iam perlucente ruina (‘the one dining more extravagantly and better is the most doomed of these men, on the verge of collapse, with the ruin already letting in the light’, 11.12–13); in this case, moral collapse is likened to a decaying bulding. 81 Cf. the young Automedon showing oV for his amica on the Flaminian way. Livy makes Egeria the wife of Numa (1.21.3), as does Ovid, Fasti 3.275–6; 4.669. On the nocturnal setting of satire, see Miller in this volume. On using Numa for satirical eVect, cf. Martial 11.15.8–10: illam / ex qua nascimur, omnium parentem, / quam sanctus Numa mentulam uocabat (‘that from which we are born, the parent of everyone, which holy Numa used to call his dick’). 82 For the history of this road through the centuries, see della Portella’s (2004) Wnely illustrated account. 83 Senaculum, LTUR iv (1999: 264–5); Fortuna Redux, LTUR ii (1995: 275); Honour and Virtue, LTUR iii (1996: 31–2).

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Appia made the very heart of the city easily accessible. By implication, then, Umbricius’ journey out of the city might be seen as a Wnal tour of some of the greatest monuments of the Rome he wishes to abandon.84 So, as Umbricius begins to narrate his Farewell to Rome, as seen through his unloving eyes, we should keep in mind the cityscape that he and the narrator are presumed to have already traversed on their way to the Porta Capena. Although the details of his valedictory do not concern us here, it is striking that Umbricius begins his description of Rome with the arena, which is a prime locus of abjection (29–41):85 there is no place for him here (nullus in urbe locus, 3.22), but let people like Artorius and Catulus live in Rome, he says; once they were horn players for travelling provincial shows (gladiators fought to musical accompaniment), now they give munera themselves in Rome, at which they ‘kill to please’ the mob (occident populariter). Then they return immediately to their jobs, charging for admission to the public toilets (inde reuersi conducunt foricas, 37–8). Fortune raises such men when she feels like having a joke, says Umbricius, while he has none of the shameless skills essential for success at Rome: quid Romae faciam? (‘What can I do in Rome?’ 41). Juvenal tellingly juxtaposes the arena and the sewer— each a container of the dregs, each a place of inXux and eZuence—as he plays on the inversion of hierarchy: both stand metonymically for the city, which is Wgured as a giant latrine. The Porta Capena signiWes a ‘hole in the body’ whose larger implications are manifested in the sewer and the arena.

RETURN TO THE PORTA C APE NA The locale of the Porta Capena is clearly signiWcant within the broader plan of the Juvenalian collection, for the satirist makes a return to it in 8.160, with his reference to the Porta Idymaea (usually 84 Portella (2004: 45): ‘The road led out of the heart of the city, the Forum Boarium, passing between the Circus Maximus and the slopes of the Palatine Hill’; see also Theodorokopoulos in this volume on the route of Fellini’s motorcyclists past the monuments as they head out of the city. 85 See Barton (1993: 56–66, 85–90, 130–2).

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thought to mean ‘Jewish Gate’), again in connection with alien inhabitants from the East (Syrophoenix).86 This, however, occurs in a larger scene, detailing the bad behaviour of Lateranus (probably the consul designate in 65 ce under Nero) which bears some preliminary scrutiny itself: Quo mihi te solitum falsas signare tabellas in templis quae fecit auus statuamque parentis ante triumphalem? Quo, si nocturnus adulter tempora Santonico uelas adoperta cucullo? Praeter maiorum cineres atque ossa uolucri carpento rapitur pinguis Lateranus et ipse, ipse rotam adstringit suZamine mulio consul, nocte quidem, sed Luna uidet, sed sidera testes intendunt oculos. Finitum tempus honoris cum fuerit, clara Lateranus luce Xagellum sumet . . . What use is it to me for you to be accustomed to seal false wills in the temples your grandfather built and in front of your father’s triumphal statue? What use, if as a nocturnal adulterer, you cover your head by veiling it in a Santonian hood? Past the ashes and bones of his ancestors in his speeding carriage Xies fat Lateranus, and he himself—himself !— slows the wheel with the brake, a muleteer consul. It’s at night, granted, but the Moon sees, and the stars witness it with their eyes. When the end of his period of oYce has come, Lateranus will take up the whip in broad daylight . . . Juvenal 8.142–52

These lines contain several echoes of passages we examined earlier. The profanation of temple space recalls other instances of similar behaviour, although here no speciWc temples are mentioned, while the shaming of the triumphal statue is reminiscent of both the intrusion of the Egyptian Arabarch into Augustus’ colonnade of heroes (the word triumphalis appears only here and in 1.129) and of the urination on the altar of Pudicitia by Tullia and Maura. The emphasis here is very much on the way that ‘shady’ dealings make places that should be sacred into ‘shady’ locations. The next line 86 On the meaning of Idymaea, see Courtney (1980: 408); Ferguson (1979: 240); Martial 10.50.1.

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brings in the nocturnus adulter, who oVers yet another example. Nocturnus, in addition to supplying a link with Numa’s nocturna amica (3.12), is used later in the poem (8.233) of the arch-criminals Catiline and Cethegus.87 Lateranus rushes past the ashes and bones of his ancestors—presumably along the Appian or Flaminian Way— like the puer Automedon, and, just like him (nam lora tenebat / ipse, 1.61–2), he drives himself, a true mulio consul.88 For the time being, he does this at night, but once his period of oYce is ended, he will do it in broad daylight; as with the vignette of the pissing Tullia and Maura, the satirist plays on the contrast between what goes on at night, when darkness provides the cover for shamelessness, and how people act with a respectable fac¸ade during the day. The sites of Rome, often the scene of disgusting behaviour by night, may appear somewhat less polluted by day, but, as is the case with the husband walking through his wife’s urine, the signs are there if you look carefully enough. Even the day / night boundary, then, seems unreliable in the satirical cityscape. The speaker, continuing his portrayal of Lateranus, next shows him at the Porta Capena: Interea, dum lanatas robumque iuuencum more Numae caedit, Iouis ante altaria iurat solam Eponam et facies olida ad praesepia pictas. Sed cum peruigiles placet instaurare popinas, obuius adsiduo Syrophoenix udus amomo currit, Idymaeae Syrophoenix incola portae, hospitis adfectu dominum regemque salutat, et cum uenali Cyane succincta lagona. Meanwhile, while he sacriWces woolly ewes and a bullock according to Numa’s rite, before Jupiter’s altars he swears 87 Quid, Catilina, tuis natalibus atque Cethegi / inueniet quisquam sublimius? arma tamen uos / nocturna et Xammas domibus templisque parastis . . . (‘What can be found more illustrious than your ancestry, Catiline, or Cethegus? Yet you plotted to attack and burn homes and temples at night . . .’). Cf. 6.117–18, of Messalina’s night-time trips to the brothel: sumere nocturnos meretrix Augusta cucullos / ausa Palatino et tegetem praeferre cubili (‘the whore Empress dared to put on night-time hoods and to prefer a mat to her Palatine bedroom’). 88 Later, Lateranus is likened to boys behaving badly (8.167). The word mulio has last been seen at the end of Satire 3, when Umbricius breaks oV his list of reasons for leaving, because the sun is going down and ‘the muleteer has been signalling for some time his readiness to leave’: nam mihi commota iamdudum mulio uirga / adnuit (317–18).

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only by Epona and the pictures painted on the smelly stables. But, when he wants to celebrate solemnly in the all-night food bars, the Syrian Jew dripping with non-stop perfume runs to meet him, the Syrian Jew who lives at the Idymaean gate, and greets him, with a host’s welcome, as Master and King, and with him Cyane, skirt pulled up and her Xagon for sale. Juvenal 8.155–62

The more Numae recalls Numa in Egeria’s Grove earlier and more broadly alludes to his establishment of the calendar and rituals of Roman religious practice. Indeed, apart from these two passages, Numa is only mentioned elsewhere in 3.138 (as an example of the virtuous men who are no longer to be found) and in 6.343 (for the admirable simplicity of his earthenware ladle). The conjunction of the altars of Jupiter and the portraits of Epona, goddess of muleteers, painted on the smelly stables brings the most august of the gods into close association with a major source of excrement. This reminds us again of the puer Automedon (1.61; cf. qui bona donauit praesepibus, 1.59) and the invasion of public space by the Circus. The adjective olidus is elsewhere used of the stinking brothel in which a slave stands on sale (olido stans / fornice, 11.173–4). The peruigiles popinas suggests late-night consumption and excessive outXows—of money, wine, vomit, and urine.89 The meeting with the Syrophoenix by the Porta Capena is a grotesque version of Numa’s meeting with Egeria and now also of Umbricius’ with his friend the satirist-narrator. The repetition of Syrophoenix is very emphatic and the change of name to Porta Idymaea supplies further evidence of the ‘pollution’ of the location by foreign elements. It is as if the presence of Syrophoenix contaminates the old name of the gate in this line, bringing about the change from Capena to Idymaea; also, the word incola is designedly placed between Idymaeae and portae. The designation of the Syrophoenix as incola suggests that he is now the permanent resident of the area. Cyane, with her dress hitched up and her ‘Xagon for sale’, is another example of the money-making that has infected this place, and by extension the city in general. Running throughout 89 On the phrase instaurare popinas (cf. pugnam instaurare) and its connections with the rituals of the feriae Latinae, see Courtney (1980: 408). I am grateful to Alexandre Grandazzi for his insights on this subject.

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this description is a focus on Xuids and wetness:90 the Syrophoenix is udus with Xowing perfume, recalling the madidam portam of the Umbricius scene; now a diVerent kind of liquid is ‘dripping’ around the Porta Capena, however.91 The excessive Xattery and greeting of Lateranus by his eastern acquaintance is another example of excessive outpouring, akin to the shit in the stables, the perfume doused over the Syrophoenix, and the contents of Cyane’s ready-to-be-uncorked ‘Xagon’.92 The whole picture is characterized by substances spewing out; this time, instead of Umbricius’ rhetorical ‘burst out’, the gate is the scene of the Syrophoenix’s gushing Xattery. After the scene at the gate, Juvenal’s account of Lateranus concludes with him carousing in a large popina (in magna . . . popina, 172), when he should be oV guarding frontiers (maturus bello, Armeniae Syriaeque tuendis / Wnibus et Rheno atque Histro, ‘old enough for war, for defending the borders of Armenia and Syria and the Rhine and the Danube’, 169–70). Here the boundaries of the Empire are brought into direct association with the socio-cultural boundaries whose dissolution so alarms the speaker: inuenies aliquo cum percussore iacentem, permixtum nautis et furibus ac fugitiuos, inter carniWces et fabros sandapilarum et resupinati cessantia tympana galli. aequa ibi libertas, communia pocula, lectus non alius cuiquam, nec mensa remotior ulli.

90 See Miller (1998) on Roman satire and the grotesque body ‘whose oriWces are open to the world’ (399); he argues that, unlike the Rabelaisian grotesque, which seeks to open up the world to change and the other, its purpose is ‘to aYrm the rigidities of present and past by always picturing the violation of boundaries as leading to death and sterility’ (411). 91 Udus does not have a very pleasant ring in Juvenal: in 1.68 it describes the signet ring of the signator falsi sweating in the summer heat; in 8.242 it describes the sword of Octavius [sic] dripping wet from slaughter in Thessaly; in 9.4 it is applied to the moist beard of a man who has been rubbing a girl’s crotch; in 10.321 it refers to the crotch of women with multiple lovers. The adjective madidus, applied to the Porta Capena earlier (3.11), is used twice with reference to intoxication (6.297; 15.47), as well as to the armpits of a sweating poet (10.178). 92 The lagona is associated with the speech of the shyster lawyer in 7.121 (he receives Wve as payment for four pleas); with the dinner battle started by insults in 5.29, and with greedy seatraders in 12.60 and 14.271. The general suggestion is one of quantity over quality.

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There you will Wnd him reclining with some murderer, mixed up with sailors and thieves and runaways, among executioners and cheap undertakers and the silent drums of a eunuch-priest Xat on his back. There is freedom for all there, shared drinking-cups, no separate couch for anyone, nor a table set apart. Juvenal 8.173–8

If a slave behaved in such a manner, he would be sent oV to Lucania or the Tuscan chaingangs (in Lucanos aut Tusca ergastula, 180), but the Troiugenae forgive themselves and behaviour which would shame a labourer will be found to beWt a Volesus or a Brutus (181–2). In conclusion, then, the two scenes at the Porta Capena are thematically linked and constitute the most detailed account of a particular place in the Satires. These scenes oVer in a slightly more extended form an expression of the anxieties of our satirist-narrator as he wanders across the Roman cityscape. In Satire 3, the moment at the gate leads into an emblematic site-description by the narrator, followed by Umbricius’ catalogue of exempla and reasons for leaving Rome; in Satire 8, the encounter at the gate is the centrepiece of the description of Lateranus, who may not even be the worst instance: Quid si numquam adeo foedis adeoque pudendis / utimur exemplis, ut non peiora supersint? (‘But what if we can never cite examples so disgusting and so shameful that there are not worse ones to come?’ 183–4). The speciWc locations in the Satires appear Xeetingly, Xashing before us very much in the manner that sites on a museum display of Ancient Rome might do. Having surveyed them, we can say that, in the Juvenalian corpus, these locations almost always appear in the following three ways: 1. They are inherently repulsive, like the Subura or the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus, places—whether a jumbled conglomeration of small buildings like the Subura district or a massive architectural expression of the desire for solidity and containment like the Colosseum or Circus—characterized by overXowing, oozing, and pollution. The permeability of the boundaries of the arena, or of the circus, is emphasized by the number of individuals the satirist attacks for entering them when they should know better, and by the frequent signs of the incursion of the arena and the circus into the city at large.

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2. They are important public spaces, freighted with historical and cultural signiWcance, where repellent behaviour or individuals can all too easily be witnessed—like the Forum or the Campus Martius. These public spaces, including such well-known ones as the Temple of Concord, are viewed from a ‘liminal’ perspective, from the position of the marginal, alienated, and about-to-depart gaze. Echoing the litany of temples we discussed in Satire 1, there is a second list in Satire 9.22–4—Isis, the ‘imported mother’ (i.e. Cybele) and Ceres—locations notorious for adultery and prostitution, which ‘pollute’ the public and sacred space of Rome. The populating of such sacred or historically-freighted places with objectionable people creates an alienation eVect worthy of Brecht. 3. They are previously ‘clean and proper’ places that have become repulsive because of their penetration or contamination by outside elements. The Grove of Egeria is the most detailed description of how public space has become objectionable in various ways, but other examples include the Gallery of Triumphatores in the Forum Augusti. In Satire 14.256–64, the burglary of the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum Augusti is set in the context of the spectacle oVered by watching people’s greed for money, as they leave their cash under guard in the Temple of Castor: this is better entertainment than the theatres can oVer: tanto maiores humana negotia ludi (264). The move from private to public space—and vice versa—oVers no security, for both have been penetrated by outsiders. The borders between public and private, outside and inside, Rome and the Empire, have all become blurred. The sites and sights of Rome in Juvenal can be read, therefore, as places and manifestations of abjection, in the sense that Kristeva deWnes the phenomenon as ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite . . . Abjection . . . is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady . . .’93 Just as food, waste, and corpses show what must be thrust aside, ab-jected, in order to continue to live, so the objects—whether people or places—of the satirist’s loathing show what the Juvenalian subject must abject in order to maintain 93 Kristeva (1982: 4).

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the boundaries that structure his identity. Since what causes abjection is the ambiguous and the transgressive, border zones are especially signiWcant and it is not surprising therefore that the only sizeable description of a speciWc location in Rome should be one on the edge, a neglected grove near a city gate, and that it should come in Satire 3, in which the satirist attempts to abject both Rome and himself, through the alter ego of Umbricius. As we have seen in the two Porta Capena scenes and elsewhere, meeting is an important theme in satire: one bumps into unpleasant objects or is confronted by nasty people all the time. The genre relies on confrontation and this is analogous to how abjection works, by forcing the individual into close proximity, or association, with the objectionable. Satire 3 oVers a particularly eVective instance of the phenomenon, because bumping into Umbricius forces the Juvenalian speaker to confront himself. What is abjected here, then, may be the satirist himself. Abjection focuses attention on thresholds, openings, and holes, which Kristeva designates as sites of attraction and repulsion, food and excrement, desire and loss, exile and return. In the Satires, these experiences are mapped onto the city of Rome, and, by extension, the Empire it governs. Instead of lingering over speciWc locations in Rome, however, Juvenalian satire exhibits its attention to space and position— the space in which the satirical subject operates and how he is positioned in it—primarily by means of a series of pivotal scenes that take place in unnamed, or non-speciWc, liminal locations. The Satires of Juvenal thereby show us that the Roman imperial male subject is not a Wxed system, since he is not Wrmly anchored to Wxed locations, but one whose boundaries are constantly under threat and being breached by outlaw thoughts and images. Kristeva explores how the border around the body is an attempt to contain the subject, and how it is breached by the physical Xows in and out of its oriWces. In Juvenalian satirical discourse, the border around the body is mapped onto the liminal sites in the city and, beyond that, onto the borders of Rome and the territory it occupies. One notable feature of Juvenal’s Satires is the frequent reference to far-away peoples and places, such as the four rivers surrounding the Empire in 8.169–71 or the Sarmatians at the beginning of Satire 2 and Juverna, the Orkneys, the Britanni, and Armenia at the end of it (1, 160–2, 164, 170). In the case of the Sarmatians, the speaker is expressing a desire to escape as far as possible

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from the corruption around him (Ultra Sauromatas fugere hinc libet et glacialem / Oceanus, ‘I’d like to Xee from here beyond the Sarmatians and the icy Ocean’, 1–2), while, in the list of conquered territories at the end, the issue is whether the corruption so evident in the city of Rome—the word Urbs appears twice there, in lines 162 and 167—has spread to distant regions of the Empire (sed quae nunc populi Wunt uictoris in Urbe / non faciunt illi quos uicimus, ‘but the things which now happen in the victorious people’s Rome are not done by those we have conquered’, 162–3, and sic praetextatos referunt Artaxata mores, ‘thus they take back [Roman] teenage habits to Artaxata’, 170). The narrator’s obsessive interest in food and consumption, waste and sewers, cemeteries and the arena, and the edges of the Empire are all interconnected. What the narrator sees—and what he associates with these sights—as he moves like a Xaˆneur around the city is conditioned by the experience of abjection; as Kristeva puts it: ‘The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places himself, separates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a sense and not without laughter— since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection.’94 What does it mean to write the sites and sights of Rome in this way? It is a Rome that is present yet absent; the signiWers of Romanitas remain visible, but their original signiWeds have Xed, like the Camenae from Egeria’s Grove; Rome can be experienced only from a position of uncertainty and threat; there is no Wxed centre, just as there is no anchor for the subject’s identity. There is a general movement from public spaces and concerns in the opening satires (1–5) to a more private realm in the later ones (6–14); this division is often interpreted as signalling a molliWcation in the satirist’s tone or a change in perspective, but is rather an attempt to reclaim some Wxed and comforting space. The attempt ultimately fails and the abject stray is back out in the open in Satires 15 and 16. What is abjected does not go away, it is never fully expelled; instead it hovers around the borders of the city-as-body, Xickering like the monuments of Rome in these poems, because abjection constitutes the body in the moment of its violation. 94 Kristeva (1982: 8).

5 Victim and voyeur: Rome as a character in Tacitus’ Histories 3* Rhiannon Ash

quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliqua historia uestigium ponimus For wherever we go, we walk upon some piece of history Cicero, De Wnibus 5.5

I N T RO DU C T IO N In ancient literature, the device of personifying any city, whether to articulate moralism, to trigger pathos or to celebrate imperial or personal achievements, has rich potential. Rome above all repeatedly becomes a focal point for creative personiWcation along such lines, particularly in genres such as epic, oratory, satire, and historiography.1 Of course, the scale and degree of an author’s elaboration naturally varies: personiWcations range from pithy instances encapsulated by a single word, such as Juvenal’s depiction of Rome enslaved * I would like to thank the editors, Diana Spencer and David Larmour, both for their invitation to contribute an article to this volume and for their helpful feedback on my piece. I am also grateful for the thoughtful questions and comments from the jovial audiences who attended my talks based on this paper, which were delivered at Glasgow University and the Oxford Philological Society in 2006. 1 See Fantham (1972: 128–30).

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to a bald Nero (cum . . . caluo seruiret Roma Neroni, ‘when Rome was enslaved to a bald Nero’ Satires 4.37–8), to more complex tropes, where Rome herself is invested with physical characteristics and can move or even speak, such as when Lucan’s personiWed Rome pleads with Caesar not to cross the Rubicon (1.190–2).2 Before turning to Tacitus’ complex depiction of the city in wartime and to his deployment of her very buildings as agents of perception and historical change, I want to consider three preliminary and programmatic instances of personiWcation from other authors. All three passages in diVerent ways show the emotional power of Rome personiWed at pivotal moments and raise issues crucial for my subsequent discussion. The Wrst instance is from oratory, when Cicero depicts those welcoming him upon his return from exile: unus ille dies mihi quidem immortalitatis instar fuit quo in patriam redii, cum senatum egressum uidi populumque Romanum uniuersum, cum mihi ipsa Roma prope conuolsa sedibus suis ad complectendum conseruatorem suum progredi uisa est. quae me ita accepit ut non modo omnium generum, aetatum, ordinum omnes uiri ac mulieres omnis fortunae ac loci, sed etiam moenia ipsa uiderentur et tecta urbis ac templa laetari. That single day when I returned to my fatherland was to me a kind of immortality, when I saw the senate and the whole Roman people come out, and when Rome herself seemed to me to advance, having almost torn herself from her foundations, in order to embrace her saviour. She welcomed me in such a way that not only all men and all women of all classes, ages and ranks of society, of every circumstance and position, but even the walls themselves and the buildings of the city and the temples seemed to rejoice. Cicero, In Pisonem 52

Cicero opens the vista eVectively as a pivotal moment by playing with the contrast between a single day and the rest of time (immortality).3 He also engages our interest by accentuating the visual mode, triggering enargeia by concentrating on his own mediating gaze of the scene 2 Quintilian discusses the emotive power of the prosopopeia, where an orator pretends to speak in the character of his client in order to move the judge (6.1.25–7). A poet well-versed in the declamation schools who makes a personiWed city speak is extending that technique. 3 Tacitus does something similar when describing the Roman soldiers at the scene of the Varian disaster lamenting tot hominum milibus unum iam reliquum diem, ‘the one day remaining for so many thousands of men’ (Annals 1.65.7).

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(uidi). More startling than this, however, is his deployment of a rather surreal narrative mode through which he pointedly highlights the strenuous eVort whereby Rome laboriously uproots herself and goes out to meet him, so that the ‘city’ paradoxically leaves the city. By this arduous physical dislocation, he suggests that the centripetal focus for the expression of patriotic feelings, even from Rome, is now Cicero himself. The fantasy element here is brought out by comparing Cicero’s relatively prosaic description to Atticus of his arrival back in Rome (4 September 57 bce), which is much more down-to-earth: ad urbem ita ueni ut nemo ullius ordinis homo nomenclatori notus fuerit qui mihi obuiam non uenerit, praeter eos inimicos quibus id ipsum, se inimicos esse, non liceret aut dissimulare aut negare. cum uenissem ad portam Capenam, gradus templorum ab inWma plebe completi erant. a qua plausu maximo cum esset mihi gratulatio signiWcata, similis et frequentia plausus me usque ad Capitolium celebrauit in foroque et in ipso Capitolio miranda multitudo fuit. I arrived at the outskirts of the city. Every man whose name was known to my nomenclator slave, no matter what his rank, came out to meet me, except for enemies who could neither conceal nor deny the fact that they were such. When I reached the Porta Capena I found the steps of the temple thronged by the common people, who welcomed me with vociferous applause. Similar numbers and applause followed me to the Capitol. In the Forum and on the Capitol itself, the crowd was spectacular. Cicero, Ad Atticum 4.1.5

The reception is certainly enthusiastic, but there are no personiWed buildings and the mediating gaze of Cicero himself has disappeared (Att. 4.1.5). In the more elaborate depiction of the speech, a single citizen has almost symbolically ‘become’ the city by a peculiar form of synecdoche.4 At the same time, in a diVerent trope, the individual buildings (the fabric of the city) are made to act as a chorus,

4 Cf. the antithesis between the physical fabric of Rome, subject to destruction, and her citizens, especially the senate, in whom the true spirit of the city lies: so Lucan’s Lentulus argues that ‘Rome’ (and the power invested in her) is wherever the senate is (rerum nos summa sequetur j imperiumque comes, ‘the rule of the state will follow us and power will be our companion’ 5.26–7) and Tacitus’ Otho suggests that the aeternitas rerum rests on the senate’s safety rather than on the city’s buildings (Histories 1.84.4).

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articulating and reflecting the intense happiness that the citizens themselves are depicted as feeling. It is rather like Florus’ depiction of Rome, uelut elata montibus suis ‘as if raised aloft on her hills’ (1.38.21) watching the Romans defeat the Cimbri, which happened as the citizens themselves were watching a gladiatorial show in the city. The passage from the In Pisonem is just one of many instances where Cicero uses Rome elaborately as a character in his speeches to make his point;5 and the distinction between Rome on the one hand and her individual buildings on the other will recur in Tacitus’ representation of the city. In Tacitus’ urban landscape, as we will see, the Capitol, unlike Cicero’s personiWed Rome, is helplessly rooted to the spot and conspicuously lacks any saviour, Ciceronian or otherwise, to come to the rescue.6 We can see a conceptual precursor to this elaborate personiWcation of the city in an expressive legend, linked by writers from Fabius Pictor onwards to Rome’s earliest history. When Tarquin the Proud’s builders are digging the foundations for the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, they make a macabre discovery, a decapitated human head with its features intact.7 Yet the soothsayers see this as a positive omen, indicating that Rome will become caput rerum, thus reading the real severed head as a metaphorical imperial head.8 Such teleological interpretations must have seemed particularly attractive as Rome was becoming the imperial power par excellence, progressively eclipsing her rival Carthage and undergoing radical political changes that would eventually transform the republic into the principate. As Nicolet observes, ‘There was a caput to the immense ‘‘body’’ that was

5 See Edwards (1996: 114–16), including this passage. 6 The archetypal saviour of the (Wxed and vulnerable) Capitol is Manlius Capitolinus, who in 390 bce was roused by the sacred geese and stopped the Gallic invaders from seizing the Capitol. Yet Manlius was also infamous for his later sedition, narrated especially by Livy (6.11–20) in terms evocative of the Catilinarian conspiracy; Oakley (1997: 481–4); cf. Wiseman (1979); Jaeger (1993). The absence of the ‘good’ Manlius from Tacitus’ narrative will be discussed below. 7 Varro, De lingua Latina 5.41; Livy 1.55.5; Pliny, Naturalis historia 28.15–17. 8 Fabius Pictor and (later) Valerius Antias (cited at Arnobius 6.7) are the original sources for this story, which came into special prominence in the third century bce; see Ogilvie (1965: 211–12); Borgeand (1987); Beck and Walter (2005: 103–5). Cornell (1995: 128–9) argues that the construction of the temple should be dated to Tarquinius Superbus’ reign rather than to the rule of Tarquinius Priscus. For the evolution of the Capitol / caput nexus after the end of the empire, see Edwards (1996: 89–95).

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the empire: it was both the city of Rome and the emperor.’9 That is just one of many reasons why decapitating emperors during civil wars was such an expressive mode of execution (and why the destruction of the Capitoline Temple in Tacitus, Histories 3, is so chilling, as the metaphorical ‘head’ of the empire is destroyed, shortly before the emperor himself is executed).10 The discovery of the severed head on the Capitol is a relatively simple device to symbolize the potential of Rome as a proto-imperial power, but, in the context of this current discussion, it arguably serves as a forerunner to more elaborate images of the city’s personiWcation that we Wnd elsewhere. One extraordinary example of a rather more involved personiWcation of Rome, developing through time, features in a fragment preserved by Lactantius (Diu. inst. 7.15.14–16), often assigned to Seneca the Elder, and perhaps originally located in his historical work (although this is not certain).11 In this unanchored fragment, Seneca sets up an elaborate system whereby the diVerent phases of the history of Rome are divided into aetates, running from the city’s ‘Wrst infancy’ under her ‘midwife’, Romulus, through her ‘adolescence’ lasting until the end of the Punic wars, and her ‘prime’ lasting to the end of the republic. The arrival of the principate signals the inevitable decline: haec fuit prima eius senectus, cum bellis lacerata12 ciuilibus atque intestino malo pressa rursus ad regimen singularis imperii recidit quasi ad alteram infantiam reuoluta. amissa enim libertate, quam Bruto duce et auctore defenderat, ita consenuit tamquam sustentare se ipsa non ualeret nisi adminiculo regentium uterentur. 9 Nicolet (1991: 192). For an extension of the metaphor to include the Cloaca as the excretory passage of the city, see Gowers (1995). 10 Pompey’s death by decapitation is also expressive in this context. See Ash (1999: 80–3). 11 Seneca the Elder wrote a history ‘from the start of the civil wars, the point at which truth Wrst withdrew, almost up to the day of his death’, as we know from a fragment of his son’s De vita patris (Seneca fr. 99 Haase). GriYn (1972: 10) reminds us that the fragment could come from a lost philosophical work of Seneca the Younger (and she reviews the fragment in Note B on 19). See also Sussman (1978: 137–42). 12 The verb lacero is also emotively associated with ravaging Rome at Seneca, Octavia 503–4 (Roma . . . lacerata totiens), with ravaging countries at Cato, Orationes 177 ¼ Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2.6.7 (cum . . . Hannibal terram Italiam laceraret), Cicero, De oYciis 1.57 (qui lacerarunt . . . patriam), Livy 2.57.3 (laceratam . . . rem publicam), and with ravaging the empire at Tacitus, Histories 3.55.2 (lacerare imperium; cf. rem Romanam . . . lacerari, Annals 4.24.1).

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This was her Wrst old-age, when, ripped apart by civil wars and oppressed by internal trouble, she fell back again into the control of one man, reverting as it were to a second childhood. What I mean is that gone was the liberty which she had defended while Brutus was leader and instigator, and thus she grew old, virtually lacking the strength to support herself without using the prop of emperors.

This progression has something in common with Hesiod’s Wve ages of the world (Works and Days 106–201), especially the race of iron (176–201) with its breakdown of family ties and prematurely elderly children. Seneca’s sustained focus on the successive phases of a human life is an utterly bleak mode of personiWcation, transforming the jingoistic ideology that we saw was implicit in the severed head discovered on the Capitol into a vision of inevitable and irreversible decline.13 It has something in common with a subversive section in the speech of Ovid’s Pythagoras who, after listing a sequence of Greek cities whose fortune has waned, then highlights Rome, who olim / immensi caput orbis erit, ‘someday will be head of the wide world’ (Met. 15.434–5). Yet the context, that is the citation of Greek cities whose power has disappeared and whose walls have collapsed, suggests that inextricably bound up in this vision of a grand imperial future for Rome lies the inevitable disintegration to follow.14 Similarly, Seneca’s elaborate model of the personiWed Rome’s successive aetates is used to articulate a sharply pessimistic vision of the future of the city as an imperial power.15 If the passage was originally part of a historical narrative, then the work must have been a far cry from 13 It was a model which appealed to Florus, who simpliWes it for inclusion in the introduction of his Epitome (1.1.4–7), using only four stages, and brightening up the last one by seeing Trajan’s principate as a temporary rejuvenation. 14 See Rossi (2002: 244–7) on the pessimistic undercurrents of the Ovidian passage further articulated via links to Vergil, Aeneid 6.773–6. We can also think here of Herodotus 1.5.2. 15 Nor is this an isolated example. Poignant personiWcations of Rome, debased, compromised, or otherwise humiliated, have a particularly vibrant literary heritage. So, Petronius in the miniaturized bellum ciuile, describes how war is the only thing that can wake hoc mersam caeno Romam somnoque iacentem (Satyricon 119.58). As Connors (1998: 110) says, ‘Roma personiWed becomes a banqueter suVering the after-eVects of overindulgence’. Cf. Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo (c.1360), who depicts an imaginary voyage with the geographer Solinus and a meeting with a decrepit old woman, Rome, who shows them the ruins of the city so that they can understand quanto fui bella, ‘how beautiful I used to be’ (Dittamondo 2.31).

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the monumentalizing history of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. Seneca the Elder did not of course live to see the burning of the Capitol in 69 ce (and nor did his son, the other candidate for the fragment’s authorship), but the ‘decapitation’ of the city suggested by that event would surely have made an expressive end point for his personiWcation of the elderly Rome. This example of a vivid but pessimistic personiWcation of Roma, locked into the relentless forwards momentum of history and time, but helpless and debased by the reality of the principate on which she now has to lean, is an especially salient starting point for this essay. I propose to examine the creative ways in which Tacitus uses images of the city and her buildings within his conceptual landscape of Rome as he narrates the Wnal stages of the violent civil war between the Vitellians and the Flavians in Rome in Histories 3.16 For Tacitus, the very fabric and buildings of the city serve both as lofty arbiters of the morally debased human sphere and as innocent victims of the self-destructive and sordid Wghting. As such, they have a more wholesome presence in the text than many (or arguably any) of the human protagonists. In particular, we will see a cumulative accentuation of the important visual presence of these buildings, as places to see and be seen. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of the mediating ‘gaze’ in ancient historical texts, but in Histories 3, Tacitus extends the point of view increasingly to the buildings of Rome themselves.17 By activating conflicting or cohering viewpoints from internal protagonists, whether animate or inanimate, Tacitus can infuse his landscape of civil war with moral questions which focus on shame and honour. Indeed, the imagined gaze of these buildings, the most powerless protagonists in the text for all their powerful symbolism, triggers posterity’s condemnation and memorializes the self-destruction through historiography, thereby serving as a powerful abstract weapon after the event.18 If Roman historiography is concerned to provide exempla, namely, great Roman individuals from whom their descendants can learn, then personiWed buildings can also be made to function in this way, so 16 Tacitus’ narrative has generated some spirited discussion of his accuracy regarding the real topography of the city, especially Wiseman (1978) and Wellesley (1981), but my discussion will focus instead on what this topography symbolizes. 17 See Davidson (1991); Walker (1993); and Feldherr (1998). 18 For the moralizing potential of the gaze in a range of texts, see Barton (2002).

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that bricks and mortar also make a fundamental contribution to the moralizing agenda of the text.19

T E XT UA L T I M E A N D S PAC E , R E A L TIME AND SPACE The main focus of this discussion will be Tacitus’ Histories 3.67.2–3.86, a tour de force which narrates the disastrous events that took place in Rome between 18 and 20 December 69 ce, above all the climactic destruction of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter (Histories 3.71–2) on 19 December and the murder of Vitellius (Histories 3.85) on 20 December. On successive days, both the temple that symbolizes the perpetuity of Roman imperial power and the emperor himself are annihilated, and both building and man are given ‘obituaries’ (Histories 3.72, 3.86) to play up the signiWcance of their parallel fates.20 This narrative segment is particularly conspicuous for its large scale, considering that Tacitus documents a period of only three days: if one turns to the Annals for comparison, there are whole years which Tacitus narrates more compactly than this. However, it is not just the scale that is arresting, but Tacitus’ elaborate manipulation of time and space (both geographical and narrative) before and within this section. Even before the climactic events in Rome, Tacitus sets up a powerful marriage of time and space as an expressive precursor. After Vespasian’s troops have defeated the Vitellians at the second battle of Bedriacum (24–5 October 69 ce; Histories 3.16–31), the Flavian general Antonius Primus advances slowly towards Rome, with an agonizing sluggishness which is all the more striking, because of the dynamism of his actions up until now. His entire personality and strategy has hitherto been dictated by the concept of festinatio, ‘hurried activity’, which earned him tags such as acerrimus belli concitator, ‘the most enthusiastic instigator of the war’ (Histories 3.2.1).21 Yet after his victory, Tacitus carefully accentuates the decelerating pace of this Flavian march to 19 On exemplarity, see Chaplin (2000). 20 On the destruction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus see Briessmann (1955: 69–75) and Darwall-Smith (1996: 41–7). 21 On Tacitus’ depiction of Antonius Primus see Ash (1999: 147–65).

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Rome in minute detail. So, Antonius Primus, after setting oV from Fanum Fortunae down the Via Flaminia (Histories 3.50), Wrst reaches Carsulae, 60 miles from Rome (Histories 3.60), then Narnia, 50 miles from Rome (Histories 3.63), and then by 16 December he arrives at Ocriculum, 45 miles away from Rome (Histories 3.78.1), where he decides to celebrate the Saturnalia, a grotesquely inappropriate move typically played up by Tacitus. Had Antonius Primus and his troops only moved more quickly, then their presence in the city could have prevented much death and destruction, but thanks to their celebration, they enter Rome on 20 December (Histories 3.82), after the Wre in the Capitoline Temple.22 This minute documentation of Antonius Primus’ troops progressing southwards in Wve- and ten-mile bursts creates a sense of impending menace for Rome, but it proves to be a red herring: the forces necessary to unleash destruction are in fact already there within the city. Tacitus’ narrative of Antonius Primus’ frustratingly slow march southwards to Rome illustrates how eVectively he can use representations of space and time cumulatively and creatively to dramatize his narrative. This meticulous citation of stopping-points (Fanum Fortunae, Carsulae, Narnia, Ocriculum) is not just an indication of a historian’s attention to detail, but reads like a warped itinerarium, marred by far too many halts along the way, given how urgently Antonius Primus needs to take control in Rome, even before the burning of the Capitol: no wonder Tacitus refers scornfully to the praua mora, ‘wicked delay’ (Histories 3.78.1).23 Yet Tacitus also uses the topography of the city itself in an especially pointed way in this section (Histories 3.67.2–3.86). It is full of references to routes through the city, both those taken and those avoided, and shows a spatial awareness of the sites of Rome that is striking within the surviving Tacitean corpus.24 22 See Wellesley (1981: 166–71) for evidence about precise dates between 15 and 20 December. 23 Salway (2001) discusses the phenomenon of Roman itineraria, listing the names of places and the distances between them along a given route, including the famous Peutinger Table, which ‘bears a multicoloured depiction of the entire inhabited world (oecumene) . . . carefully planned to put a seated personiWcation of Rome in a nimbus at the centre both horizontally and vertically’ (2001: 22). 24 Sites of Rome mentioned in 3.67.2–3.86 are: Palatium (67.2, 68.3, 70.2, 84.4); aedes Concordiae (68.3); domus fratris (68.3, 70.1); Via Sacra (68.3); domus Flauii

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One particularly rich cluster of topographical references occurs during the narrative of Vitellius’ abortive abdication:25 XV kalendas Ianuarias audita defectione legionis cohortiumque, quae se Narniae dediderant, pullo amictu Palatio degreditur, maesta circum familia; ferebatur lecticula paruulus Wlius uelut in funebrem pompam: uoces populi blandae et intempestiuae, miles minaci silentio. nec quisquam adeo rerum humanarum immemor, quem non commoueret illa facies, Romanum principem et generis humani paulo ante dominum relicta fortunae suae sede per populum, per urbem exire de imperio. nihil tale uiderant, nihil audierant. repentina uis dictatorem Caesarem oppresserat, occultae Gaium insidiae, nox et ignotum rus fugam Neronis absconderant, Piso et Galba tamquam in acie cecidere: in sua contione Vitellius, inter suos milites, prospectantibus etiam feminis, pauca et praesenti maestitiae congruentia locutus–cedere se pacis et rei publicae causa, retinerent tantum memoriam sui fratremque et coniugem et innoxiam liberorum aetatem miserarentur–, simul Wlium protendens, modo singulis modo uniuersis commendans, postremo fletu praepediente adsistenti consuli (Caecilius Simplex erat) exsolutum a latere pugionem, uelut ius necis uitaeque ciuium reddebat. aspernante consule, reclamantibus qui in contione adstiterant, ut in aede Concordiae positurus insignia imperii domumque fratris petiturus discessit. maior hic clamor obsistentium penatibus priuatis, in Palatium uocantium. interclusum aliud iter, idque solum quo in sacram uiam pergeret, patebat: tum consilii inops in Palatium redit. On December 18th, after hearing news that the legion and cohorts at Narnia had deserted him and surrendered to the enemy, Vitellius, dressed in mourning garb, left the Palace, surrounded by his sorrowful household. His small son was carried in a little litter, as if to a funeral procession. The

Sabini (69.1); lacus Fundani (69.2); Capitolium (69.4, 70.2, 71.1, 72, 75.3, 79.1, 81.2); rostra (70.1, 85.1); Auentinus (70.1, 84.4); penates uxoris (70.1); forum (71.1); imminentia foro templa (71.1); Capitolina arx (71.1); lucus asyli (71.3); Tarpeia rupes (71.3); sedes Iouis Optimi Maximi (72.1); Velabrum (74.1); Ioui Custodi templum (74.1); Gemoniae scalae (74.2, 85); Saxa rubra (79.1); Via Flaminia (79.1, 82.2); ipsa patriae moenia (80.2); pons Mului (82.1); ripa Tiberis (82.2); Via Salaria (82.2); Collina porta (82.2, 82.3); Sallustiani horti (82.3); campus Martius (82.3); Galbae occisi locus (¼ Lacus Curtius 85); paterni penates (86.3). 25 See the accompanying map (Fig. 2). Extracts from the Histories come from Heubner’s Teubner text of 1978. Translations are my own.

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people’s utterances were flattering and untimely; the soldiers remained threateningly silent. Nobody was so mindless of human aVairs as to be unmoved by that spectacle. A Roman emperor, shortly beforehand master of the human race, after leaving the seat of his authority, was now passing through the city and through the people, abandoning his power. They had neither seen nor heard about anything like it. Suddenly unleashed violence had done for the dictator Caesar, and a secret plot had removed Gaius, while night and the obscure countryside had hidden Nero’s flight. Piso and Galba had practically fallen on the Weld of battle. Vitellius, before an assembly of his own people and in front of his own soldiers, with even women looking on, made a few remarks suitable to his current sorrowful position: he said that he was yielding for the sake of peace and the state, but he begged them only to keep his memory in their hearts and take pity on his brother, his wife and his innocent young children. At the same time he held out his son and commended him, now to individuals, now to them all. Finally, as tears were choking his voice, he turned to the consul (Caecilius Simplex was the man), who was standing close by, and unstrapped his dagger from his side and began to hand it over, a symbol of his power over the life and death of his subjects. While the consul was refusing it and the people standing by in the assembly were loudly contradicting him, Vitellius departed, intending to deposit the imperial regalia in the Temple of Concord and to head for his brother’s house. Hereupon there was a louder uproar, as they refused to let him enter a private house and called him to the Palace. The alternative route was blocked, and the only route available was the road leading to the Sacred Way. Not knowing what else to do, Vitellius returned to the palace. Tacitus, Histories 3.67.2–68

The way in which Tacitus describes space and movements in this passage is particularly interesting. Vitellius leaves the Palace, described Wrst neutrally (Palatio degreditur, ‘he left the Palace’ 3.67.2), and then emotively (relicta fortunae suae sede, ‘after leaving the seat of his authority’ 3.68.1) and progresses per populum, per urbem, ‘through the people, through the city’ (Histories 3.68.1) to make a speech of resignation at the rostra in the Forum.26 After the 26 Per urbem seems exaggerated, given the relatively short distance from the palace to the Forum, but Tacitus wants to underscore the emotional impact of Vitellius’ journey for onlookers. The power of the rostra as a location is suggested elsewhere by Pliny the Elder’s striking description of it as an oculatissimus locus, ‘a spot most looked at’ (Naturalis Historia 34.24).

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consul, Caecilius Simplex, has refused the emperor’s gesture of abdication (handing over his dagger), Vitellius plans instead to leave his imperial regalia in the Temple of Concord (close to the rostra) and to head for his brother’s house (ut in aede Concordiae positurus insignia imperii domumque fratris petiturus, ‘intending to deposit his insignia of power in the Temple of Concord and head for his brother’s house’ Histories 3.68.3), but the crowd (vividly reiWed as a ‘wall’ which temporarily becomes part of the city’s fabric) blocks his way, leaving open only the Via Sacra, the route back to the Palace. Considering that Vitellius basically goes from the Palace to the Forum and back again without achieving his aim, Tacitus’ level of supplementary topographical detail is striking, but it has a purpose. First, it serves to explain, since the sight of Vitellius’ pitiful (if short) journey from the palace to the Forum allows time for onlookers to feel shock at the unprecedented situation of an emperor attempting to abdicate in broad daylight: nihil tale uiderant, nihil audierant, ‘they had neither seen nor heard anything like it’ (Histories 3.68.1). No wonder the consul and the crowd are so unresponsive to the emperor’s plan.27 Second, it makes a point about the nature of Vitellius’ power (or lack of it). Tacitus pointedly mentions two places that Vitellius never even reaches because the crowd bars his way, the Temple of Concord and his brother’s house nearby.28 There is of course a pleasing irony in Tacitus drawing attention to the Temple of Concord, which should be associated with harmonious agreement, in a context so rich with discord and self-destruction.29 However, the fact that it was the physical barrier of the crowd that drove back Vitellius (interclusum aliud iter, ‘the alternative route was blocked’ Histories 3.68.3) is particularly important because it suggests that in Tacitus, Vitellius’ desire to abdicate was sincere, despite assumptions to the contrary made afterwards. Suetonius implies otherwise, with

27 Levene (1997) discusses the mechanisms whereby Tacitus stirs pity in the audience during Vitellius’ attempted abdication scene. 28 Wellesley (1972: 166): ‘It stood presumably in the Clivus Argentarius or the Vicus Iugarius, not far from the north-western end of the forum.’ 29 The Temple of Concord was also the venue for discussing the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators in 63 bce and Sejanus in 31 ce. See Patterson (1992, esp. 192), and Ferroni (1993).

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Vitellius setting oV pugionem . . . quasi in aede Concordiae positurus, ‘as if intending to deposit the dagger in the Temple of Concord’ (Vitellius 15.4), but then being persuaded to retain the dagger by people sycophantically shouting out that he was the actual embodiment of Concord (a detail not in Tacitus). Suetonius’ Vitellius is at best mercurial, at worst a hypocrite, whereas Tacitus’ Vitellius’ is simply powerless in the face of the crowd. If, as Patterson has suggested, after Augustus’ rebuilding of the Forum, the western end (around the Curia) was associated with the Senate and the people, while the eastern end (around the Temple of Divus Julius) was associated with the emperor, then Vitellius’ unsuccessful attempt to head for the Temple of Concord at the western end has an additional symbolism, as he physically tries to move away from imperial to popular and senatorial space during his unsuccessful abdication, but cannot do so.30 Yet Vitellius’ powerlessness becomes even clearer when, on the next day, Flavius Sabinus complains that the abdication had merely been a show intended to deceive eminent men. Tacitus formulates Sabinus’ objection suggestively: cur enim e rostris fratris domum, imminentem foro et irritandis hominum oculis, quam Auentinum et penates uxoris petisset? ita priuato et omnem principatus speciem uitanti conuenisse. contra Vitellium in Palatium, in ipsam imperii arcem regressum . . . For why, after leaving the rostra, had he sought his brother’s house, which overlooked the Forum and stimulated people’s eyes, rather than the Aventine and his wife’s home? That was suitable for a private citizen and one trying to avoid all the show of imperial authority. Yet Vitellius had returned to the palace, to the stronghold of empire itself. Tacitus, Histories 3.70.1

This interesting set of complaints shows how movements around the city (even abandoned itineraries) can be read as laden with meaning. Sabinus reserves special vitriol for Vitellius’ decision to head for a place that he never even reaches, his brother’s eye-catching house,

30 Patterson (1992: 194).

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rather than his wife’s house on the Aventine, the hill historically associated with the plebs, but by this stage the location of e´lite housing.31 In the end, Vitellius will indeed flee to his wife’s house on the Aventine (Histories 3.84.4) shortly before his death, but, even then, he gets drawn back again to the palace, a false refuge, through his own Wckleness and fear. On this occasion, Sabinus appears to know nothing about the intimidation of the crowd that forced Vitellius to return to the palace after attempting to abdicate and wrongly assumes that the emperor was in control of the whole situation. Buildings potentially have powerful symbolism, but activating (or denying) that symbolism depends on being able to overcome unpredictable factors in the surrounding space, such as the pressures exerted by the crowd. It was clearly a point of contention: Cassius Dio actually has Vitellius successfully reach his brother’s house (65.16.5).

EV EN T H E WALL S H AVE EYE S The other striking aspect of Sabinus’ objection is the way in which he describes Lucius Vitellius’ house as imminentem foro et irritandis hominum oculis, ‘overlooking the Forum and stimulating people’s eyes’ (Histories 3.70.1). This formulation is important because it taps into a nexus of visual imagery connected with Rome’s buildings that crucially recurs in this section (Histories 3.67.2–86). The impact of this house as a potential destination for the emperor has nothing to do with the fact that it is owned by his brother, but rests on its prominent location and visibility. It is a place to see and be seen, overlooking the Forum, the focal point for politics and business, and as such it lays claim to power in a way that is incompatible with abdication, or so

31 For the Aventine, which had been within the pomerium since 49 ce, see Coarelli (1985: 338–52); Richardson (1992: 47); and Andreussi (1993: 147–50). It was not necessarily an unproblematic destination for Vitellius. The Aventine was full of longstanding political associations with the plebs, and some, such as Sejanus, had attempted to exploit these for their own ends; see Syme (1956: 257–66).

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Sabinus argues.32 The choice of the verb immineo may even contain within it a hint of personiWcation, since, while its primary meaning here is ‘overlook’ (OLD 1), other meanings of the verb are connected with people (OLD 2, 3, 4, and 5).33 However that may be, the house (and therefore its occupant) certainly draws the eye to it, as the colourful periphrasis irritandis hominum oculis, ‘stimulating people’s eyes’ makes clear.34 There is additional impact in that the focus on this house is broadly evocative of Cicero’s powerful visual imagery in the De domo sua. Cicero cannot bear that his house on the Palatine, seized and turned into a temple by Clodius during his exile, should stand as a visible monument to his humiliation: in conspectu prope totius urbis domus est mea, pontiWces. in qua si manet illud non monumentum uirtutis, sed sepulcrum inimico nomine inscriptum, demigrandum potius aliquo est quam habitandum in ea urbe in qua tropaea de me et de re publica uideam constituta. My house is in the sight of almost the whole city, priests. If there remains in the city that—I won’t call it a monument of valour—but that tomb inscribed with the name of my enemy, I had better migrate to some other place rather than live in that city in which I am to see trophies set up to symbolise victory over me and over the republic.35 Cicero, De domo sua 100

Cicero’s former house, located high on the Palatine, draws the collective eyes of the city to it, just as Lucius Vitellius’ domus does. Another example of this visual phenomenon is Tacitus’ later description of Piso’s domus foro imminens festa ornatu, ‘house overlooking the Forum, festive in its decoration’, which proves to be one of the irritamenta inuidiae, ‘incitements to resentment’, upon his return to

32 Cf. Spencer’s essay in this volume on the Forum viewed from above as a location of fracture and tension for citizen self-fashioning. 33 See also Fantham (1972: 118). 34 Cf. Livy 2.7.11, where the consul Poplicola oVers to rebuild his house at the bottom of the hill, rather than keeping it on the top of the Velia (the north-eastern part of the Palatine), because the people felt that their libertas was threatened by its current location. Plutarch’s version of the story at Publicola 10.2–4 emphasizes the negative visual impact of the consul’s haughty ‘descent’ from the house on high. 35 There is also strong visual imagery centring on the house at De domo sua 101 and 146. Cf. De oYciis 1.138 for Cicero’s discussion of visible property and power, especially Gnaeus Octavius’ house on the Palatine, which everybody went to see.

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Rome after Germanicus’ death, particularly since celebritate loci nihil occultum, ‘nothing was hidden because of the crowded nature of the place’ (Annals 3.9.3).36 Tacitus’ reference to Lucius Vitellius’ house is not an isolated instance of the visual impact of buildings dove-tailing with the power struggles of the civil war being played out in the city. When the leaderless Vitellian soldiers are advancing towards the Capitol, where Flavius Sabinus and his associates have taken refuge, they travel at full speed past the forum et imminentia foro templa, ‘Forum and the temples overlooking the Forum’ (Histories 3.71.1).37 The phrasing recalls Sabinus’ earlier description of Lucius Vitellius’ house imminentem foro, ‘overlooking the Forum’ (Histories 3.70.1), but the impact is diVerent. Where Sabinus assumed that the secular site of the house occupied by Vitellius would naturally attract everybody’s eyes, here, the venerable temples do not even draw the soldiers’ gaze for a moment, nor slow down their relentless advance (cito agmine, ‘in a swift column’, Histories 3.71.1)38 to the Capitol (the location of the grandest temple of them all). We can compare here a moment in Livy, where Camillus’ soldiers are inspired in their rescue of their besieged comrades on the Capitol in conspectu habentes fana deum et coniuges et liberos et solum patriae deforme belli malis, ‘having in their view the shrines of the gods, their wives and children, the soil of their fatherland, scarred by the evils of war’ (5.49.3). In general, temples can be considered as representing or personifying the gods in whose honour they are built: so Lucan’s Caesar evokes Capitoline Jupiter with, O magnae qui moenia prospicis

36 Woodman and Martin (1996: 127) have an extensive note on houses as status symbols and on the potential dangers of such visibility. A conspicuous instance is Caecina Tuscus’ house, which Vitellius notices: turrim uicino sitam collucere per noctem crebris luminibus, ‘a nearby villa was gleaming through the night with abundant lights’ (Histories 3.38.1). Its high visibility proves deadly for Junius Blaesus, the guest of honour at a dinner party being held there. 37 Wiseman (1978: 166) speciWes that the temples were those of Castor, Saturn, and Concord. 38 Heubner (1972: 169) notes that this noun and adjective are not combined before Tacitus. This is the Wrst occurrence of the combination (also at Annals 1.63.4, 4.25.1).

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urbis / Tarpeia de rupe, Tonans, ‘O Thunderer, you who look out over the walls of the great city from the Tarpeian rock . . .’ (1.195–6).39 If so, the Vitellian soldiers’ immunity to the ‘gaze’ of these buildings is an important marker of their gross moral debasement, since in ignoring the temples, they are also disregarding the gods that they represent. Of course, anthropomorphized buildings are not always emotive, such as when Vitruvius raises practical concerns with the direction in which diVerent kinds of building debeant spectare, ‘ought to look’ (De arch. 6.41.1–2). Yet there are clearly special moral and ideological implications for the Vitellians’ characterization triggered by Tacitus in introducing at this point the looming temples above the Forum.40 There is a particularly revealing intertext from Livy, who powerfully and memorably depicts the deuotio of Marcus Curtius: 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. (They say that) after silence fell, Curtius, gazing at the temples of the immortal gods, which overlook the Forum, and at the Capitol, and stretching his hands now to the sky, now to the gaping chasm towards the gods below, devoted himself to death. Livy 7.6.4

Livy here gives a two-way visual exchange: the temples ‘look down’ upon Curtius in the Forum, but, at the same time, Curtius responds by looking up at the Capitol for inspiration before sacriWcing himself

39 Cf. Livy’s Manlius Capitolinus, praying to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and the other gods and goddesses qui Capitolium arcemque incolitis, ‘you who inhabit the Capitol and the citadel’ (6.16.2), with Kraus (1994a: 187) and Oakley (1997: 534). See too Ovid, Fasti 1.85–6: Iuppiter arce sua totum cum spectat in orbem / nil nisi Romanum, quod tueatur, habet, ‘When Jupiter surveys the whole globe from his citadel, he has nothing to see but the Roman empire’. 40 Even non-personiWed temples are supposed to stir emotions and to draw people’s respectful gaze (Livy 2.49.7; Ovid, Tristia 1.3.32; Silius Italicus 11.260; Martial 9.25.4). The notion of temples looking at people is more unusual: cf. Ovid’s novel description of the Temple of Bona Dea, which oculos exosa uiriles, ‘hates the eyes of men’ (Fasti 5.153).

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for the long-term good of the Roman state and stretching out his hands to the places in which the relevant gods could be found.41 Yet in Tacitus, the shameless Vitellian soldiers are completely oblivious to the mediating gaze of the temples overlooking the Forum, and essentially the contrast with the passage from Livy graphically points up the moral failings of these extraordinary Vitellian automata, immune to the rich resonances of the locus in which they are operating. As Quintilian observes, ad qualitatem quoque frequenter pertinet locus, ‘place also frequently aVects the quality of an action’ (5.10.40), and this is the case here. The Livian intertext suggests moral decline, but a closer point of reference in Tacitus’ own narrative indicates continuity, at least with the recent (immoral) past. The Vitellians’ advance past the forum et imminentia foro templa, ‘Forum and the temples overlooking the Forum’ (Histories 3.71.1) economically recalls an earlier scene, where the Othonians, intent on murder, burst into the Forum on horseback in pursuit of the elderly Galba: nec illos Capitolii aspectus et imminentium templorum religio et priores et futuri principes terruere, quo minus facerent scelus, cuius ultor est quisquis successit. The sight of the Capitol, the sanctity of the temples overlooking them, and contemplation of the emperors past and future did not deter them from carrying out a crime whose avenger would be whoever succeeded to the principate. Tacitus, Histories 1.40.2

The Vitellians (like the Othonians) are thus seen to be immune to the traditional symbols of divine and human authority (and our memory of the more extensive earlier passage allows a more succinct expression of the idea at Histories 3.71.1). One particularly suggestive feature of Tacitus’ description here is that the genitive Capitolii, with reference to aspectus, can function both objectively (‘the sight of the Capitol’, that is, the temple as seen by the soldiers) and subjectively (‘the gaze of the Capitol’, that is, the temple personiWed and looking down upon the soldiers); and these two coexisting readings combine 41 On this practice, see Oakley (1997: 562–3). Spencer (in this volume) also discusses this passage in Livy.

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forcefully to raise the emotional stakes and to bring out strongly the amoral character of the Othonian soldiers.42 Some further personiWcation is also suggested in the reference to the priores et futuri principes, a typically pregnant Tacitean formulation. Chilver raises the possibility that Tacitus ‘may be actually invoking the sight his readers could see—the statues (including those of later emperors) which were on the Capitol’.43 Or perhaps Tacitus means the abstract thought of these emperors as a deterrent: they are certainly personiWed as present. The Othonian soldiers in 69 ce would presumably be thinking of their own futurus princeps, Otho, who is conveniently absent from the scene of carnage. At any rate, at Histories 1.40, the personiWed Capitoline temple remains only a voyeur, looking on helplessly as an emperor is murdered in cold blood below, but the situation will deteriorate by the time that the Vitellians rush past the temples overlooking the Forum at Histories 3.71: the Capitoline temple is about to be transformed from voyeur to victim.

IMPLOSION AT THE CENTRE: THE CAPITOL Any threat to the Capitol, visually and spatially dominating the troubled city and laden with historical signiWcance since the initial construction of Jupiter’s temple under the Tarquins, should normally exert a strong controlling influence on the citizens’ conduct. Yet once the Vitellians arrive for their assault, any such resonances disappear from view, at least as far as the internal protagonists are concerned. Tacitus’ description is extraordinarily powerful: uixdum regresso in Capitolium Martiale furens miles aderat, nullo duce, sibi quisque auctor. cito agmine forum et imminentia foro templa praeteruecti erigunt aciem per aduersum collem usque ad primas Capitolinae arcis fores. erant antiquitus porticus in latere cliui dextrae subeuntibus, in quarum tectum egressi saxis tegulisque Vitellianos obruebant. neque illis manus nisi gladiis armatae, et arcessere tormenta aut missilia tela longum uidebatur: faces in prominentem porticum iecere et sequebantur ignem 42 The wholesome gaze of the Capitol contrasts with the morally bankrupt gaze of the spectator populus (Histories 3.83.1), viewing the Wghting as if it were in the arena. 43 Chilver (1979: 100). Cf. Edwards (1996: 77).

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ambustasque Capitolii fores penetrassent, ni Sabinus reuolsas undique statuas, decora maiorum, in ipso aditu uice muri obiecisset. tum diuersos Capitolii aditus inuadunt, iuxta lucum asyli et qua Tarpeia rupes centum gradibus aditur. improuisa utraque uis; propior atque acrior per asylum ingruebat. nec sisti poterant scandentes per coniuncta aediWcia, quae ut in multa pace in altum edita solum Capitolii aequabant. hic ambigitur, ignem tectis obpugnatores iniecerint, an obsessi, quae crebrior fama, nitentes ac progressos depulerint. inde lapsus ignis in porticus adpositas aedibus; mox sustinentes fastigium aquilae uetere ligno traxerunt flammam alueruntque. sic Capitolium clausis foribus44 indefensum et indireptum conflagrauit. Martialis had scarcely returned from the Capitol when the raging soldiers arrived. They had no general, each man wrote his own script. Passing in a swift column the Forum and the temples overlooking the Forum, they charged up the hill opposite until they reached the lowest gates of the Capitoline citadel. There was a series of colonnades built long ago at the side of the slope on the right as you go up. Emerging onto the roof of these, the besieged showered the Vitellians with rocks and roof-tiles. These attackers were armed only with swords, and it seemed a lengthy business to summon catapults and missiles. So they hurled torches into a projecting colonnade and followed in the wake of the Wre. They would have broken through the burnt gates of the Capitol, had not Sabinus torn down statues everywhere (the adornment of our ancestors) and built a sort of barricade on the very threshold. They then attacked the Capitol by two diVerent approaches, one near the Grove of Refuge and the other by the 100 steps which lead up to the Tarpeian rock. Both assaults came as a surprise, but the closer and more vigorous was the one by the Refuge. The Vitellians could not be stopped from climbing up by the adjoining buildings, which had been raised high (typical in prolonged peace) and equalled the floor of the Capitol. It is uncertain whether the assailants set Wre to the houses, or whether it was the besieged (although this was the more common version), who were trying to dislodge their enemies as they struggled and advanced. From there the Wre spread to the colonnades adjoining the temple. Soon the gables supporting the roof, made from old wood, caught up and nourished the flames. So the Capitol, with its doors closed, undefended and unplundered, was burnt down. Tacitus, Histories 3.71 44 Dio 65.8 records the intriguing detail that, at the time of the siege, some huge footprints were seen on the Capitoline Hill. Some soldiers on guard duty also claimed to have seen the doors of the Temple of Jupiter open of their own accord: that detail, together with the footprints, suggests that Jupiter himself had abandoned his ‘home’. The fact that in Tacitus the doors are closed may suggest that Jupiter was still ‘at home’.

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In narrating the Vitellian attack and the Flavian defence, we can see how Tacitus pointedly and repeatedly draws attention to the physical fabric of the site, that is to the mundane parts rather than to the emotive sum of these parts, which accentuates our sense of disintegration. So, the Flavian defenders, emerging on the roofs of the colonnades flanking the hill, attack the Vitellians saxis tegulisque, ‘with rocks and roof-tiles’ (Histories 3.71.1) and, after the Vitellians have thrown in torches, Sabinus improvises by using reuolsas undique statuas, decora maiorum, ‘statues torn down everywhere, the adornments of their ancestors’ (Histories 3.72.2) to make a disturbing barrier. If the statues in some sense fuse with the real ancestors that they represent (and Tacitus’ gloss suggests this), then the sense of transgression is especially acute.45 The Vitellians are temporarily delayed, but they then progress, scandentes per coniuncta aediWcia, ‘climbing up by the adjoining buildings’ (Histories 3.71.3), as if using ladders or makeshift bridges. Their two-pronged attack is made via the Asylum and the Tarpeian Rock, both ancient sites with suggestively ironic associations, given the self-destruction and criminality of the protagonists. Romulus established the asylum, located in the dip between the two peaks of the Capitoline hill, as a way of expanding the citizenship and thereby strengthening the state (Livy 1.8.4–6), but now Rome’s citizens are attacking one another. The Tarpeian rock was a point from which condemned criminals and traitors were thrown, but now it serves as a means to carry out a criminal act.46 All these physical details so far refer to the environs, but Tacitus extends his focus on the material element to the Capitoline Temple itself too, as the deadly Wre spreads: mox sustinentes fastigium aquilae47 uetere ligno traxerunt flammam alueruntque, ‘next, the gables supporting the roof, made from old wood, drew the flame and fed it’

45 See in general Mossman (1991, esp. 113) on statues substituting for people. 46 Livy 1.11.6–9; Plutarch, Romulus 18. On the asylum, see Ogilvie (1965: 62–3), and on the Tarpeian Rock, see Ogilvie (1965: 74–5). 47 Aquilae, meaning either gables or perhaps pedimental sculptures in the form of eagles (Wellesley 1972: 171) appears to be a technical architectural term (OLD aquila 5), with which even contemporaries may have needed some help, as the addition of the gloss sustinentes fastigium suggests. If so, it contributes towards breaking down the Capitoline Temple into its constituent material parts.

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(Histories 3.71.4). This is indeed a disturbing image. On the one hand, the venerable roof, constructed from old (dry) wood, becomes just so much fuel for the Wre, but, at the same time, there is also some personiWcation here in the formulation traxerunt flammam: the verb is normally associated with drawing in life-giving substances such as water or air (OLD traho 7), but here the roof-beams seem to collude in their own destruction by sucking in Wre.48 Thus, it appears that even the temple has been caught up in the collective madness of civil war, as the wholesome personiWcation implicit in the earlier image of the Capitolii aspectus (1.40.2), looking down on the soldiers from on high, engages in a form of cataclysmic suicide.49 This device, whereby personiWcation of the suicidal Capitoline Temple is emphasized at the end of Histories 3.71, forms a natural bridge to the extended ‘obituary’ oVered by Tacitus in Histories 3.72, where personiWcation is activated in a more sustained way.50 Here, it is not so much a particular formula (such as the hic exitus which opens the obituaries for Cremona at Histories 3.34.1 and for Flavius Sabinus at Histories 3.75.1) that creates the sense of a death-notice (and thus personiWcation). It is more the methodical and linear tracing of the Temple’s life cycle, from Tarquinius Priscus laying down its foundations (Histories 3.72.2) to the survival of Lutatius Catulus’ inscribed name on the building usque ad Vitellium, ‘all the way to Vitellius’ principate’ (Histories 3.72.3), that suggests personiWcation, rather like the aetates of Rome in the passage from Seneca discussed at the opening of this essay.51 In so doing, Tacitus dramatically freezes the minutiae of the military action taking place between Vitellians and Flavians on 19 December 69 ce (resumed at Histories 48 Baxter (1971: 103–4) certainly sees personiWcation here. Ovid’s reworking of Priam’s murder deploys similar collaboration from a (personiWed) inanimate object that is disturbing in a diVerent way: exiguumque senis Priami Iouis ara cruorem / conbiberat, ‘As for Priam’s thin blood, Jupiter’s altar had guzzled it up’ (Met. 13.409–10). 49 The personiWed temple’s desperation for the (cleansing?) Wre may also reflect the fact that the Flamen Dialis, the priest of Capitoline Jupiter, was bound by many elaborate taboos, such as being forbidden to touch raw flesh (Plutarch, Moralia 289F) or a dead body (Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 10.15.24). 50 See Syme (1958) and Pomeroy (1991: 192–225, 255–7, appendix on the obituaries of cities). On this chapter, see Do¨pp (2003). 51 Tacitus conveniently manages to downplay the previous burning of the Capitoline Temple in 83 bce so as to create a sense of continuity all the way from Tarquinius Priscus and Vitellius. This is also helped by the strong opening of the

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3.73), and in one awful moment he broadens out his narrative focus temporally to contextualise this event within a huge chronological sweep of Roman history. Now, Roman citizens climactically destroy the Capitoline Temple and thus ‘decapitate’ their own empire in a way that has not happened before. Both Tacitus (Histories 3.83.2) and Suetonius (Vespasian 8.5) call the city deformis, ‘disWgured’, after the burning of the Capitoline Temple, which may have a special resonance if we consider that the metaphor of the body is activated. By pulling back the lens in this way, Tacitus prompts us to make historical comparisons and to superimpose this current visualization of crisis at the centre of the city and the Roman world on earlier depictions of disaster on the same urban site.52 The most salient instance is the infamous Gallic invasion of the early fourth century bce, to which Tacitus alludes when he refers to the sedem Iouis Optimi Maximi . . . quam non Porsenna dedita urbe neque Galli capta temerare potuissent, ‘the seat of Jupiter Optimus Maximus . . . which not even Porsenna, when the city surrendered, nor the Gauls, when the city was captured, could have deWled’ (Histories 3.72.1). The central players in Livy’s account of these events (5.32–55) are Manlius Capitolinus, who defends the Capitol from within the city during the nocturnal attack by the Gauls (5.47) and Furius Camillus, dubbed by his men the conditor . . . alter urbis, ‘second founder of the city’ (5.49.7), who comes to Rome’s rescue from the outside. As Gowing observes, Camillus is ‘a Republican exemplum who had become so much a part of the Roman psyche that it would be virtually unthinkable to contemplate forgetting him’.53 If we search for equivalents in 69 ce, we are inevitably disappointed. The elderly Flavius Sabinus on the Capitol is hardly another Manlius Capitolinus, the exemplar of martial heroism who pushes Gauls from the

chapter: id facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit, ‘That was the most grievous and foul crime ever to befall the republic and the Roman people since the foundation of the city’ (Histories 3.72.1). 52 On Tacitus’ sensitivity towards chronologically disparate events taking place in the same location, see Paga´n (1999) and Ash (2006). Tacitus’ own account of the restoration of the Capitol on 21 June 70 ce only six months later (Histories 4.53) is a case in point. 53 Gowing (2005: 15).

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Capitoline summit:54 indeed, no heroic Sabinus ‘Capitolinus’ at all emerges from this story, only, in due course, his brutally decapitated corpse (Histories 3.74.2). If we turn to Antonius Primus, after his dawdling journey, he only reaches Rome when it is too late to be of service (Histories 3.79.1), unlike the republican model Camillus.55 The only point of continuity with the past lies perhaps in the role of the Vitellians, who take on some of the alien characteristics of the invading Gauls,56 but even here there is a diVerence: the powerless and invisible Vitellius is the polar opposite of the menacing Gallic leader Brennus, and even the Gauls are depicted as god-fearing (e.g. 5.46.3), a quality which is conspicuously lacking in the Vitellian troops. Perhaps the most pervasive point of contrast lies in the emotive power of historical and religious topography in Livy’s account, used with particular impact by Camillus in his speech pleading with the citizens not to abandon Rome for Veii after the Gallic assault (5.51.1–54.7).57 The climactic point of his peroratio rests on the Capitol: hic Capitolium est, ubi quondam capite humano inuento responsum est eo loco caput rerum summamque imperii fore; hic cum augurato liberaretur Capitolium, Iuuentas Terminusque maximo gaudio patrum uestrorum moueri se non passi; hic Vestae ignes, hic ancilia caelo demissa, hic omnes propitii manentibus uobis di. Here is the Capitol, where after a human head was once found, the reply was given that in that place would be the head of aVairs and the seat of empire; here, when the Capitol was being cleared with augural rites, Iuuentas and Terminus did not allow themselves to be moved, much to the delight of your fathers; here are Vesta’s Wres, here the shields that were sent down from the sky, here are all the gods, kindly to you if you remain. Livy 5.54.7 54 It is arguable, however, that Tacitus’ narrative oVers many reincarnations of the ‘bad’ Manlius, the initiator of sedition (see n. 6 above). 55 Dio presents Antonius Primus’ conduct more positively, since he advances to help the city, drawn by the Wre rising from the Capitol ‘u æ KŒ æıŒ øæ Æ’, ‘as if from a beacon’ (65.18.2). Wellesley (1981: 188) is uncomfortable about Tacitus’ pejorative description of Antonius Primus’ praua mora (Histories 3.78.1). 56 See Ash (1999: 47–9). 57 Feldherr (1997) explores Camillus’ techniques in more detail. Jaeger (1997: 57–74) is especially sensitive in analysing the impact of the protagonists’ views of the city on their conduct and discusses Livy’s visual language. Vasaly (1993: 33 n. 30) suggests that Livy’s version of Camillus’ speech was influenced by Cicero, De legibus 2.3, on places evocative of his own history and identity.

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The anaphora of hic insistently underscores the emotional signiWcance of place, but the Wnal word of Camillus’ speech, di, and the masked conditional clause manentibus uobis seems to clinch the argument and persuade his listeners not to abandon the site of Rome: for leaving Rome, Camillus implies, will mean gods who are no longer propitii. In fact, Roman religious feeling envelops Livy’s whole narrative of the Wrst assault on the Capitol, informing individual and collective conduct across the entire social spectrum. So, respect for the gods is seen in the decision to withdraw to the Capitol in the Wrst place (placuit . . . deos hominesque et Romanum nomen defendere, ‘it was decided to defend gods, men and the Roman name’ 5.39.10), in the plebeian Lucius Albinus turWng his family from his wagon in order to carry the Vestal virgins and their sacra (5.40.9–10), in the daring escape of Fabius Dorsuo from the besieged Capitol to the Quirinal to carry out an annual family sacriWce (5.46.1–3), and (most famously) in the propitious decision not to kill the sacred geese of Juno on the Capitol, despite the famine (5.47.4).58 Livy depicts his Roman protagonists as being sensitive to the religious ritual and topography of the city, and if this intertext underpins Tacitus’ account of Roman conduct on and around the Capitol in 69 ce, then a reader’s sense of the decline in morals and collective character is driven home even more sharply. The fact that in Tacitus the contemporary Gauls visualize the destruction of the Capitol from a distance and read it as signalling the imminent collapse of the Roman empire (Histories 4.54) is the Wnal irony, as the Romans themselves successfully engineer a crisis not secured even by the menacing Allia Gauls. It is very expressive about Tacitus’ narrative artistry and historiographical agenda that he places this item about the Gauls being inspired by the Capitol’s destruction (Histories 4.54) directly after the report of its restoration (Histories 4.53). This arrangement drives home the point that it is much easier to rebuild a physical structure than to reconstruct the cumulative respect for a nation symbolized by that structure. This is despite what Tacitus’ Otho argues: uos pulcherrimam hanc urbem domibus et tectis et congestu lapidum stare creditis? muta ista et inanima intercidere ac 58 Ovid’s Mars reviews the pious actions of the Roman citizens during the Gallic siege and concludes putant aliquos scilicet esse deos, ‘They plainly think that some gods exist’ (Fasti 6.366).

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reparari promisca sunt, ‘Do you think that the stability of this most beautiful city rests upon houses and buildings and piles of stone? Those are dumb, inanimate things, which can fall apart or be reconstructed wholesale’ (Histories 1.84.4). Otho is partly right, in that individual buildings can always collapse and be rebuilt, but the emotive case of the Capitoline Temple shows that the ideology and conWdence symbolized by these structures are much harder to repair. Even so, there is perhaps still some muted optimism in Tacitus’ pointed evocation of the Wrst siege of the Capitol by the Gauls narrated by Livy: just as the near catastrophe of 390 bce marked a new beginning for Rome, articulated through Livy’s ‘fresh start’ to the narrative at the opening of Book 6, so the implosion at the centre during the civil wars in 69 ce heralds a new era under the Flavian dynasty, rising like a phoenix from the ashes.59

C ON C LU S I ON One of the overarching concerns of this volume is to confront and to peel back the polyphonous and palimpsestic identities of Rome. This is a city whose multiple identities (even to the present day) have been creatively shaped by surviving ancient texts that map the physical city and render it full of meaning, even when the buildings themselves are crumbling or gone. People remember what went before, either through having seen it themselves, or through having read descriptions in texts. So Tacitus oVers us a richly layered narrative of the cataclysm surrounding the Capitoline Temple that exploded on a single day (19 December 69 ce), but his presentation opens up much broader temporal and textual vistas which, when viewed closely, sharpen the moralism of his account and interrogate Romanitas at a disastrous moment, which ultimately might have been more comfortable for his readers to forget. This is indeed a bitter and painful form of memorializing through monuments. The collective sense of Romanitas has, by Tacitus’ own day, been progressively 59 For the various devices by which Livy indicates that the opening of Book 6 is a fresh beginning in Roman history after his Wrst pentad, and a ‘rebirth’ of the city, see Kraus (1994a: 83–8) and Oakley (1997: 381–6).

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(if imperfectly) reconstructed, much as the Capitoline Temple itself has been restored, but a reading of Histories 3 shows how fragile the new ‘ediWce’ of Roman identity remains; and even the restored temple burned down again in 80 ce.60 We are left with a strong sense that although the physical fabric of the city and its focal point, the Capitoline Temple, could always be reinstated (again and again, if necessary), the broader emotional fault-lines were still there in the collective memory, rendering an unexpectedly open-ended narrative for Tacitus’ readers sensitive to the possibility of history repeating itself. The recent near-miss of another civil war during the short-lived principate of Nerva (96–8 ce) meant that Tacitus’ audience would have been especially alert to the nuances of reading supposed symbols of perpetuity such as the Capitoline Temple. Buildings, like the empires that they represented, could so easily rise and fall. Tacitus deploys devices such as personiWcation of architectural structures selectively but at strategic moments, using Rome and her buildings creatively as both victims and voyeurs within the text, and artfully switching between their dual identities as prosaic structures of bricks and mortar on the one hand and emotive beacons of Roman identity on the other. Static buildings, like the human characters who move around the text, have huge potential to drive home moral lessons to Tacitus’ contemporary readers and to make them aware of their own vulnerability. Indeed, in some ways, buildings such as the Capitoline Temple are potentially even more expressive than the human protagonists, precisely because of the reassuring sense that they have always been there in an urban landscape laden with memory: despite that symbolic value, Romans still manage to inflict destruction on the Capitoline Temple during a civil war. In a diVerent context, Tacitus’ Tiberius observes, principes mortales, rem publicam aeternam, ‘emperors are mortal, but the state lasts forever’ (Annals 3.6.3).61 Those buildings of Rome which came to symbolize that perpetuity naturally prove irresistibly expressive ‘characters’ for Tacitus in documenting the extraordinary events by which the Roman empire nearly imploded. 60 Plutarch, Publicola 15.2 and Dio 66.24.3, with Darwall-Smith (1996: 105–10) and Packer (2003: 174). 61 See Woodman and Martin (1996: 108–9) for useful bibliography, including Pratt (1965).

6 The Gates of Janus: Bakhtin and Plutarch’s Roman meta-chronotope* Jason Banta

The erosion of the boundaries between the past and present is a very real concern in many of the articles in this volume. Rome, as a temporal entity, is not easily contained and seeps through the walls that writers and readers of the city have attempted to construct. Plutarch’s formation of an Archaic Roman topography in his biographies of Romulus and Numa is saturated with chronotopal irregularities and problems of temporal seepage. In this article I tackle the narratological strategies which embed the Romulus and Numa ideologically as well as three-dimensionally, in Plutarch’s archaic vistas. These Lives are less about their ostensible subjects than how the tension between the respective agendas of Romulus and Numa creates the backdrop of Archaic Rome. Plutarch utilizes them to create, in Bakhtin’s words, a chronotopic narrative.1 For Bakhtin, the chronotope is a speciWc intersection of time and space coordinates in a literary work that are the prime determinants of its generic qualities. According to Pam Morris, at the centre of this chronotopic perception * I would like to thank both Diana Spencer, for her critical and encouraging read of the essay, and David Larmour, for his long-time involvement in this project as well as paving the way for my interest in Plutarch. The essay itself is based on a chapter of my dissertation, ‘Imperium cum Wnibus: Plutarch’s Archaic Roman Chronotope’. Finally, I would like to extend thanks to my dissertation committee, in both its incarnations, for their thoughtful comments. 1 Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope is enunciated in ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’ in Bakhtin (1981: 258).

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is ‘the aesthetic visualizing of a human being in relation to their temporal and spatial world’.2 She points out that this is ‘ultimately an ideological perception; a way of comprehending human life as materially and simultaneously present within a physical-geographic space and a speciWc point of historical time’.3 It is a way of understanding experience. This theory of the chronotope operates under the premise that all contexts are necessarily and fundamentally shaped by the kinds of space and time that they operate within.4 Since Plutarch is Wrst and foremost writing narrative accounts of his subjects’ lives, his process is susceptible to the vagaries of Bakhtin’s chronotopic theory.5 Hence, reading the way in which Plutarch constructs and attempts to stabilize the spatial and temporal background will reveal important qualities about his narrative strategy and the place that Rome plays in it. Despite the attempts of Plutarch to stabilize the time/space coordinates of Archaic Rome, contemporary Rome is a constant invader and shadow, an altar hidden in the ground waiting to be uncovered.

BAKHTIN’S LITERARY- SCAPES As Jay Ladin elaborates in his article ‘Fleshing Out the Chronotope’, Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope highlights the central importance of space and time in literary narratives. Ladin explains that ‘literary time and space are expressive, plastic elements which vary signiWcantly between and within literary works, rather than uniform ontological givens’.6 In this article, I will utilize, and elaborate on, Bakhtin’s

2 Morris (2003: 180). 3 Morris (2003: 180). 4 This is discussed at length in Morson and Emerson (1990: 367): ‘Bakhtin’s crucial point is that time and space vary in qualities; diVerent social activities and representations of those activities presume diVerent kinds of time and space. Time and space are therefore not just ‘‘neutral mathematical’’ abstractions.’ 5 Of course, Plutarch is not alone in this category. As Irene de Jong says (de Jong, Nu¨nlist, and Bowie 2004: xi) ‘A rough estimate tells us that more than half of all Greek literature is narrative, if we include historiographical, biographical, and philosophical narrative and narratives which are embedded in other genres.’ 6 Ladin (1999: 212).

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chrontopic narrative theory. The narrative force in both the Romulus and Numa is driven by a tension between two seemingly antagonistic chronotopes. Plutarch exploits this tension, between the destructive and consumptive Romulean chronotope and the exclusive, delineating Numan chronotope in order to generate a higher level chronotope. It is within this overarching chronotope that Plutarch attempts to resolve the essential conXict between the two lower level chronotopes. The higher level chronotope, Plutarch’s Archaic Roman chronotope, is a re-fabrication of the Roman foundation moment(s) that allows Plutarch to explore the essentially alien nature of Rome and attempt to integrate into a familiar scheme.7 Bakhtin and Bakhtin scholars have included Plutarch as an example of a form of narrative that predates the dynamic novelistic mode. Biography in general for Bakhtin is a closed genre, what he calls a ‘high distanced genre’: The individual in the high distanced genres is an individual of the absolute past and of the distanced image. As such he is a fully Wnished and completed being. This has been accomplished on a lofty, heroic level, but what is complete is also something hopelessly ready made; he is all there, from the beginning to the end he coincides with himself. He is, further more, completely externalized. There is not the slightest gap between his authentic essence and its external manifestation. All his potential, his possibilities are realized utterly in his external social position, in the whole of his fate and even in his external appearance; outside of the predetermined fate and predetermined position there is nothing.8

One of the major generic qualities of the novel for Bakhtin is the sense of immediacy, of ‘presentness’.9 Each moment is deWned by a reWnement of the hero’s character. The novelistic hero is necessarily incomplete, his character is unfulWlled, and he is changed by his 7 Plutarch in this, and many other senses, foreshadows something of the Second Sophistic literary movement. According to Whitmarsh (2005: 1), oratory comprised the centre of the Second Sophistic and it became ‘the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power’. 8 Bakhtin (1981: 24). Of all Plutarch’s subjects, this most aptly describes Romulus (and his counterpart Theseus) since they inhabit a non-historical, mythical period, that is normally the coin of Epic. 9 See Morson (1994: 177–233).

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actions.10 In Plutarch, Bakhtin claims there is no real change.11 The hero may undergo ordeals and alter himself slightly, but nothing essential is ever changed.12 The characters of Plutarch’s subjects are not created so much as revealed.13 According to Bakhtin: This Aristotelian identiWcation of ultimate purpose with origin inevitably had a crucial eVect on the distinctive nature of biographical time. From here it follows that a character at its most mature is the authentic origin of development. It is here that we get that unique ‘inversion in a character’s development’ that excludes any authentic becoming in character.14

The Plutarchan narrative for Bakhtin is closed, representing a static world of immutable moral values, but where real ethical choices with consequences are intrinsically impossible. The chronotopic form of the biography lends itself to this type of closure. The subject of the biography is the life of an individual. The general form remains constant, and the temporal progression varies little. The time covered stretches somewhat organically from birth, to maturation, to death. For Bakhtin, this organism is a dead one, however. Plutarch’s characters exist outside normal temporal experience. Despite the apparent mortality of his vessels, the Plutarchan character is fully formed from the outset. Historical progression provides merely a backdrop

10 Pelling (1990) addresses the relationship between childhood experiences and adult character. He notes the discrepancy between Plutarch’s insistence on the importance of education and relative lack of information in his Lives on the subjects’ childhoods (216). Apparently lacking access to such information, Plutarch participates in what Pelling calls ‘routine generalizations’ (226). In order to Wll in these gaps, Plutarch is ‘retrojecting aspects of the men’s later careers . . . He is simply inferring what sort of youth it must have been who grew up into the man he knew’ (226). This inference strengthens Bakhtin’s view that the Plutarchan character is essential and unchangeable. It ignores basic temporal progression; the complete adult ‘character’ is what deWnes the younger. 11 Bakhtin (1981: 142): ‘Here as well, what governs from the outset is the whole of the character; . . . From the very Wrst strokes (the Wrst manifestations of character) the Wrm contours of the whore are already predetermined, and everything that comes later distributes itself within these already existing contours.’ 12 ‘In Plutarch’s Lives for example, a kind of entelechy governs character: as acorns grow to oaks, Demosthenes develops into an orator and Alexander into a conqueror’ (Morson 1994: 108). 13 As Bakhtin (1981: 140) states, ‘the ultimate purpose of its development . . . is at the same time its Wrst cause’. 14 Bakhtin (1981: 140).

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for revelation of this character, which is timeless, unchanging, and dead. In the Numa and Romulus, I would suggest, Plutarch is exploring a new type of subject. In life, every one of Plutarch’s subjects was dynamic, but their choices and their path of life, their individual chronotopes are closed. Alcibiades will never shock Plutarch’s audiences with a new escapade, Pyrrhus will never rally his troops in a diVerent battle, and Scipio (would that he was with us at all) will never emerge from his house in a new plot twist. Their timelines have been circumcised. Plutarch’s subject, as I will argue, is not the namesakes of the biographies, rather the physical and psychic entity of Rome. This leads to some of the diYculties associated with reading these two biographies. Rome as an entity resists the chronotopic strictures that exist in Plutarchan biography. Like the violence of Romulus and the spirit of war in the temple of Janus, Rome continually leaks through the edges of the chronotope, asserting its narratological independence.

BRAVE OLD WORLD It is in the introduction to the Theseus, the companion Life to the Romulus, that Plutarch associates the distanced, mythic past with fantastic and unexplored lands: ‹ æ K ÆE ªøªæÆ ÆØ, t
Ø
Œ ø; ƒ ƒ æØŒd a Øƪ Æ c ªHØ ÆP H E K Ø æØ H ØŒø ØF ; ÆN Æ

ÆæƪæıØ ‹ Ø a  K ŒØÆ ŁE ¼ıæØ ŒÆd ŁæØØ j ºe Iœc j
ŒıŁØŒ  Œæ j ºÆª  ª ; o ø Kd æd c H  ø H Ææƺºø ªæÆ, e ØŒ e KØŒ Ø º ªfiø ŒÆd Ø ƒ æ fiÆ

æƪ ø Kfi æ  ØºŁ  Ø; æd H Iø æø ŒÆºH r N E a  K ŒØÆ æÆ  ŒÆd æƪ،a Ø Æd ŒÆd ıŁªæØ  ÆØ ŒÆd PŒ  Ø

 Ø P ÆØÆ: Just as geographers, Sosius Senecio, when they come to deal with those parts of the world they know nothing about, crowd the edges of their maps with explanatory notes saying ‘Beyond this lies sandy and waterless deserts full of wild beasts’, or ‘blind marsh’, or ‘Scythian cold’, or ‘frozen sea’; so it is the same for me in writing my Parallel Lives. Now that I have transversed those periods of time which can be reached by

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reasonable inference15 or where factual history can Wnd a Wrm foothold in my Parallel Lives, I might well say of earlier periods ‘What lies beyond is full of marvels and larger than life, the land of poets and mythographers, where nothing is reliable or clear.’ Plutarch, Theseus 1.1

Plutarch attempts here to convey to his audience the inherent diYculties in writing about a character such as Romulus. Previously our intrepid biographer has composed the Life of the Roman law giver Numa. Numa, and the material in his biography, sit on the line between myth and fact, between the rolling hills and pastures of history and the vast unknown wastelands of fantasy. Plutarch, having completed the Life of the proverbially pious king, can ‘not unreasonably, go back still farther to the time of Romulus’. It is proximity, physically and temporally, as well as historical interest that drives Plutarch since his ‘inquiries (historia) have brought me near to this time’ (Plut., Thes. 1.2). This apparent attempt to create a valid historical backdrop for his subjects drives Plutarch’s narrative in both biographies. In his exploration of Plutarch’s biographies, Bakhtin concludes that the historical reality presented within is only tangential to Plutarch’s overall agenda. History becomes merely the ‘arena for the disclosure and unfolding of man’s character’: Historical reality itself, in which the disclosure of character takes place, serves merely as a means for disclosure, it provides in words and deeds a vehicle for those manifestations of character: but historical reality is deprived of any determining inXuence on character as such, it does not shape or create, it merely manifests it. Historical reality is an arena for the disclosure and unfolding of human characters—nothing more.16

When dealing with Numa and Romulus, Plutarch is presented with something of a unique diYculty. As the above passage from the Theseus illustrates, Plutarch is struggling with a reality that is neither strictly historical nor entirely coherent through which his characters may act. 15 I have adopted ‘reasonable inference’ for NŒ Ø º ªfiø and ‘factual history’ for ƒ æ Æ following Pelling (2002a: 171). 16 Bakhtin (1981: 141).

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The Sites of Rome

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

Romulus and Numa take back seats to the real star of these Lives, Rome. In them, Plutarch attempts to explore or, in fact, create the (a)historical and temporal landscape that deWnes Archaic Rome. Plutarch retro-Wts an undiVerentiated landscape, as represented in the Romulus, with meaning and signiWcance derived from a contemporary

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Rome. Much like Livy, Plutarch attempts to stabilize a prehistoric Italy by referencing later Republican and Imperial landmarks, such as the Forum, the Circus Maximus, and others.17 Rome, as an omnipresent temporal entity, provides meaning by continually asserting its physioideological presence. Romulus and Numa lose any personal intentionality in this scheme. They cease to be people, and become merely vehicles. The ostensible subjects are transformed into landscaping tools and time pieces, used to create a physical/historical map of Archaic Rome. It is with Numa that Plutarch Wrst attempts to solidify Archaic Rome, to close his chronotope.18 This is signiWed by the creation of boundaries for Rome. These new boundaries are sanctiWed by Numa’s installation of the god Terminus. Such physical delineations are mirrored by Numa’s reorganization of the calendar and the privileging of Janus at the head of this new calendar. Terminus and Janus stand as space and time coordinates in the Numa, and Plutarch attempts to stabilize the chronotope with them. In order to explore Plutarch’s two chronotopes, let us begin with the Romulus. Plutarch’s narrative in the Romulus of the legendary twins’ early life follows a common thread. According to Wiseman, in Remus: A Roman Myth, the only constants in the Romulus and Remus story were (1) they were twins, and (2) they were suckled by a she wolf.19 More importantly he notes that these two conditions are topographically bound to three locations, the Kermalus, the Ficus Ruminalis, and the Lupercal Slope or Cave. Wiseman attempts to situate all three of these locations in non-Romulan terms, that is he works to provide names and origins that predate the supposed importation of the twin myth. Plutarch, conversely, with reference to the Kermalus and Ficus Ruminalis at least, works to obfuscate such origins and instead presents a landscape that only comes into deWnition with the arrival of the twins, and, more speciWcally, of Romulus. 17 Figures 1, 2, and 8 are particularly useful for understanding the frame of reference. For similar strategies in Livy see Jaeger (1997) and especially Diana Spencer’s contribution to this volume. 18 Penwill (2004: 32) makes a similar argument for Livy’s narrative: ‘Livy presents us with a Hegelian antithetical pair, ‘‘Romulus’n’Numa’’, out of which the synthesis is a Rome well versed in both the arts of war and peace.’ 19 Wiseman (1995: 77).

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The Sites of Rome

Plutarch quickly passes over the prehistory of Rome, brieXy narrating the strife of Numitor and Amulius, the birth of the twins, and Amulius’ exposure of the infants.20 The manner in which Plutarch passes over Alba Longa, the civic predecessor of Rome, reveals the importance he assigns to Romulus in the process of founding Rome. Plutarch is going to use Romulus to form the Wrst aspects of the Archaic Roman chronotope. He is only concerned with the twins, and the rest of the story is cursorily narrated. KŁ s N Œ a æ; ŒÆ  b K d e  Æe ‰ Þ łø; Ng b ŒÆ Ø  Æ ººfiH ÞÆ Ø ŒÆd æÆı ; Ø æºŁE; Kªªf b B ZŁ ŒÆ ÆŁd I ºº : F b  ÆF ŒÆ ÆŒº  

ºæÆ c Œ  ºÆFÆ ŒÆd  øæ ÆÆ æfi ø ŒÆ ªŒ N øæ  K ØØŒH ƺŁÆŒ ; n F ˚æƺe ŒÆºFØ; ºÆØ b ˆæÆ ; ‰ ØŒ ‹ Ø ŒÆd f Iºf ªæÆf OıØ: Putting the newborns in a cradle, he went down to the river intending to throw them in. Seeing that the stream was extremely swollen and violent he was afraid to approach, and setting the children near the bank he went away. The river overXowing, a wave picked up the cradle and, carrying it gently, set it down in a seemingly soft spot, which they now call the Kermalus, but anciently Germanus, as it seems they called both the brothers germani. Plut., Rom. 3.4–5

Plutarch depicts the Roman landscape, especially the Tiber, as wild and uncivilized. It is described as ººfiH ÞÆ Ø ŒÆd æÆı  (‘extremely swollen and violent’), so imposing that the servant is unable to approach it closely enough to carry out his commands, and instead lays the basket beside the river, as opposed to in it.21 Plutarch’s version of the twins’ abandonment in the river diVers from the other versions, those of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. In Dionysius, the Tiber is indeed overXowing, much like in Plutarch’s narrative. The manner in which the river conveys the abandoned 20 Plutarch prefers to use the form Ilia for the name of the mother of Romulus and Remus (Plut., Rom. 3.3). Ilia, of course, is a name that contains serious topographic associations with Ilium, the homeland of the Trojans and progenitors of the Romans. 21 See Wiseman (1995: 46–50). He notes that the Pseudo-Hesiodic Catalogue of Women states that the sons of Circe and Odysseus, in this case Latinos and Agrios (‘the wild man’), are associated with the Tyrenians (Etruscans). Nonnus 37.56–60 preserves the early Greek conceptions of the Tiber area as one that is wild and uncontrollable.

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twins is markedly diVerent, however, being less gentle:  b æØ  Ø K ;  Ø Æ F Þ Łæı ŒÆ a ØŒæe  øæF  KŒººØ a æ (‘The cradle Xoated for some time, and then, as the water retreated little by little, it struck against a stone and, overturning, threw out the infants’, Dion. Hal. 1.79.5). In Livy, the Tiber is not overXowing for any natural reason, but instead it is forte quondam diuinitus (‘by some divine fortune’ Livy 1.4.4). Rather than destroying the twins, the river conveys them, safely, through the wilds of pre-civilized Rome till they reached the Kermalus, a locus, previously unnamed, which Wnally acquires a suitable label with the arrival of the twins.22 q b º  KæØ ; n  øØºØ KŒºı; j Øa e  øº ‰ ƒ

ººd  ıØ; j Øa e a æıŒÆ H Łæ ø KŒE Øa c ŒØa KØØ; j ºØ Æ Øa e H æH ŁºÆ ; ‹ Ø   Łºc ÞFÆ T Æ ƒ ƺÆØ ; ŒÆd Ł  ØÆ B KŒ æB H 

ø K غEŁÆØ ŒFÆ OıØ  ıEÆ; ŒÆd ŁıØ ÆP fiB ºØÆ; ŒÆd ªºÆ E ƒæE K Ø ıØ: Nearby there is a wild Wg tree, which they called the Ruminalis, either as many think because of Romulus; or because of the rumination, or cudchewing, of the animals that spend the day there on account of the heat; or most likely because of the nursing of the infants, since the ancient Romans called the teat ruma, and they named a certain goddess, being thought to watch over the nursing of newborns, Rumina and they sacriWce to her without wine, instead pouring milk over the victims. Plut., Rom. 4.1

Plutarch describes the area surrounding the twins’ safe landing, beginning with the Ruminalis, a wild Wg tree. Plutarch cites three 22 Plut., Rom. 3.5. As stated in the above translation, the name Kermalus is, according to Plutarch, derived from Germanus, a title derived from the twins’ appellation of ‘germani’, a transliteration of Latin germani. Plutarch is apparently following Varro here: Germalum a germanis Romulo et Remo; quod ad Wcum Ruminalem, et ii ibi inuenti, quo aqua hiberna Tiberis eos detulerat in alueolo expositos (‘It is named Germalus from the twins Romulus and Remus, which is near the Ruminal Wg tree; they were found there because the winter tide of the Tiber had carried them to the shore depositing them’ LL 5.8.54). Wiseman, however, postulates a nonRomulan origin, associating the name of the location with Evander’s wife Carmenta, hence Kermalus from carmina (1995: 77–6). For discussion and bibliography of the site, see Coarelli (1993) and Richardson (1992: 81).

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The Sites of Rome

derivations for the tree’s name.23 The Wrst is a simple attribution to Romulus. The second carries pastoral overtones. As Plutarch states, the Latin word for the cud-chewing is ruminatio, and animals would pass the hot part of the day, shaded by the Wg tree, occupied by this activity. The third derivation, which he signals as his preference with ºØ Æ, is from the suckling of Romulus and Remus there by the she-wolf. The Ruminalis is then named from the word ruma, an archaic Latin term signifying a breast that is used to nurse.24 The ancient Romans, according to Plutarch, also worshipped a divinity with a similar name, Rumina, who regulated the rearing of young children.25 At Wrst it seems that Plutarch is privileging the connection with the native goddess Rumina. This would appear to overvalue the role of local Italic tradition in the formation of Archaic Roman topography, as opposed to the rationalizing explanation involving the activities of livestock. But in fact, it is not so much the presence of the shrine that provides the label for the landscape, but the twins themselves. Plutarch states that the tree received its name not directly from the archaic Latin goddess, but instead from her association with the suckling of the infants, namely, the twins. This association is strengthened by Plutarch’s statement in Roman Questions 57:26 Øa fiB  ı fi Æ ŁıÆØ ªºÆ ŒÆ Æ ıØ H ƒæH; r   P

ææıØ; j ÞFÆ ¸Æ EØ c Łºc ŒÆºFØ; ŒÆd  ıØAºØ OÆŁBÆØ ºªıØ; Ææ ‹  ºŒÆØÆ fiH  øºfiø c Łºc

Ææ; u æ s E a æÆ a ÆØ Æ ªºÆŒ Ø Łºa I e B ŁºB ŒÆºF; o ø   ıEÆ Łº Ø sÆ ŒÆd ØŁ ŒÆd Œıæ æ  P æ  ÆØ e ¼ŒæÆ  ‰ ºÆæe Z Æ E 

Ø. Why do those sacriWcing to Rumina pour milk but not wine over the oVerings as a libation? Is it because the Latins call teat ruma, and they say the Ruminalis is named thus on account of the she-wolf oVering Romulus her teat? Just as we call wet-nurses ŁºÆ from Łº, Rumina, being She

23 Wiseman (1995: 78) oVers the possibility that the site received its label from an ancient name for the Tiber, ‘Rumon’ from Serv., Aen. 8.90.63. 24 Cf. Festus 332L; Pliny, HN 15.77. 25 Cf. Varro, RR 2.11.5; Nonius 246L; Augustine, CD 4.11. 26 Hadszits (1936). Also see Rose (1975), who is unable to escape the primacy of Rumina as established by Varro.

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who oVers the teat, is the nurse or nurturer of children, and therefore does not allow pure wine, which is not good for children. Plut., QR 57

Plutarch is unique in emphasizing this explicit link. He works to privilege the role of the twins in the naming of the tree, de-emphasizing other origins for the name. This is brought out when we compare Plutarch with Varro. Plutarch usurps the pre-eminence of the archaic goddess by making her merely a symptom of the Romulus and Remus miraculous rescue. For Varro, it is the goddess who is the source of the appellation. By the Imperial period, the association of the twins myth with the area had become so ingrained that it overshadowed what seems to be Varro’s original association.27 While both Livy and Ovid point to an implicit relationship between Romulus and the Ruminal Wg tree by citing its name as originally ‘Romularis’,28 Plutarch’s explicitness drives home his intention to attribute the formation of coherent topographic labels to Romulus. Here, it is the circumstances of the twins’ survival and nurturing that provide the aetion in Plutarch for both Kermalus and the Ficus Ruminalis; the goddess Rumina is almost a symptom, a divine extrapolation from the mytho-historic incident. Rumina cannot, does not exist, in Plutarch’s narrative, externally from the twins. She is tangential in every sense. Plutarch’s narrative also stresses the tension between the wild nature of the landscape of Archaic Rome before the arrival of Romulus, and the civilizing eVect that accompanies him, which is seen in the labelling of the geography. This opposition between civilization and the current wild state of the area is further highlighted by the fact that the very wilderness that is supposed to be the undoing of the twins is the future site of the most powerful city in the Mediterranean. Wolves and woodpeckers stalk Plutarch’s Archaic Rome, where one day Caesars and Ciceros will 27 Varro, RR 2.11.4–5. For an extended discussion of the interpretive problems associated with the Ficus Ruminalis, see Hadzsits (1936: 307). 28 Livy 1.4.5: Ita, uelut defuncti regis imperio, in proxima alluuie ubi nunc Wscus Ruminalis est, Romularem uocatam ferunt, pueros exponent (‘Thus, having forgotten the command of the king, they exposed the children at the nearest of the overXow where now is the Ruminal Wg tree, having been called Romulan they maintain’); Ovid, Fasti 2.411–13: Arbor erat: remanent uestigial, quaeque uocatur Rumina nunc Wcus. Romula Wcus erat. uenit ad expositos, mirum, lupa feta gemellos (‘There was a tree, traces remain, what is now called the Ruminal Wg tree was the Romulan Wg tree. A whelped she-wolf, miraculous, came to the abandoned twins’).

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walk. The landscape receives deWnition and name from the arrival of Romulus (and Remus), as opposed to its natural conditions. As we can see, from the very outset, Plutarch is using Romulus as a tool to inscribe meaning upon the landscape of Italy in order to create a coherent topography of Archaic Rome. Plutarch’s close association of Romulus with the landscape invests it with order, meaning, and even a sense of personality. Romulus himself has a relatively simple personality, his entire existence in Plutarch being predicated upon the foundation of the city. It follows then that whatever characteristics Romulus exhibits will likewise be shared with his foundation. The river is calmed by Romulus, in the same manner that the unruly population will later be molliWed by the ruler. The river, almost personiWed, then leads the infant to the tree which receives deWnition from his arrival, both ideological and nominative. The city itself will become personiWed on some level throughout the narrative, but the question that remains to be answered is upon whom, if anyone, does Rome’s personiWcation lie? The landscape, up until the introduction of Romulus, was unknowable and unlabelled for Plutarch. Plutarch’s use of Romulus to supply meaning to the landscape is a process of transformation that quickly expands from the Tiber to touch almost all of Italy, and threatens to run out of control.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LO CATION The foundation moment of the city is marked by a violent assertion of Romulus’ authority. Interestingly enough, at this point in the biography, Plutarch has made almost no mention of the ‘character’ of Romulus. The only two character traits assigned to Romulus are an imperious attitude and his proclivity for sacriWcing.29 Ironically, these two attributes play a disturbingly prominent role in the founding of the city. The conXict between Romulus and his twin is purely one of topographical preference. Before Romulus and Remus arrive 29 For Romulus’ imperious bearing, see Plut., Rom. 6.2. For his proclivity for sacriWcing, see Plut., Rom. 7.2.

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in the area where Rome will stand, there is no issue of strife at all; they work almost in complete concert. It is the site that is the source of the conXict, as opposed to a symptom. The question of topography, in Plutarch, is the Wrst instance of disagreement between the twins. As Plutarch states:  ›æÆØ b æe e ıØŒØe ÆP E PŁf q ØÆæa æd F ı (‘When they set out to found the city, a dispute arose immediately between them over the site’; Plut., Rom. 9.4). Compare Livy, who blames the strife as inherited from Amulius and Numitor, on regni cupido. For Livy, inde foedum certamen coortum a satis miti principio (‘a shameful dispute grew out of it upon an occasion innocent enough’, Livy 1.6.4). In Livy, the respective locations are merely areas where the twins await appropriate omens to legitimize one of their rules by assigning their name to the city.30 The origin of the discord in Dionysius is factionalism, the division of the colonists into two groups, as each espoused the merits of their own leader (Dion. Hal. 1.85.3). With Remus eliminated, Romulus is free to begin construction of the city.  ˇ b  øº K fiB  øæ fiÆ ŁłÆ e   ›F ŒÆd f æE; fiþŒØ c ºØ; KŒ "ıææ Æ  Æ ł ¼æÆ ƒæE ØØ ŁE ŒÆd ªæÆØ ªıı #ŒÆ Æ ŒÆd ØŒ Æ u æ K º fiB: Romulus, once he buried Remus on the Remoria along with his foster parents, founded the city, having sent for men from Etruria who prescribed all the details in accordance with certain rites and texts, and taught them (to Romulus) in the manner of a ritual. Plut., Rom. 11.1

Notable here is that Romulus is only able to continue the construction of the city after two diVerent requirements have been fulWlled. First, not only has Plutarch fully separated Romulus from his brother, but he has also removed all previous familial connections. Hence, 30 Quoniam Gemini essent nec aetatis uerecundia discrimen facere posset, ut dii, quorum tutelage ea loca essent, auguries legerent, qui nomen nouae urbi daret, qui conditam imperio regeret, Palatium Romulus, Remus Auentinum ad inaugurandum templa capiunt (‘Since they were twins and respect for age was not able to diVerentiate them, it was agreed that the gods, who held those places in their protection, should choose by augury who would give a name to the new city, who would rule with imperium at the foundation. Romulus took the Palatine for his augural area, and Remus took the Aventine’, Livy 1.6.4).

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Faustulus and Larentia exit the stage at the same time as Remus, with no adequate explanation. By this, Plutarch is able to further relegate any part of Romulus that is superXuous to the foundation of the city. Ties to Alba Longa, a pastoral upbringing, familial or fraternal duties are all stripped away, having no apparent impact on the biography’s subject. In an almost perfunctory way, Plutarch has consolidated the character, or lack thereof, by removing anything that might remind his audience that Romulus had an existence outside the foundation of Rome. Romulus, however, instead of becoming a fully autonomous entity with the loss of these exterior inXuences, is instead further galvanized as the vehicle through which Plutarch is going to format the Archaic Roman cityscape. Second, the city must be set out in the manner of a ritual that Romulus has learned from Etruria.31 He must perform the foundation moment, constructing the city in the way one constructs a text. This heightens the constructed nature of Plutarch’s Rome. It is not a natural, autochthonous growth, but one that is artiWcial and invasive. Plutarch is using Romulus to formulate a coherent topography for future Rome. The future location of Rome is as wild as the areas beyond the edges of the geographer’s maps Plutarch mentioned at the opening of the Theseus, ¼ıæØ ŒÆd ŁæØØ j ºe Iœc j
ŒıŁØŒ  Œæ j ºÆª  ª  (‘ ‘‘sandy and waterless deserts full of wild beasts’’, or ‘‘blind marsh’’, or ‘‘Scythian cold’’, or ‘‘frozen sea’’ ’, Plut., Thes. 1.1).

P LU TA RC H ’ S TI M E S C A P E So far we have concentrated on the major chronotope that dominates the Romulus. In this, Plutarch is attempting to deWne a space of activity in which the rest of his discussion of Archaic Rome can play out. Romulus violently labels the landscape and creates the Wrst physical markers of Roman identity, namely, the city walls and the Palatine Hill. Time, in the Romulus, is an elusive Wgure. Romulus still inhabits, to some extent, the atemporal borderland of Epic, a 31 For an in-depth discussion of foundation rituals for sacred spaces in Rome and their Indo-European analogues, see Woodard (2006).

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genre that in Bakhtin’s scheme refuses to allow any change.32 The world of Epic for Bakhtin is the picture of stasis. It is a past that is absolute and unchangeable. It is this type of chronotope that Plutarch is attempting to alter with Romulus.33 Having dealt with matters of space in Plutarch’s narrative in the Romulus, let us turn towards temporal issues. References to time and chronology are conspicuously absent in the Life of Romulus. The Wrst and almost only reference to a speciWc time in the Romulus concerns the foundation of the city.34 Plutarch Wrst associates the foundation of the city with the festival of the Parilia, situating it at a speciWc time of year. He then notes the custom of bloodless sacriWces during this festival, which seems out of character for a relatively aggressive people whose leader’s seminal act of founding the walls is accompanied by the murder of the brother. This is followed by a description of what lengths the Roman antiquarian Varro went to in order Wx the exact date and time of Romulus’ birth (Plut., Rom. 12.3). A short discussion of astrology is ended by the disclaimer Iººa ÆF Æ b Yø ŒÆd a ØÆF Æ fiH $fiø ŒÆd æØ fiH æ$ ÆØ Aºº j Øa e ıŁH KºØ f K ıª Æ ÆP E (‘These and other similar speculations will attract readers more by their novelty and wonder, rather than oVend by their fabulous character’, Plut., Rom. 12.6). Roman time then, for Plutarch, starts appropriately enough with the foundation of Rome. Before this, any attempt to establish any accurate historic timeframe is so diYcult as to be nearly impossible.35 Such attempts, in the same manner as Plutarch’s biographies of 32 Morris (2003: 182): Bakhtin’s Epic is about the ‘beginning’, ‘Wrst’, ‘founder’, ‘ancestor’, ‘that which occurred earlier’ and is an ‘absolute past . . . it lacks any relativity, that is any gradual, purely temporal progression that might connect it with the present’. 33 Bakhtin (1981: 14–15) ‘Whatever its origins, the epic as it has come down to us is an absolutely completed and Wnished generic form’. 34  … Ø b s  Œ Ø æfi Æ ªØ  fiB æe #ŒÆ ŒÆºÆH %Æ&ø; ›ºªE ÆØ; ŒÆd c æÆ Æ  'æ ıØ  øÆEØ; ªŁºØ B Æ æ  O  (‘It is agreed that the foundation occurred ten days before the Kalends of May, and the Romans celebrate this day, naming it the birthday of their fatherland’, Plut., Rom. 12.1). 35 The trials undergone by the astrologically minded Tarutius (Plut., Rom. 12.2–6) in order to establish the date of birth for Romulus, under the insistence of Varro, are paralleled by Plutarch’s own eVorts to convert the various myths of Theseus and Romulus into something resembling history (Plut., Thes. 1.3).

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Theseus and Romulus, must be met by an indulgent audience.36 Numa’s biography presents similar, but subtly diVerent, diYculties for Plutarch. While not entirely a ‘historical’ personage, as Plutarch implies in his comments on the problems of chronology at the beginning of the life, Numa is a transitional Wgure between myth and history.37 Numa is intimately bound up with this start of time, since Plutarch states that æfi Æ b ªªg ŒÆ a  ØÆ Ł Æ  Kfi w c   Œ ØÆ ƒ æd  øº (‘by some divine chance he was born on that day on which Rome was founded by Romulus’, Plut., Numa 3.4–5). Also, the pastoral nature of the bloodless rituals which the Romans perform associates this event more strongly with Numa, who is noted for his institution of such rites, rather than with Romulus, whose sacriWce at the foundation of the city walls is anything but bloodless. Numa’s birth coincides with the advent of time in Plutarch’s narrative. Plutarch will use Numa as a tool to contain and delineate and, in a certain sense, edit the rough draft of Rome that the author created with Romulus.38 The chronotope in the Romulus is dependent wholly upon Plutarch’s tool, Romulus. In the formative stages of the Roman state, Romulus’ physical presence is a necessity for social cohesion. Neither Rome nor its citizens have developed a stable enough sense of identity to survive without Romulus. This is clearly demonstrated in Plutarch’s description of the battle in the Forum between the Romans and the Sabines. The Romans begin to get routed almost immediately when Romulus is removed from the Wght. Without the central civilizing and controlling force of the king, the Romans have no ability to resist the Sabine onslaught. They become unstable, unable to maintain the consistency and discipline needed to face their enemies. Romulus, regaining consciousness after a glancing blow, looks around at his retreating people. Seemingly unable to stop this exodus, he resorts to a call for divine aid: 36 Pªø ø IŒæÆ H  ŁÆ ŒÆd æfi ø c IæÆغª Æ æø (‘Let us pray for a kind audience and one that receives ancient tales indulgently’, Plut., Thes. 1.3). 37 See Plut., Numa 1.2, for Plutarch’s attempts to situate Numa within an Olympian dating system. 38 While the Numa was ostensibly published before the Romulus, as Plutarch states in Thes. 1.2, one can safely assume they were written at the same time. See Pelling (2002c).

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ººB b B ıªB ÆP fiH æØ; ŒÆd e IÆ æØ ºH ; IÆ  Æ N PæÆe a EæÆ h$Æ  fiH ˜Ød  BÆØ e  æ ıÆ ŒÆd a  øÆ ø æªÆ Æ   Æ c æØØE; Iºº OæŁHÆØ: ª b B PB; ÆN  F Æغø  ºº; ŒÆd Łæ KŒ  ƺB Ææ  E ªıØ:  Æ s æH  y F › F ˜Øe F
 æ ¥ æı ÆØ ; n  ¯ Ø Ø ¼ Ø 'æØ; r Æ ıÆ

Æ  ºØ øÆ O

ø f
Æ ı K d c F  ªØÆ

æƪæı ŒÆd e B  ¯ Æ ƒæ : With a general rout streaming around him, and with no one daring to turn about, he (Romulus) raised his hands to the sky and besieged Zeus to stay his army and not allow the Roman power to fall, but to restore it. As he uttered this prayer, the king’s reverence held many men in their position, and inspired courage in those fleeing because of this reversal of the rout. They made their Wrst stand, then, where now is the temple of Zeus Stator, which might be glossed as ‘Stayer’. Then they once again ordered their ranks and drove the Sabines back to where now is the Regia and the temple of Hestia. Plut., Rom. 18.6–7

Zeus, in this case Jupiter Stator, ostensibly provides the power to halt the Roman retreat. Plutarch reports, however, that it was not particularly divine inXuence, but ÆN  F Æغø, that is, respect for Romulus. Only with his reappearance can the Romans regain both their will to Wght and, since their martial attitude is the most deWning characteristic of the population and their leader, their very identity. This is again re-enforced when Romulus disappears under the cover of an atmospheric disturbance at the end of the Life. The citizenry immediately splits into opposing factions without the physical presence of Romulus and the dissolution of the city is imminent.39 Despite the fact the Romulus has laid the foundations for the city and those structures vital to the creation of a Roman identity, without his presence the city begins to lose 39 Compare this to Livy (1.16.2): Romana pudes sedato tandem pauore, postquam ex tam turbido die serena et tranquilla lux rediit, ubi uacuam sedem regiam uidit, etsi satis credebat patribus, qui proximi steterant sublimem raptum procella, tamen uelut orbitatis metus icta maestum aliquamdiu silentium obtinuit (‘When the Romans had recovered from their quivering panic, and calming and tranquil light had replaced such a turbulent day, when they saw the royal seat to be empty, even though they believed enough the patricians, who had been standing close and were caught upwards by the gust, nevertheless they remained silent for some time having been aZicted with a fear of orphanhood’). Also see Diana Spencer’s essay in this volume.

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cohesion. Plutarch’s stated reason for the refusal of surrounding peoples to intermarry with the new Romans seems almost prophetic now: Iººa c b ºØ ›æH K  Œø PŁf K Ø ºÆ; z Oº ªØ ªıÆEŒÆ r ; ƒ b ººd ت K$ I æø ŒÆd IÆH Z   æøæH  ŒÆd

æŒH  c ıE Æ ø: But on the contrary, seeing the city Wlling up straightaway with aliens, few of whom had wives, the majority being a mixture from the needy and obscure, they were derided and expected to have no strong cohesion. Plut., Rom. 14.2

The Romulan chronotope is thus inherently unstable. Romulus as the central deWning factor is a disruptive force. His expansion consumes opposing authorities, but is always threatening to collapse in on itself. It is the lack of both temporal and topographic boundaries that creates this instability. Plutarch works to correct this in his formation of the Numan chronotope. Numa becomes the replacement for Romulus, and is introduced as a stabilizing factor. Plutarch describes the unwilling king as a Sabine, one that refused the migration to Rome and hence has not become assimilated into a Roman template like his kinsmen under Tatius. He has strong ties to the Wrst Sabine king, having married Tatius’ daughter as well as sharing his homeland, Cures, from where the term Quirites supposedly derives (Plut., Numa 3.4). Despite Plutarch’s seeming insistence that Numa is not a Roman, the mention of his homeland causes the audience to recall both Romulus’ divine appellation, Quirinus, as well as the designation of the Roman citizens as Quirites.40 He was, as noted above, also born on the exact day of the city’s foundation. What Plutarch has done with Numa is present an alternative for a deWnition of Roman-ness. Up to this point Roman identity has been intrinsically and exclusively associated with Romulus. Numa is the Wrst ‘Roman’ who exists outside this inXuence. 40 c b ª K øı Æ fiH  øºfiø e ˚ıæE ƒ b  ¯ıºØ

æƪæıØ; ƒ  ‹ Ø ŒÆd f º Æ ˚ıæ Æ T Æ (‘Some say Romulus’ historic title of Quirinus has the meaning ‘‘Warlike’’; others attribute the name to the fact that the citizens too are called Quirites’, Plut., Rom. 29.1).

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THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING . . . Numa, having retreated from an urban environment dwells as a near hermit on the outskirts of civilization, an area that serves as an antithesis for the Xedgling urban centre of Rome. These two topographies, the passive countryside and the tumultuous city, represent the dichotomy between Romulus and Numa. Instead of the wild, pre-Roman Italy that Plutarch describes at the beginning of the Life of Romulus, the countryside of Numa is peaceful, his Ø are KæØ.41 Numa will have a calming eVect on the topography of both Rome and the character of the Roman people similar to that he has had on the landscape. He will induce the people to pursue a pastoral mode of life, instead of a martial existence, revere the gods, and live quietly in general (Plut., Numa 20.3–4). Romulus had set the foundations of the eternal city but left it in turmoil. Romulus’ Rome is dependent upon the king for its social cohesion, and with the removal of the controlling force the social system begins to disintegrate. Only Numa’s presence can tame the chaos and form the population into a permanent citizen body.42 Numa’s installation is a mirror image of Romulus’ assumption of power. Instead of creating a people and city over which he will be king (like Romulus did), Numa is made king by acclamation of all the people, both senatorial and plebeian.43 Numa’s entrance into 41 For the condition of the Tiber before the arrival of Romulus, see Plut., Rom. 3.4. In contrast, there is Plutarch’s description of Numa’s environment: › b ˝A KŒº ø a K ¼ Ø ØÆ æØa IªæÆıºE a ººa ŒÆd ºÆAŁÆØ   XŁº; K ¼ºØ ŁH ŒÆd ºØHØ ƒæE ŒÆd Ø KæØ Ø c  ÆØ Æ (‘Numa, forsaking the pastimes of the city, preferred to dwell for the most part rustically and to wander there alone, passing his time in groves of the gods, and sacred meadows, and peaceful places’, Plut., Numa 4.1). 42 By ‘solidify’, I mean that Numa provides a stabilizing inXuence and Wlls in all the gaps left by Romulus in the development of Archaic Rome. While Plutarch mentions the successors of Numa, it is almost in passing. Archaic Rome has been fully developed with Numa, and Plutarch jumps right into the Republican Period with his chronologically next Roman biography, Publicola. 43 Perhaps the diVerence between Romulus’ and Numa’s assumption of power can be read as a step towards the development of the later Republic. Despite Plutarch’s statement that the people were not ready for any government except that of monarchy (Plut., Numa 2.3), nevertheless Numa is made king by acclamation of both the senatorial class and the plebeian.

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Rome is marked by celebration and sacriWce, and Plutarch notes that the people were rejoicing u æ P ÆغÆ B ºø; IººÆ Æغ Æ  (‘as if the city was receiving not a king, but a kingdom’, Plut., Numa 7.1), as indeed the Romans will receive a kingdom, their own, both physically and socially, during the kingship of Numa. Numa, just like Romulus, receives an augury that approves of his kingship. Unlike Romulus’ sign, his successor’s is under no suspicion of forgery. Romulus declared what he had seen, and then it appeared, according to one version Plutarch relates.44 Numa waits for the sign, and will not claim kingship until after it is given. The event that signals his kingship will occur apparently independent of Numa. The fact that it occurs at all and is not fabricated or summoned by will emphasizes the diVerence between this event and Romulus’ divinations. Numa also awaits his birds, appropriately enough, on the Capitoline Hill. In Plutarch’s narrative Romulus receives the omen on the Palatine, signifying the future centre of the city. Numa, a Sabine king, receives his on the Wrst location on which the Sabines become topographically stable and are able to challenge the Romans.45 Central to Numa’s programme of religious (and topographical) reforms is the encouragement of worship of and the building of a temple to Terminus. According to Plutarch:

æH   ÆØ ŒÆd —  ø ŒÆd "æ ƒæe ƒæÆŁÆØ: ŒÆd c b —  Ø ‹æŒ I E$ÆØ  øÆ Ø ªØ ; fiz æØ æØ F ØÆ ºFØ: › b "æø ‹æ ¼ Ø Y; ŒÆd ŁıØ ÆP fiH  fi Æ ŒÆd N fiÆ ŒÆ a f H IªæH æØæØ; F b łıÆ; e ƺÆØe b IÆ ÆŒ  q  Łı Æ; ˝A غÆ  ‰ æc e ‹æØ Łe Næ ºÆŒÆ ŒÆd ØŒÆØ æ ı Z Æ  ı ŒÆŁÆæe r ÆØ:

44 ıŁø b c æØ ZæØØ ÆN Ø æÆFÆØ; ŒÆd ŒÆŁø øæ ; #$ ÆØ fiH  fiø; Ø ºÆ ı b fiH  øºfiø æÆBÆØ ªF Æ: ƒ b e b   IºŁH NE; łÆŁÆØ b e  øº; KºŁ   b F  ı;  f ŒÆ fiH  øºfiø ÆBÆØ (‘The story goes that, when they agreed to settle the strife by bird-auguries and sat apart from one another, six vultures appeared to Remus, and twice that number to Romulus. Others say that Remus truly saw this, and Romulus lied; and that it was only when Remus came to him that the twelve vultures actually did appear before Romulus’. Plut., Rom. 9.5). 45 The Sabines do not pose any threat to the Romans and their expansion until Tatius, through subterfuge, seizes the Capitoline fortress. After this, the Romans and the Sabines meet for the Wrst time on the uneven ground where the Forum was eventually to be.

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He [Numa] was also the Wrst, they say, to build temples to Fides and Terminus, and he taught the Romans their most solemn oath by Fides, which they still use today. Terminus signiWes boundary, and to this god they make public and private sacriWces where their Welds are set oV by boundaries; of living victims nowadays, but anciently the sacriWce was a bloodless one, since Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries was a guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing, and should therefore be clear of slaughter. Plut., Numa 16.1–2

Numa, in Plutarch, institutes the worship of Terminus among the Romans as a method for recognizing land divisions. Division of land was integral for peaceful coexistence among the inhabitants of early Roman territory. All of Romulus’ major domestic problems centre on topographic disputes; the Wrst is the location of the city, which results in the death of Remus (Plut., Rom. 10.1). According to Plutarch, the origin of Romulus’ conXict with the Senate has to do with land distribution: B b ªB c æ Œ   ÆP e K 'Æı F Æ E  æÆ Ø ÆØ; ŒÆd f ›æı E ´ Ø I ; h  ØŁ ø h  ıºø KŒ ø, $ ŒØfiB c ªæı Æ æ ºÆŒ Ø. When he, of his own accord, divided up the war-won territory among his own soldiers and returned the hostages to the Veientes without the Senate approving or advising, he then seemed to be insulting them outright. Plut., Rom. 27.2

Romulus’ inability to assimilate territory won in war eVectively creates domestic tension; he is unable to transform himself from a war leader to a peace-time king.46 Plutarch further emphasizes the importance of Terminus’ installation and the corresponding social contract by linking the lack of such boundaries with the land-rapacious and war-mongering Romulus. 46 Numa in fact is unable to make a successful transition from priest-king to leader, the opposite problem of his predecessor, as noted by Plutarch: ÆP e b e ˝A o ø Æd N e ŁE Iæ BŁÆØ ÆE Kº

Ø; u  ŒÆd æƪªº Æ ÆP fiH

  ª ‰ K æ ÆØ ºØØ; ØØAÆØ ŒÆd N E: ‘ ¯ªg b Łø:’ (‘And Numa himself, as they say, had such implicit conWdence in the gods, that once, when a message was brought to him that enemies were coming up against the city, he smiled and said ‘‘But I am sacriWcing’’ ’, Plut., Numa 15.6).

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ŒE b ŒÆd ‹ºø y  ›æ ÆØ c æÆ › Æغ;  øºı c ıºŁ  K$ºªÆŁÆØ fiH  æfiø F NŒ ı c IÆ æØ F Iºº æ ı: e ªaæ r ÆØ B ıø e ‹æ; i ıº  ÆØ; c ıºÆ  b B IØŒ Æ ºª. And it is quite apparent that it was this king [Numa] who set bounds to the territory of the city, for Romulus was unwilling to acknowledge, by measuring out his own, how much he had seized from others. He knew that a boundary, if observed, fetters lawless power, and if not observed, is a witness of injustice. Plut., Numa 16.2

Numa prescribes the appropriate worship of Terminus. Terminus then becomes a touchstone, so to speak, for domestic accord.47 Terminus and Numa, in Plutarch, both have their power legitimized on the hill that the Sabines utilized to mount the Wrst successful attack on the Romans. Terminus is intimately bound up with Sabine identity. Dume´zil, following Varro, has associated Terminus with the so-called ‘gods of Titus Tatius’ (ARR 169–170). Once Terminus has been incorporated into a Roman religious system, he becomes necessary for the continuing survival of the state.48 Rome has shifted from a militaristic policy to an agrarian policy of peaceful propagation, and without the deWnite preservation of boundaries between both Rome and its neighbours and between the Romans themselves discord will reappear and they may lose social consistency. Terminus (and Juventas) are the only two deities that were not relocated from the Capitoline with the construction of the temple for Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Dion. Hal. 3.69.3–5). According to Dionysius these deities were integral for the continued success and health of the 47 As is noted in Woodard (2006: 65), ‘[O]ne might expect that the nomadic Proto-Indo-European pastoralists had no need for boundary stones. In the sedentary Indo-European daughter cultures, such as that of Rome, stones provide an eVective means for making boundaries and the archaic sacred stone might naturally be assimilated to such markers.’ Thus, for an amorphous Romulan culture, such boundary stones are not integral to social consistency. Only with the continuing establishment of a more coherent Roman identity does the need for such markers arise. 48 See Woodard (2006: 246): ‘Numa’s boundary and land reforms—to use the phenomenology of the historicized mythic tradition—are the consequence of the transformation of an archaic Indo-European pastoral society, with its rituals of symbolic and ever advancing acquisitions of earth, into the landed society of Rome in which shared boundaries between Welds must remain Wxed and inviolate.’

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Roman state. Livy provides collaborating evidence for the immovability of Terminus (Livy 1.55.2–4). Plutarch notes that Numa decreed that the sacriWces to Terminus would be bloodless. The peculiarity of this sacriWce occasions mention in Roman Questions 15: Øa e "æØ; fiz a "æغØÆ ØFØ; Łe    Pb Łı ÆP fiH fiH; q  øº b ‹æı PŒ ŁŒ B æÆ; ‹ ø K$fiB æœÆØ ŒÆd I  ŁÆØ ŒÆd  Ø AÆ N Æ; u æ › ¸Œø r ; w i e  æı KØŒB ÆØ: ˝A b —

ºØ; Icæ  ŒÆØ ŒÆd ºØ ØŒe J ŒÆd غ  ª ;   æÆ ‰æ Æ  æe f ªØ ØH Æ ŒÆd E ‹æØ K Ø Æ e "æØ ‰ K

Œ  ŒÆd ºÆŒÆ غ Æ ŒÆd Næ fiþ  E Æ¥ Æ  ŒÆd  ı ŒÆŁÆæe ŒÆd I Æ  ØÆıº Ø. Why is it that they [the Romans] are not in the habit of sacriWcing living creatures to Terminus, in whose honor they celebrate the Terminalia, even though they regard him as a god? Is it that Romulus placed no boundarystones for his country, so that the Romans might go forth, seize land, and regard whatever they were able to reach with their spears as theirs, in the manner of the Spartan maxim; whereas Numa Pompilius, a just man and a statesman, who had become versed in philosophy, marked out boundaries between Rome and her neighbors? When he Wnally installed Terminus over the boundary stones, as a guardian of peace and friendship, he thought that Terminus should be kept pure and undeWled from blood and slaughter. Plut., QR 15

Compare the sacriWce Numa proclaims for his boundary, as opposed to Romulus’ for the foundation of the walls. Once again, Plutarch has presented the characters of these kings, through the sacriWces they make, as opposing poles. Ovid’s description of Terminus in the Fasti reinforces the pastoral and protective nature of the deity: et cantant laudes, Termine sancte, tuas: tu populos urbesque et regna ingentia Wnis: omnis erit sine te litigiosus ager. nulla tibi ambitio est, nullo corrumperis auro, legitima seruas credita rura Wde. The simple neighborhood meets and celebrates the feast, and chants your praises, holy Terminus: You conWne peoples and cities and great kingdoms;

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all land would be disputed without you. You seek none’s favour, you are bribed by no gold; you guard entrusted lands with pledge of law. Ovid, Fasti 2.657–62

The bloodless sacriWces to Terminus ensure domestic accord. Romulus’ fratricide, while a necessary step in the establishment of the city, foreshadows the sanguinary and oppressive character of Rome’s founder that will emerge later in his kingship. The situation of relative peace after Numa’s legitimization of Terminus is contrasted sharply with the character of the Roman people under the inXuence of Romulus, whose actions not only transgress boundaries in his search for conquest but also disrupt appropriate social relationships. Under his leadership, as stated above in Roman Questions 15, the Romans rushed forth and seized neighbouring property without regard to ownership. Romulus’ ignorance of physical boundaries, as well as the inability of these boundaries to constrain him, is highlighted by Plutarch in the Romulus: KŁÆÆ b ººd ŒÆd H KŒ e IŁæ ø e  øº; ƒ b

æª æØ ¸Æ EØ łÆ  ÆP fiH غ Æ K ØÆ  ŒÆd ıÆ Æ: )ØÆ  x º; I ıª Æ B   ºØ; ‰ b Ø ÆØ; K$Æ  f ƒ

Æ łÆ ŒÆd ŒºÆ   E H ıºH f  æ تªÆ; r  K ØÆd ÆP e I æŒ ø. Many foreign peoples were awed in regard to Romulus, and the forebearers of the Latins sent ambassadors and established treaties and alliances. He took Fidenae, a city neighboring Rome, as some say, having abruptly sent his horsemen to sabotage the pins of the gate, and then unexpectedly appearing there himself. Plut., Rom. 23.5

Romulus is then able to destroy the most visible mark of topographic coherency in other cities: city walls. The fact that Rome retains her walls allows her to maintain stability and, paradoxically, absorb surrounding peoples. Despite Romulus’ original foundation of walls for Rome, Plutarch continually depicts him as a transgressor, a character whose mere presence is enough to rend the fabric of both the physical and social city. Terminus, in Plutarch, can be read as a marker for the transformation of the character of the Roman people from a martial encampment

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to a more political and agrarian society. Observed boundaries guarantee peaceful coexistence among the populace and their violation creates strife at the most basic social level, as evidenced by the Romulus and Remus episode. The Wgure that Plutarch most associates with this transformation of the Roman character is Janus. Plutarch binds Numa and Janus intimately together through Numa’s numerous calendrical reforms (QR 19, 22; Numa 18–19). Mars, as a warrior, is emblematic of the reign of Romulus. As a patron of sorts for Romulus, Plutarch notes that, previous to Numa, March stood at the head of the Roman calendar. Numa attempts to elevate Janus in order to strengthen the new ruler’s agenda. Of particular importance for Numa in Plutarch is Janus’ association with agriculture. Plutarch highlights this association in one of the reasons for the bi-form appearance of the deity in Roman Questions 22: j Aºº ‹ Ø f æd c  * ƺ Æ ÆP e Iªæ Ø ŒÆd I Ø æøı ŁØ N # æ  ı BÆ;  Æ ªøæªE ŒÆd

ºØ ŁÆØ;  ƺ ŒÆd  Œ  (‘Or is it rather that he changed the people of Italy to another form of life by persuading a people who had formerly made use of wild plants and lawless customs to till the soil and live under organized government?’). Janus, like his sponsor Numa, is described by Plutarch as a symbolic marker for the transformation of the Roman people from a conglomerate of disparate peoples into a single social unit. Plutarch associates Janus not only with agriculture but also with eVective government. Agriculture then is a necessary component of Numa’s scheme for social stability.49 Terminus and Janus are bound together by a number of functions. The territory which Romulus had acquired in warfare was distributed among the indigenous citizenry of Rome by Numa, and marked oV by boundary stones consecrated to Terminus. Such land gifts were meant to inspire their owners towards farming, as Plutarch relates: ŒÆØ
Æ  AÆ › ˝A ØØ E I æØ H ºØ H; ‰ IªŒ B IØŒ Æ IÆØæH c I æ Æ; ŒÆd æ ø K d ªøæª Æ e B –Æ fiB æfi Æ ı$æ. 49 In QR 42 Plutarch intimately associates Janus with images of fertility and social stability, in particular Kronos, material wealth, and coinage. For Plutarch, Janus is a necessary aspect of good government because agriculture and material prosperity encourage peaceful development.

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And Numa divided all this [i.e. land acquired by Romulus in war] among those of the citizenry without means, on the rationale that by removing destitution, the necessity of wrong doing, and turning the people towards agriculture, they would be cultivated along with the land. Plut., Numa 16.3

Since agriculture inspires a peaceful mentality along with a strong work ethic, according to Plutarch, Numa administered agriculture as an Næ  º æ (‘peace potion’; Plut., Numa 16.4). Janus, as shown earlier, is credited with the introduction of farming and animal husbandry to Italy (Plut., QR 19, 22). Agriculture is set in direct opposition to martial pursuits, and Janus is seen as a founding Wgure for this practice, as indicated by Janus’ usurpation of Mars’ place in the calendar. Plutarch includes a description of the Temple of Janus in the Numa:  Ø b ÆP F ŒÆd g K  fi  Łıæ; n ºı º ŒÆºFØ:   ÆØ ªaæ IfiHŁÆØ b ÆP e ‹ Æ fi q º; ŒŒºEŁÆØ b Næ ª: n b ƺ e q ŒÆd  Æ ø ªØ ; I ØØ ıæ  ºfiø B ª Æ; Øa ªŁ E ŒŒºfiø æØŒıØ ªØ ÆææØ I æØ. There was a temple for him [i.e. Janus] in Rome with double doors, which they call the Gate of War. For customarily it was opened whenever there was war, and closed when peace came. But the latter was a diYcult matter and rarely happened, since the leadership was always involved in some war, and Rome’s size brought it into conXict with the surrounding barbarian populations. Plut., Numa 20.1

For Plutarch, the Temple of Janus was a barometer of the martial readiness of the Roman State, at least in theory. The temple would indicate, through its physical appearance, whether the Roman State was prosecuting a war or existing in the stability of peace. The gates were only closed in times of complete peace. Symbolically, the gates then were barriers that when closed held in check the martial tendencies of the Roman people within the temple dedicated to Janus. And these are tendencies that are best associated with the violence and disruption of Romulus. When opened, war then was unfettered to leave the temple and bring Rome into conXict with its neighbours, disregarding the sacred boundaries of Terminus that ensured accord among the Romans and between the Romans and

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their neighbours. Janus then, as a guardian of or check on these martial tendencies, mirrors Terminus’ function as a facilitator of domestic accord by marking out distinct boundaries. According to Plutarch, Rome, under Numa’s benign inXuence, becomes a centre of domestic accord and civil tranquility which radiates these qualities out to surrounding communities, creating a utopian environment (Plut., Numa 20.3–5). This is a vast change from the Romulan programme, in which it was insinuated that the king was continually looking for pretences for war.50 A further link can be established between Janus and the sacred nature of the walls of Rome. Recall Plutarch’s descriptions of the Romans’ ritual for sanctifying the walls of the city: ˜Øa A E Iº ŒÆd ƒæe  ıØ a b ºÆ P  ıØ; q ŒÆŁ æ ªæÆł ´ææø; e b E ƒæe E  Ø; ‹ ø  bæ ÆP F ø ÆØ æŁø ŒÆd I Łfi ŒøØ; o ø ªaæ ŒE ŒÆd  øº I Œ EÆØ e Iºe ‰ ¼Æ  ŒÆd ƒæe  K ØØæF Æ ØÆ A ŒÆd ØE  æÆ e ŒÆd º: a b ºÆ P x   q IØæHÆØ; Ø z ¼ººÆ  ººa H IƪŒÆ ø ŒÆd f Œæf KŒŒ ıØ: ‹Ł ƒ ºØ I  IæB Œ   ‹ i ººøØ  IØŒE; K

ÆØ Iæ æfiø; F ¼ææÆ ŒÆd ŁºØÆ  $Æ : ‹ Æ b a   æØæ øØ; a H

ıºH æÆ ØÆ æF  c oØ ÆØæFØ; ŒÆd  ÆæıØ o ø e ¼æ æ; ‰ c Iæı AÆ ƒæa ŒÆd ¼ıº K. Why do they consider the entire city wall as inviolable and sacred, but not the gates? Is it, as Varro has written, that it is necessary to think the wall sacred, so that men may Wght and die with enthusiasm in its defence? It was under such circumstances, it seems, that Romulus killed his brother, since he was attempting to leap across a space that was inviolable and sacred, and to make it violable and profane. However, it was impossible to consecrate the gates, for through them they carry many necessary things and dead bodies as well. For this reason, and from time immemorial, the founders of a city yoke a bull and a cow and go over with a plough as much land as they intend to inhabit: and when they are marking out the course of the city walls, they 50 In particular, note one of the reasons Plutarch supplies for the rape of the Sabine Women: ŒÆd ºªıØ b ØØ e  øº ÆP e fiB Ø غ º Z Æ; ŒÆd  Ø Œ Øø ¼æÆ ºª ø ‹ Ø c    æø ÆØ ºØ æ ŒÆd ÆP$ ªŁÆØ ª  ;  Æ  æ$ÆØ æe f
Æ ı (‘And some say the Romulus himself, naturally warlike, and having been persuaded by certain oracles that Rome was destined to become great being nourished and increased by wars, he undertook hostilities towards the Sabines’, Plut., Rom. 14.1).

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measure oV the spaces for the gates, lift up the ploughshare and carry it across, since they hold that all the ploughed area is to be kept sacred and inviolable. Plut., QR 27

Plutarch implies that the walls cannot be completely sanctiWed on account of IƪŒÆ , ‘necessity’. This sense of necessity in Plutarch’s narrative of Archaic Rome is explicitly linked with Romulus. Plutarch in the synkrisis of Theseus and Romulus compares the motivations for the actions of the two heroes. Theseus wins pride of place since he undertook his adventures out of choice, with no compulsion. Romulus, according to Plutarch, performs his exploits for diVerent reasons: › b ıº Æ ıªfiB Ææ ŒÆd Øøæ Æ K Øæ; KŒE e F —º ø I H  e ı IæE ª ; ŒÆd  fiø F a Æ Æ

ÆŁE K d e æA ªºÆ Ø IªŒ Ææƪ . On the other hand, for the escape of current servitude and impending punishment, he artlessly attained that courage arising from fear, of which Plato writes, and through the fear of extreme suVering he performed great deeds on account of necessity. Plut., Thes. et Rom. Comp. 1.1

Romulus is characterized by Plutarch as being continually driven by necessity. It is a necessity for wives and alliances that forces him to orchestrate the rape of the Sabine women. It is necessity that drives his entire militaristic agenda. If we keep in mind the stress that Plutarch has placed on necessity and Romulus’ character, then we can draw a connection between the walls of Rome and the walls of the Temple of Janus. Janus, being the patron of agrarian pursuits, is linked with the pastoral ritual of consecration for the city walls as performed by Romulus.51 Certain necessary, but objectionable and disruptive, tendencies, associated with the aggressive personality of Romulus, are held within the Temple of Janus, and are only allowed to exit through the gates of war, being prevented from shattering the walls by the providence of Janus. 51 Associations between Terminus and the ritual consecration of the walls in Plutarch can also be drawn. The walls are consecrated by a pastoral rite, devoid of the sacriWce of live victims. Terminus receives only non-blood sacriWces as well (Plut., QR 15, Numa 16.2).

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Janus exhibits powerful topographic associations similar to those of Terminus. The Wgure of Terminus also has a temporal aspect that is shared with Janus. Plutarch a number of times describes the insertion of Janus at the forefront of the year, superseding March. In Roman Questions 15, Plutarch explains that the Romans celebrate the festival of the Terminalia in honour of Terminus. Varro indicates that the Terminalia was once considered the end of the year: Terminalia, quod is dies anni extremus constitutus: duodecimus enim mensis fuit Februarius et cum intercalatur inferiores quinque dies duodecimo demuntur mense. The Terminalia, because that day was considered the end of the year: Indeed February was the twelfth month and when the extra month is inserted the last Wve days are removed from the twelfth. Varro, LL 6.13

Ovid corroborates this in the Fasti: Sed tamen, antiqui ne nescius ordinis erres, primus, ut est, Iani mensis et ante fuit; qui sequitur Ianum, ueteris fuit ultimus anni: tu quoque sacrorum, Termine, Wnis eras. So you will not be ignorant of the old sequence, the Wrst month belonged to Janus, as now. What follows Janus was then the old year’s Wnal month. You were end of the rites as well, Terminus. Ovid, Fasti 2.47–50

The Terminalia began a series of festivals that marked an ancient transition from one year to the next. The Terminalia and the subsequent festivals mark a disruption in the Xow of time between one year and the other.52 This disruption occurs until the arrival of the festival that takes place on the Ides of March, the Anna Perenna, a New Year celebration. Janus and Terminus then both stand as markers for the temporal transition from one year to another, Janus, and the calendar introduced by Numa corresponding to a solar year, and Terminus with the New Year festival of the Anna Perenna on 15 March corresponding to a lunar calendar. 52 Woodard (2002: 96–7).

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The Sites of Rome CITY LIMITS?

If Plutarch used Romulus to break the boundaries of Epic and attempts to begin the construction of a historical reality in which to unfold the character of future Romans, it is with Numa that our narrator attempts to codify and limit this process. The solidiWcation of the social system of Archaic Rome are dependent on Numa’s establishment of a stable topography. Plutarch explicitly states that good government and appropriate social behaviour is dependent upon material prosperity. The original prosperity that the initial Roman population experienced is owing almost exclusively to the aggressive actions of the city’s founder, Romulus. Plutarch depicts Romulus as a Wgure that enlarges the Roman sphere of inXuence, but he is also a topographically disruptive force, since in order to extend Roman power he must destroy other, competing topographic distinctions. After Romulus’ disappearance, the social fabric of Rome, containing an uneasy amalgamation of the proto-Roman followers of Romulus and the newly arrived Sabines, is on the verge of rending. Plutarch’s Numa reconstitutes Roman identity along topographic lines. Numa’s introduction of both Terminus and Janus, for Plutarch, provides the appropriate limits to Roman space and time. Terminus delineates the edge of Roman territory, creating strict boundaries for Rome and halting the aggressive mentality of Romulan Rome which ignored, although by necessity, such boundaries. Janus not only introduces agriculture into the Roman sphere but also within his temple contains the violent impulses that threaten to bring Rome into conXict with her neighbours, allowing Numa to reverse the Romulan agenda of aggressive expansion and help complete the social consolidation of Archaic Rome. Without the institution of such boundaries by Numa, Rome would have dissolved, as evidenced by the precarious situation after the death of Romulus. Numa replaces the cohesive power of Romulus’ personality with the installation of the worship of Terminus and Janus, allowing Archaic Rome to outlive her founders. Archaic Rome, however, was never in any danger of dying. Plutarch, with his Numan chronotope, is attempting to circumscribe the

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limits of Rome in order to nestle the cityscape into a familiar biographical time frame. Both the Romulan and the Numan chronotopes are interdependent; they provide a background and energy for the narrative of both biographies. This relationship can be described best by the use of Ladin’s list of chronotopic relationships: it is dialectical in nature. As he states: More common (and more powerful in its eVects) . . . is a dialectical relationship among chronotopes. (Here, dialectical refers to any conceptual conXict that is resolved by a higher level concept.) In dialectical relationships, a conXict between simultaneously presented chronotopes is resolved by the generation of an implicit, higher level chronotope, within which that conXict is resolved.53

The chronotopes of the Romulus and Numa are resolved, in one way, by Plutarch’s appeal to the ‘higher level concept’ of contemporary Rome. This concept that he attempts to create is what I call a metachronotope, an overarching time-space nexus that allows him to situate these otherwise problematic narratives. Early in this article, I emphasized Bakhtin’s valuation of ‘historical reality’ in Plutarch’s biographic chronotope. Bakhtin claims that history is tangential to the purpose of Plutarch’s narrative, that is, the revelation of the character of the protagonist. It has no determining inXuence on the protagonist, and ‘it does not shape or create, it merely manifests it (character)’.54 As I have attempted to prove, Plutarch’s narrative in these two Lives has worked counter to this, and in fact it is the ‘historical reality’ of Rome, the very substance which Bakhtin claims merges into the background, that Plutarch is concerned with. In this way, Romulus and Numa become tangential, merely tools for the manifestation of the site Rome. They have no intentionality, no real character, and no existence outside their functions as surveying tools for Plutarch. The opening of the Romulus tips Plutarch’s hand: "e ªÆ B   ZÆ ŒÆd  $fi Øa  ø IŁæ ø ŒøæŒe I ‹ ı ŒÆd Ø m ÆN Æ fiB ºØ ªª; P ‰º ª ÆØ Ææa E ıªªæÆFØ.

53 Ladin (1999: 225).

54 Bakhtin (1981: 181).

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The Sites of Rome

There is no agreement among writers from whom and for what reason the great name of Rome, so famous among all peoples, was given to the city. Plut., Rom. 1.1

Plutarch’s subject in these two Lives then is Archaic Rome, but the city resists his organizing eVorts, it will not Wt into the biographic chronotope in the neat way his other subjects do. Contemporary Rome blurs with past Rome and seeps through into his narrative. The image of the Temple of Janus creates a graphic picture of the conXict. Plutarch’s chronotope, like the walls of the temple, attempts to control, regulate, and dominate the forces within it. Plutarch attempts to close oV his meta-chronotope of Rome, closing the gates. He attempts to force Rome into the paradigm of his biographic chronotope. Rome is not a person, and not a typical Plutarchan subject. Rome, as many of the essays in this volume have shown, can be called many things, but placid and dead are not among those qualities. The gates never remain closed, however, and Plutarch struggles, in these biographies, to come to terms with the nature of the city. Rome as an entity resists Plutarch’s attempts to contain and control. The boundaries of Plutarch’s meta-chronotope are porous.

7 Staging Rome: the Renaissance, Rome, and humanism’s classical crisis Jacob Blevins

Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiu’st at all, These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call. Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast . . . Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558), translated by Edmund Spenser (1591)

Despite the critical tendency to view the Renaissance in Europe as a great awakening of autonomous selfhood, Renaissance humanism was as much about conXict as self-discovery.1 Ideological tensions during the Renaissance abounded, none more signiWcant than humanism’s obsession with classical culture amid very contemporary economic, religious, and political changes. The gaze back to antiquity— its art, literature, philosophy, politics, nationalism—was, on the one hand, the primary source for a growing focus on self-identity and a secular world founded on introspection of the self; on the other 1 There have recently been various approaches to humanism that have implicitly and explicitly challenged this somewhat old-fashioned view of the Renaissance. Jonathan Dollimore in his discussion of ‘Essentialist Humanism’ with regards to attitudes toward Renaissance tragedy illustrates the politically subversive nature of humanism; see Dollimore (2004). Ernesto Grassi (1988) takes a Heideggerian view of the Renaissance, and Gian Mario Anselmi (1988) approaches the humanist programme from a fundamentally Marxist view. See also Grassi (1983) and Leonard Barkan (1991).

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hand, antiquity was the unattainable ‘Other’, the object of a desire the Renaissance could never completely satisfy, a lack that could never be Wlled. Classical Rome became both a material reminder of past greatness and a symbol of Renaissance selfhood and cultural sophistication, but classical Rome and Roman identity for humanists also represented the source of a dialectic that both gloriWed and negated classical ‘Romanness’. Classical Rome was temporally and ideologically foreign, but it was also integral to humanist identity formation. Humanism existed only in its relationship to the concept of ‘Rome’ as a place, a cultural centre, but for the Renaissance to be something diVerent, something progressive, humanist ideology also had to equip itself with methods of exposing a lack in the very myth it valorized. Although there has been a substantial body of scholarship that addresses the Renaissance fascination with Rome, none of that work, I believe, has adequately dealt with the psychic conXict between humanists and their rediscovery and literary representation of Rome.2 Materially, textually, and ideologically, there existed a ‘classical crisis’, and at the centre of that crisis, serving as a primary locus of anxiety, was the reality of a ruined Rome, a Rome that in one sense had to be recovered and restored, but ultimately replaced.3 Just as Renaissance archaeologists and mapmakers had sought to uncover the buried ruins of Rome and to interpret the ‘truth’ of Rome (and consequently the ‘truth’ of themselves) from the material fragments of Rome’s past, Renaissance writers also attempted to uncover Rome by appropriating Latin texts that centred on ‘place’ and Roman ideology and then to create a Wctitious Rome that served to validate

2 Two notable exceptions are Thomas M. Greene’s (1982a) and Margaret W. Ferguson’s (1984) essays. Ferguson actually characterizes du Bellay’s relationship to ancient Rome and to his hopes for a contemporary adoption of Roman qualities as an essentially Freudian ‘family Romance’ (26–7). Barkan also addresses the connexion between Rome and the Oedipal family romance in Transuming Passion (1991). 3 The basis for my examination of the humanist’s relationship to Rome and the anxiety that ensues is Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of InXuence (1973); however, Bloom’s inXuential theory of poetic history focuses on single authors and their single powerful precursors and largely discounts early modern consciousness. Also, Bloom’s theory is based solely on the Freudian Oedipus complex, and he does not explore the Lacanian implications of poetic ‘anxiety’. My analysis here opens up the fundamental presence of ‘anxiety’ to a broader cultural consciousness and to the Lacanian principles that might provide better insight into Renaissance identity formation.

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classical Rome as a centre of cultural supremacy. However, those literary representations of Rome are often subverted and altered, thus exposing a lack that could only be Wlled by humanists’ own mythological constructions of a new Europe, one that was still deWnitively Christian. At times, these writers recreate Rome in Europe’s own image, depicting Rome as a mere reXection of contemporary European cultural centres. The various humanist processes of appropriation illustrate the ideological struggle with justifying a present with a past that, out of necessity, had to be shown as somehow incomplete. In order to illustrate the crisis of humanist subjectivity and the importance of various physical and textual sites of Roman culture in that crisis, it is necessary to explore the construction and intersection of identity formation and cultural ideology. Only after such an exploration can the full signiWcance of classical Rome’s presence in the Renaissance be understood; only then can the ‘double reading’ of Rome’s past and present be considered in its vast intertextual presence. Just like the material excavation of Rome’s ruins, authors textually excavated the works of Latin authors—Roman historians, poets, and playwrights—and Wssures that emerge in those Latin texts became a source of a humanist reinvention of Rome’s mythic past and that material, ruinous present.4 Writers such as Joachim du Bellay respond directly to the ruins of Rome, grieving the loss of ancient Rome’s great past but recognizing that greatness suVered from its own lack, its own self-destructive qualities. English playwrights ‘play out’ the very psychic crisis of the humanist in their Roman plays, as they depict a Rome whose great history becomes the site of tremendous anxiety for the Roman characters in the plays. Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare oVer up characters who use Rome as the locus of Roman identity, but there remains a recognition that Rome’s failures will lead to the literal ruining of Rome and what Rome represents. These works, and the constant dialogue between humanism and its Roman other, demonstrate both a fragmented sense of Rome as well as a fragmented sense of the humanist ‘self ’ 4 Catharine Edwards (1996) addresses the appropriations and reappropriations of Rome by Romans themselves as well as later thinkers and writers. Edwards identiWes such inherent contradictions in the views of Rome by Roman writers and consequently by later appropriations of the myth of Rome from those writers.

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during the period; they demonstrate not only the instability of the Roman myth, but of the very ideologies that attempt to possess it.

LACAN, ALTHUSSE R, AND TH E HU M A N I S T I D E O LO G Y The term ‘humanism’ was not commonly used until the early nineteenth century, but there were without question dominant ideological forces that governed Renaissance attitudes toward the self—primarily Christianity, but also a new secular humanism. In fact, these ideologies and the construction of the Renaissance self were closely aligned. Although Louis Althusser’s conception of ‘ideology’ is sometimes vague and its connection to the ‘self’ from a psychoanalytic approach undeWned, Althusser did recognize that some relationship between the unconscious and ideology exists—even though he clearly declined the invitation to deWne that relationship—and it is ultimately a relationship that proves relevant for an understanding of Renaissance humanism: . . . I have stopped short (quite clearly) before the question that interests you about the ‘relations’ between ideology (or concrete ideological formations) and the unconscious. I have said that there must be some relation there, but at the same time I forbade myself from inventing it—considering that it was for me a problem provisionally without solution, for myself or perhaps not only for myself—for myself in any event.5

Despite Althusser’s unwillingness to assert exactly what the relationship is, his writings often suggest the implications of ideology for a psychoanalytic approach to examining the ideological forces that shape cultural self-consciousness; he closely aligns the imaginary consciousness of the individual and the dominant ideologies that guide that consciousness: We observe that the ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that every ‘subject’ endowed with a ‘consciousness’ and believing

5 Quoted by Olivier Corpet and Franc¸ois Matheron in their introduction (Althusser 1996).

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in the ‘ideas’ that his ‘consciousness’ inspires in him and freely accepts, must ‘act according to his ideas’, must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice.6

This idea ultimately suggests that the individual’s own consciousness functions within a given ideological position while the very material actions that result from the ideology give the subject a sense of self. It also suggests the presence of a ‘cultural consciousness’ as individuals collectively function within an ideology that both guides individual actions and serves as a system through which individuals are initiated into the dominant culture. Even though Althusser was friends with Jacques Lacan, attended his seminars, corresponded regularly with him, and in fact seemed to be inXuenced greatly by him, a fundamental connection between the function of ideology and Lacan’s idea of the ‘Symbolic’ has been undervalued.7 Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic was literally the subject’s entry into the system of language (and what Lacan associated with the Law of the Father), but in a larger sense the Symbolic represents the subject’s participation in the various discursive patterns of ideology, the discourses that allow the ego to enter into the society and to assume the place of others in that cultural system. In other words, beyond language—or perhaps as an extension of language—ideology is at the heart of the Symbolic, and ideology governs the subject’s conception of himself/herself and the cultural consciousness of the society as a whole. Total deviation from ideology is not a viable option, for it is in the seemingly secure place of the Symbolic that the fragmented self Wnds some feeling of wholeness—even though that feeling is ultimately illusionary. The medieval Christian ideological domination from which humanists sought to escape could not be replaced by an actual humanistic secularism, but it could be psychically realigned with a perceived classical ideology that provided humanists with a secular component to their fundamentally Christian self-identity.8

6 Althusser (1984: 41–2). 7 Most of Althusser’s statements on psychoanalysis, including his correspondence with Lacan, are anthologized together in Corpet and Matheron (Althusser 1996). 8 It certainly should not be thought that interest in classicism originated in the Renaissance; Renaissance humanism clearly had its origins in medieval scholasticism. However, the emphasis on classical texts as a secular model for individualism developed

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The model of the unconscious that Lacan provides illustrates a subject longing for the wholeness that the psychical journey back to the elusive Imaginary order can provide, and from the collective consciousness of the humanist programme, Rome functions as that Other that can never be realized. Just as Lacan describes the analysand digging into his own past and bringing ‘back into present time the origins of his own person’, Renaissance humanism attempted to return to the classical origins of its own making.9 Lacan in his ‘Function and Field’ utilized the methodology of historicism in order to better understand the behavioural action of the patient—incidentally in a manner not dissimilar to Althusser’s discussion, quoted above, of the relationship between the subject’s material actions and the ideological system that governs them. Lacan states that ‘the unconscious is that chapter of my history marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood’.10 He writes that the body (like monuments), childhood memories (like archival documents), and ‘heroicized’ traditions and legends of the self all help the analyst to see the subject’s history and to discover the truth of the subject’s own making: What we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history— that is to say, we help him to perfect the present historization of the facts that have already determined a certain number of the historical ‘turning-points’ in his existence. But if they have played this role, it is already as facts of history, that is to say, in so far as they have been recognized in one particular sense or censored in a certain order. Thus, every Wxation at a so-called instinctual stage is above all a historical scar: a page of shame that is forgotten or undone, or a page of glory that compels . . . compulsion perpetuates in the symbol the very mirage in which the subject found himself trapped.11

For humanism, Rome is a central part of the history of its own making, and like the analysand sitting on the analyst’s couch, realizing the buried ruins of his/her ego, humanists began to see literally the buried ruins of Rome and the textual discoveries of its own selfconstruction. The humanist instinct to associate himself with the more aggressively as Renaissance humanism expanded and became, in a sense, integrated in the dominant Christian ideology. For a good—albeit somewhat dated—study of humanism’s medieval origins, see Walter Ullmann (1977). 9 Lacan (1977: 225/46–7). 10 Lacan (1977: 50). 11 Ibid., 52.

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past is Wnally a mirage of the Symbolic. Still, the Christian humanist had to justify a return to the pagan past by staying Wrmly rooted in the Christian present, and the ‘lost’ world of classical Rome served paradoxically as both the source of a desired connection as well as a validation of this ‘new’ Rome in all her symbolic power as the stronghold of a new Europe based Wrmly on papal authority. In a most insightful examination of the ‘double-task’ of the humanist resurrection of ancient Rome, Thomas M. Greene succinctly identiWes the crux of this humanist dilemma and thereby illustrates the inherent anxiety in the ‘Humanist program’: . . . one can detect the implicit duality of the Humanist program. There is Wrst the archaeological impulse downward into the earth, into the past, the unknown and recondite, and then the upward impulse to bring forth a corpse whole and newly restored, re-illuminated, made harmonious and quick. This duality is present at all points on the spectrum of Humanist activity . . . 12

Although Greene does indeed scratch the surface of the classical crisis inherent in humanism, such a binary vision overly simpliWes that humanist program and the Xuid anxiety that haunts it. From a Lacanian perspective, both the digging into and building up of the humanist ego are part of the same exercise: to Wnd self-identity amidst a self-consciousness constantly being confronted by opposing ideological forces. Materially and ideologically, the building up, tearing down, resurrecting, and burying are all functions of a self struggling to Wnd its place in the material present, in the dominant ideology, in the Symbolic. For the humanist, Rome functioned as the perceived centre of a broken self.

RO ME’S RUINS AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE SE CULAR S ELF For Italian humanists in the fourteenth and Wfteenth centuries, ancient Rome was all around them, and it can hardly come as a surprise that those men would begin to map, catalogue, excavate, and ultimately to reconstruct (if only mentally or academically) those 12 Greene (1982a: 41).

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material ruins.13 Many of the scholars of the period were concerned with this reconstruction of classical Rome as a means to validate a movement away from medieval religious ideology toward a new secular sense of self. Giovanni de Matociis, also known as Giovanni Mansionario (d. 1337), sketched out the heads of Roman emperors from Roman coins.14 Cristoforo Buondelmonti travelled in 1420 to the Aegean islands and drew careful renditions of the ruins he took to be those of Troy. Giovanni Dondi (Iter Romanum, 1375) and Leon Battista Alberti (Descriptio Urbis Romae, 1434) examined ruins to understand and praise the technical characteristics of them. Poggio Bracciolini, in the early Wfteenth century, desired an archaeological examination of Rome’s stone walls and various sites of antiquity, and perhaps even more importantly he expressed deep concern over the destruction of these ruins and the risk of destroying the opportunity to access the sites Wrst hand. ‘Renaissance men’ such as Pirro Ligorio scoured over the ancient ruins as he produced his own architecture, paintings, and even sketches of Rome.15 The fact is Rome’s material past and present captivated these men and supplied them with a pre-Christian history of their own making; however, the very sites they examined became symbolic of something greater, and their subsequent loss, their slow destruction a sign of degeneration and of lack. While many of these scholars focus on recreating the material past, others focus on what the monuments and remnants of Rome mean for their own contemporary Rome. The various sites of Rome became the symbolic embodiment of Rome’s power: the greatness of its people, of its institutions, and of its culture. Petrarch was fascinated with the actual physical ruins of Rome, but his interest was less about the topographical or archaeological reconstruction of Rome (although his writing uses a vast amount of imagery relating to the physical remains) than it was about the symbolic nature of classical Rome as an ideological link to the past. He praises the institutions of classical Rome, its military, its valuing of pietas, and most important Petrarch 13 One of the most insightful, informative, and most recent studies of Renaissance archaeology and antiquity is Barkan (1999). 14 Matociis was also the Wrst to identify the existence of two ‘Plinys’. 15 See in this volume Caroline Vout’s essay. Also, for an intensive biography of Ligorio, consult CoYn (2003). Also, consult Barkan (1999: passim).

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sees in Rome’s ruins the opportunity to praise a model on which the society of his day could fashion their own sense of self and society.16 Similarly, Giovanni Cavallini in his Polistoria de Virtutibus et Dotibus Romanorum (c.1343–52) gloriWes ancient Rome as the pinnacle of human achievement: Verum et si omnium gentium [h]istoriae reuoluantur, nullarum gentium gesta clarius elucescunt quam gesta magniWca Romanorum (‘indeed, if the histories of all peoples are recounted, the deeds of no peoples shine forth more brightly than the magniWcent achievements of the Romans’).17 And of course Flavio Biondo, in both Roma Instaurata (1446) and Roma Triumphans (1459), examines all aspects of Roman antiquity, and from the archaeological relics he attempts to recreate the entire spectrum of ancient Rome and to show that Roman uirtus is the source of Rome’s greatness as well as of its ultimate ruin.18 In addition, despite Rome’s ultimate failure, Biondo believes, Roman virtues can still provide contemporary Christian society with a social model that, viewed through a Christian gaze, can be even more successful than its ancient source. All of these humanists shared a goal—the reconstruction of and the reconnection to the past—and while rediscovering a material Rome clearly facilitated and fed the humanist programme, there was the reality that the grandeur and glory of classical Rome was now lost, never to be regained, only replaced by a new Rome that centred on the Papacy and Christian doctrine. Regardless of all the remarkable archaeological and artistic rediscoveries, it was perhaps the feeling of loss, the presence of lack—a state of anxiety—that most haunted the humanist and drove him to return back to the excavations, again and again, in search of a unity with his cultural past; the more of Rome that was uncovered, the greater the gap and the greater the desire to search even deeper into the ruins. Lacan’s explanation of ‘anxiety’ (its causes and manifestations) is particularly relevant to a discussion of the Renaissance revitalization and rediscovery of classical Rome. In his seminar on Anxiety,19 Lacan throughout 16 For a fuller discussion of Petrarch’s view of ancient Rome, see Mazzocco (1977). 17 Quoted in Mazzocco (1982: 186). The quote originally appeared in Polistoria de Virtutibus et Dotibus Romanorum, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS, Rossiano 728, fol. 1. A new edition, with a bibliography, and indices of the Polistoria now exists, edited by Marc Laureys (1995). 18 See Mazzocco (1982: 189–90) for a discussion of this paradox. 19 Lacan (1962–3).

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negotiates the paradoxical relationship between diVerence and sameness, and he proposes that it is indeed ‘anxiety’ that occupies the gap between the two. Lacan attributes anxiety to the subject’s disassociation with the Other and its failure to recognize the fundamental lack inherent in the fragmented but accessible object(s) (objet a) that the subject mistakenly takes for the Other.20 Anxiety, then, is the result of a missing ‘lack’, a false sense of wholeness that keeps desire, in a state of fantasy, focused on the material objet a rather than the Other it cannot possess. As Roberto Harari states in his discussion of Lacan’s seminar, ‘anxiety irrupt[s] when the object a is on the verge of falling away’21 and furthermore he suggests that for Lacan it is when the illusionary relationship between the subject and the objet a begins to unravel that anxiety comes to bear; anxiety emerges when the disconnected relationship between the objet a and the Other is brought to light and the subject’s own relationship to the Other (which has been delusively fashioned on the objet a) is in doubt. The material ruins of Rome represent the initial objet a of the humanist psyche, particularly for those early Italians. Ultimately, piece by piece, the archaeological remains demonstrated how fragmented the past really was and how distant ancient Rome really was. Physical discovery of ancient Rome showed the ruins, the objet a, to be literally ‘on the verge of falling away’. The fragments of the past on which the humanist gaze was Wxed were not classical Rome; they were pieces of a past greatness that humanists tried to shape into their own being. Bracciolini feared the loss of those ancient ruins (both the ‘real’ physical loss and, perhaps more important, the conceptual/ psychological loss) because unconsciously he knew that, without the objet a, his very being would be threatened; these ruins were the only connection to the ideological valorization of Rome as the origin of the humanist self. Admittedly, Italian humanists at the very least had their ‘heritage’ and reality of ‘place’ to hold on to, that is, they could at least say ‘Rome is my home and these things buried beneath my feet are mine and are part of me, are part of this place of which I am a part’. 20 For one of Lacan’s more thorough discussions of the objet a, see ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’ (in Lacan 1981b). The simplest way to understand the function of the objet a is as a seemingly attainable signiWer of the unattainable Other. 21 Harari (2001: 231).

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Even that is illusionary, however, and it was perhaps that illusion that sometimes kept Italians from recognizing and acknowledging the gaping distance between themselves and the past Rome they valorized; later humanists in France, England, and other places—who were not only temporally distanced from classical Rome, but spatially as well—often were more aware of their diVerence and distance from classical Rome. Although many of these humanists suggest an actual loss amidst their praise, admiration, and perceived recovery of ancient Rome, none provides as concise an examination of the great sense of anxiety and despair over what the ancient ruins lack as Joachim du Bellay does in Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) and Edmund Spenser in his later English translation of Les Antiquitez, Ruines of Rome (1591).22 The Frenchman du Bellay spent four years in Rome and the result was a deep anxiety about what Rome was and had become, and where his own France was situated in the grand scheme of Western culture.23 Les Antiquitez depicts both du Bellay’s awe and disappointment in the Roman ruins. Although he clearly wishes to ‘sing above all moniments / Seuen Romane Hils, the worlds 7. wonderments’ (Ruines 27–8), there is also present a real sense of loss, destruction, and regret. Most notable perhaps is the paradox of a modern Rome that does not really represent ancient Rome: Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiu’st at all, These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call. Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast . . . Ruines 29–33

Here, the Rome to which humanists longed to reconnect is a ‘wreake’, a ‘ruine’, and a ‘wast’, and in fact the desired Rome is not the Rome of the present, regardless of the name. Du Bellay illustrates here the Lacanian 22 All translations of Les Antiquitez will be from Spenser’s Ruines, cited in the text by line numbers. Although a modern translation would also be appropriate here, Spenser’s translations of du Bellay were quite inXuential in their own right and better capture the Renaissance concern over and reiteration of du Bellay’s attitudes about the Roman ruins. 23 For a Wne study of du Bellay, his travels to Rome, and his attitudes toward classical Rome and contemporary France, see Tucker (1990); particularly relevant to the present discussion is ‘The Quest for Rome, in Rome’ (55–104).

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concern regarding ‘diVerence’ and ‘sameness’, that regardless of the desire to be the same as the object of that desire, the Symbolic order (particularly considering its linguistic structure) is ultimately structured on diVerence rather than sameness. Renaissance Rome is both the same as Rome and diVerent from Rome: ‘Ye sacred ruines, and ye tragick sights, / Which onely doo the name of Rome retaine’ (Ruines 85–6). The dual nature of a Rome that is both the same and diVerent is played out often in du Bellay’s sequence and proves to be the primary source of his anxiety. He states that ‘Rome onely might to Rome compared bee / And onely Rome could make great Rome to tremble’ (Ruines 79–80), that ‘Rome is no more’ (61), and the ‘corpes of Rome in ashes is entombed, / And her great spirite reioined to the spirite / Of this great masse, is in the same enwombed’ (65–7). Du Bellay’s grief over the ‘death’ of Rome in Rome and his implicit praise of and desire for ancient Rome aside, the humanist programme demanded also that a lack be identiWed in the very object it desired. Not only has Rome faded into ashes, but it has done so by its own hand: ‘how that she, which with her mightie power / Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d herselfe at last’ (34–5). Although ‘time’ seems to be the general culprit of Rome’s demise, du Bellay Wnds Xaws in the very fabric of what ancient Rome was, even calling Rome, with its eventual troubles, ‘like a Pandora, locked long in store’ (260). Ancient Rome may have been great, may have been the pinnacle of human achievement, may have been worthy of emulation, but still Rome’s destruction was built into itself: But destinie this huge Chaos turmoyling, In which all good and euill was enclosed, Their heauenly virtues from these woes assoyling, Caried to heauen, from sinfull bondage losed: But their great sinnes, the causers of their paine, Vnder these antique ruines yet remaine.24 Ruines 261–6

The Christian connotations here are obvious—with such terms as ‘heauenly’, ‘heauen’, ‘good and euill’, ‘sinfull’, and ‘sinnes’—and this passage suggests the ultimate crisis of the humanist psyche: to turn 24 Pigman (1982) addresses the issue of Rome’s destruction in du Bellay.

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back to a classical Rome that was fundamentally lacking the Christian ideological structure that formulated the Renaissance self, but to a Rome that was also necessary for a new secular construction of that self. Even with the immense praise, admiration, and sadness over the ruins and the admitted loss of ancient Rome, only by identifying a lack in those objects and what they represent could the Renaissance psyche be made to feel secure. (Regardless of his great love of classical Rome and his numerous compositions in Latin, du Bellay in his Les Regrets even renounces Latin in favour of his own French tongue.)25 Along with the stone walls and the rubbled traces of ancient streets, humanists sought out also the textual ruins of Rome’s past. In fact, while the physical monuments perhaps instilled awe and regret, it was the distant ‘voices’ of Roman writing that ultimately drove the humanist spirit. Certainly, on one level ancient texts were no diVerent from other archaeological ruins. Like the Renaissance archaeologists who tried to make sense of and to understand the material remnants before them, numerous transcribers and editors were faced with a similar task of recovering those ancient texts they encountered. Most of the ancient texts survived in the Renaissance through the labours of often careless hands, and Renaissance editors had to wade through a vast textual labyrinth that consisted of fragments, errors, and doubtful attributions. Classical texts did indeed largely exist as ‘ruins’ to be excavated.26 Their material presence, like that of their stone counterparts, was a visible sign of Rome’s past and seen as a gateway for a humanist return to that past. However, they too had to be recognized as fragmentary (both in a literal and symbolic sense), as something once whole that was now available only in pieces, and the humanist belief that those fragments could be restored, that their wholeness was not just illusionary, was a primary Renaissance occupation. Of course, many individual texts did exist in

25 For a discussion of du Bellay’s sadness at being in Rome and his preference for his native land and language, see Clark (1999). Similarly, in England, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) and Thomas Carew in ‘The Excellencie of the English Tongue’ (1604–14?) both praise the Latin language and the writers Rome produced, but they attempt to validate ‘English’ as a worthy and necessary substitute. 26 For one example of this, see Gaisser (1993) for an in-depth study of the history of Catullus’ texts during the Renaissance.

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their ‘complete’ form, but, as a corpus, what was lacking was always as pertinent as what was had. Although texts existed in their material reality (they were indeed tangible ‘things’ capable of being restored, altered, or admired for the objects that they were), these written ruins also contained the intangible, ideological voices that served as a more accessible site of appropriation for humanists. Roman texts—despite their often fragmented forms—became the source for ideological connections with humanism’s classical Other. Writers such as Cicero became the benchmark of Renaissance sophistication. His work was of course read, its form and technique adopted as the model of Renaissance oration, and whether in the classroom or at court, Cicero was the source for sophisticated cultural discourse.27 Still, eventually it was not as much the work of Cicero as it was the idea of Cicero that aided in the construction of the humanist identity. Again, the works themselves were certainly important, but they and the humanist valorization of their author ultimately served as the supreme objet a; if one could become like Cicero, one’s identity as a humanist would be whole. But, as we have seen, since anxiety stems from failing to recognize the lack that exists in the objet a (i.e., the literary source), only by exposing the lack in that source could a true humanist identity begin to emerge. A writer like Cicero had to be shown as a Xawed model of Renaissance selfhood, and his importance for the humanist eventually had to be both aYrmed and negated. As William J. Bouwsma observes in The Waning of the Renaissance: By the later sixteenth century, scholars were able increasingly to identify conXicts among the various schools of ancient philosophy, and some humanists read the classics less as sources of timeless truths than as revelations of individual personalities and of their own times.28

But it was more than ‘ancient philosophy’ per se; it was a lack in the entire body of classical culture that was exposed—or at the very least incomplete, indeWnite. Montaigne, for example, only looked at the classics as a source of information, not of identity: ‘[a reader should] 27 For Cicero’s presence in the Latin School curriculum, consult Black (2001: passim); for Cicero’s inXuence in the public sphere, see Witt (2001). 28 Bouwsma (2000: 35).

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pass everything [from the classical world] through a sieve, and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust’.29 The result of such a recognition—that ancient texts were not authoritative and that the humanist himself had to enter into a system that validated his own authority—was innovative methods of imitation and appropriation.30 Montaigne’s reading ‘through a sieve’ is a far cry from early humanists such as Giovanni Villani whose valorization and imitation of classical texts were quite reproductive and sacramental: . . . on that blessed pilgrimage in the holy city of Rome, (in 1300) I saw the great and ancient things of that place and read the histories and great deeds of the Romans written by Virgil, Sallust, Lucan, Titus Livy, Valerius, Paul Orosius, and other masters of history who wrote things great and small, of the deeds and achievements of the Romans, and also of foreign peoples in the whole world. In order to preserve the past and provide a model for those who are to follow, I emulated this style and form, just like a disciple, although unworthy of doing such a thing.31

Such a need to ground identity in the classics and the Roman myth ultimately had to be usurped by a realization that great deeds of the past were often destructive and that imitating these models had to supply something that was lacking in the original. The result of such a ‘double-reading’ of Rome’s ruins is an inescapable conXict within the humanist self. The stone buildings, monuments, streets, and texts were there, always reminding humanists that the past was present in their own history and that they could never completely join nor completely Xee from that past. The humanist agenda had to exist fully within the Symbolic realm; it had to reconstruct itself within the very cultural structure of which Rome was a part, had to become a ‘new’ Rome and usurp the very qualities it sought to emulate. Imitation of all things Roman had to be validated by its relationship to Rome, but Rome also had to be negated in order for the new culture to take its place. Rome had to be embraced and then quickly castrated from the humanist psyche; Rome had to be present, but only in the form of dead and wasted ruins sprinkled around the Renaissance landscape.

29 Quoted in Bouwsma (2000: 36). 31 Villani (1844–5: 2:39).

30 See especially Greene (1982b).

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Although the Renaissance literary manifestations of Rome are many, and come in a myriad of forms, the depictions of Rome on the stage are particularly reXective of the psychological underpinnings of the humanist programme. In England, for example, the so called ‘Roman Plays’ of writers such as Ben Jonson and Shakespeare eVectively capture the psychic crisis inherent in humanism, and the nature of the dramatic genre lends itself to an analysis of that crisis. Most unique is perhaps drama’s need to physically recreate place; Rome must be physically reinvented on the stage. Acts and scenes in the Roman plays are consistently set in ‘the streets’, ‘the Colosseum’, ‘the senate’, and as a result there is a physical recreation of Rome’s presence, a manifestation of Rome as an active, yet unheard, participant in the drama. In addition, this silent presence suggests the physical reality of Rome in the humanist landscape, ruins that exist but whose ‘voice’ is reconstructed by those who examine and excavate those ruins. In fact, the very attempt at recreating a Rome on the stage—with set designs, fabricated armour, and characters’ establishing physical context through their speech—is itself an untruth; it is a largely fragmented, illusionary conception of Rome that thus, in a sense, mimics the nature of the actual physical ruins themselves. The audience is asked to remove itself imaginatively from its own space and place, and to suspend disbelief, to accept that what it is witnessing is a ‘true’ Rome. Although this may be considered simply an experience of ‘literary imagination’, it still suggests the humanist reality that the Rome they believe they see and know is not Rome at all, but rather an illusion of Rome, one constructed from bits and pieces of what Rome was and what their own current space is. Aside from the tenuous nature of Rome’s space on the stage, within the plays themselves there is nearly always an ideological struggle between a past Rome and a changing present Rome, and the characters actively seek out an understanding of what it means to be ‘Roman’ and how their place within Rome is validated. Both Jonson and Shakespeare depict in their Roman plays Romes in conXict, and, even more importantly, Romes in ruin. The Rome on the stage is ideologically fragmentary in nature. Not only is the ‘place’

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created on the stage illusionary, constructed by means of arranged sets and limited space, but also the very ideological uncertainty of what Rome is. In Jonson’s Catiline, for example, there is a fundamental reality that the perceived grandeur of Rome is threatened and that Rome risks falling into ruins. Cicero’s version of the Catilinarian conspiracy was well known in the Renaissance and the story itself has a dualistic quality that proves indicative of the humanist identiWcation with Rome: Cicero himself represents everything ‘great’ about Rome, but the conspiracy he tells shows the tenuous nature of Rome’s greatness, of Rome’s wholeness. Jonson’s dramatization of this conspiracy illustrates the need to Wnd a Roman precedent for England’s own political turmoil,32 but it also identiWes the fractures in the humanist idealization of Rome. In the opening lines of Catiline, for instance, the audience is instantly presented with a Rome that is in danger of being reduced to a ruinous state; the ghost of Sylla recognizes the danger of the Catilinarian conspiracy to Rome’s existence: Dost thou not feel me, Rome? Not yet! is night So heavy on thee, and my weight so light? Can Sylla’s ghost arise within thy walls, Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their Wrst beds? Or as their ruin the large Tyber Wlls, Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills? Catiline 1.1.1–8

Not only is Rome being asked questions that Rome itself can never answer, but the implication is that the state of Rome is dependent on the answers that only a reconstructed view of Rome by outsiders can ultimately provide. In other words, the questions are being addressed to a Rome that is now gone, and as a result the answers about Rome’s own fate can only be supplied by an outsider, by a humanist’s reconstruction of Rome’s past. Although the greatness of Rome, the Other with which the characters constantly try to connect, is always present, the image of Rome in Jonson also mirrors the physical ruins that were the Renaissance reality: 32 See Luna (1976).

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The Sites of Rome . . . leaue Romes blinded walls To embrace lusts, hatreds, slaughters, funerals, And not recouer sight, till their owne Xames Do light them to their ruins. Catiline 1.1.63–6

Such an attitude, that Rome will feed the Xames of its own ruin, was exactly how du Bellay came to terms with the lost Rome he experienced during his time in Italy—that Rome was like a Pandora’s box. Still, paradoxically, it is only through the ruins left behind that the humanist might cast his gaze to that past. Like this double gaze of the humanist, Catiline represents the potential of a broken Rome while Cicero and Sallust, the primary sources for the incident, represent Rome at its height. The humanist had to come to terms with both. In Sejanus, too, Jonson shows the dualistic reality of Rome and the conXict between the past and present. As with Catiline’s conspiracy, the attempt by Sejanus to rise up against Tiberius and thereby destroy the current state of Rome indicates a Rome that is lacking the strength to withstand change; said another way, the threat itself denotes some lack. As Lucius Arruntius, supporter of Agrippina, speaks of past times and the play’s current Rome, he echoes the humanist concern for Rome’s degeneration: Times? The men, The men are not the same . . . . . . Those might spirits Lie raked up with their ashes in their urns, And not a spark of their eternal Wre Glows in a present bosom. All’s but blaze, Flashes, and smoke, wherewith we labour so, There’s nothing Roman in us; nothing good, Gallant or great . . . Sejanus 1.1.87–8, 97–103

This view of Rome is consistent with how humanists looked at a past golden-age Rome that had vanished, that had turned into memories and ruins. Projected onto this ‘Roman’ speaker is the humanist realization that their Roman model was no longer attainable.

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Likewise, early in Sejanus, when the emperor Tiberius looks back to the past, he actually mentally materializes those past deeds into monuments and physical remnants: . . . These things shall be to us Temples and statues, reared in your minds, The fairest and most during imagery: For those of stone or brass, I they become Odious in judgement of posterity, Are more contemned, as dying sepulchers, Than ta’en for live monuments. Sejanus 1.484–90

Jonson’s materialization of Rome’s history sets up the image of Rome truly in ruins, the same kind of ruins du Bellay found in the material reality of the Renaissance Rome. Tiberius begins to recognize his own weakness, ‘For myself, / I know my weakness, and so little covet / (Like some gone past) the weight that will oppress me’ (3.124–6); Sejanus immediately reminds Tiberius that recognizing such weakness—recognizing lack—is what leads to ruin: But Rome, whose blood, Whose nerves, whose life, whose very frame relies On Caesar’s strength, no less than heaven on Atlas, Cannot admit it [weakness] but with general ruin. Sejanus 3.128–31

Of course, ultimately it is Sejanus himself that would cause the ruin of Caesar. Sejanus earlier envisioned turning Caesar’s ‘house’ into buried ruins: Work then, my art, on Caesar’s fears, as they On those they fear, till all my lets be cleared: And he in ruins of his house, and hate Of all his subjects, bury his own state. Sejanus 2.399–402

This, again, is the potential for Rome in the play. Once the lack, the potential for ruin, is recognized, the wholeness, the greatness Rome

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represents, comes into question. The only remedy from a humanist standpoint—and it is a remedy that is characteristic of humanism— is to Wll that lack with something else. Sejanus, as the senators observe, is Wnally the one who is left in ruins: ‘Now you lie as Xat / As was your pride advanced’ (5.735–6), but it was Caesar’s own Xaw that allowed it. Sertorius Macro, who sees in the fall of Rome the ruins of Rome to come, articulates the humanist opportunity for creating a new Rome, a chance to Wll the lack in this Rome with something fresh: If then it be the lust of Caesar’s power To have raised Sejanus up, and in an hour O’erturn him, tumbling, down, from height of all We are his ready engine: and his fall May be our rise. It is no uncouth thing To see fresh buildings from old ruins spring. Sejanus 4.744–50

The Wnal three lines of this passage encapsulate the humanist need to build a Renaissance present that amends the greatness of Rome that came before. The senators praise Macro as a hero, ‘praise to Macro, that hath saved Rome / Liberty, liberty, liberty. Lead on, / And praise Macro, that hath saved Rome’ (5.736–9), and it is Arruntius who best articulates the inevitability of Rome’s ruins rising again through Macro: I prophesy, out of this Senate’s Xattery, That this new fellow, Macro, will become A greater prodigy in Rome, than he That now is fallen. Sejanus 5.740–3

Rome’s past is indeed the foundation of what will come, but identifying the Xaws that lead to ruin provides Macro (and ultimately humanism) with the lack that allows his own Rome—his own Roman identity—to be realized. Like Jonson, Shakespeare also dramatizes the humanist conception of a battling past and present Rome, particularly in Julius Caesar. Drawn primarily from translations of Plutarch, Shakespeare’s play reXects the psychological dilemma facing humanism on multiple levels.

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First, as has been frequently noted, Shakespeare chooses a Roman precedent for dealing with fundamentally English political issues. The very crux of Shakespeare’s play, Brutus’ desire to save Rome from the tyranny of a ‘monarch’, is a timely issue for England during the late sixteenth century. The legitimacy of divine right, of monarchy based on either tradition or power, was being called into question (to some degree this issue culminates with John Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates [1649], in which Milton argues a monarch should be removed, even killed, for the good of the commonwealth). Shakespeare certainly addresses this issue in his English history plays, but the early use of ‘Rome’ as a model that shows conXict and ‘grandeur threatened’ epitomizes the humanist need to validate the European present with Rome’s past.33 And the need to either reclaim the past or to move beyond a past now in ruins proves to be a primary theme. Caesar represents in Shakespeare the grandeur of a past Rome undermined by a present Rome, represented by Brutus, and it is a present that is ideologically diVerent. Brutus does not despise Caesar, but recognizes that Caesar must be torn down, in order for a new Rome to be built. The state of Rome under Caesar is similar to that of du Bellay’s description of Rome being a ‘wreake’, ‘ruine’, and a ‘wast’: ‘What trash is Rome? / What rubbish and what oVal?’ (1.3.108–9). This description by Cassius is also echoed by Antony as he mourns the loss of Caesar: O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?: Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoiles, Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well! Julius Caesar 3.1.148–5034

Caesar’s wife Calphurnia in her prophetic dream sees the fate of Caesar as that of an exploited monument. Caesar, describing his wife’s dream to Decius, states She dreamt to-night she saw my statue, Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts, 33 For studies dealing with Shakespeare and his view of Rome see Parker (2004); Kahn (1997); and Traversi (1963). 34 All quotations will be taken from Blakemore Evans’s 1997 edition (The Riverside Shakespeare), cited in the text.

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The Sites of Rome Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it Julius Caesar 2.2.76–9

Calphurnia recognizes one fate of Rome in the dream, Decius another: This dream is all amiss interpreted It was a vision fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes In which so many smiling Romans bath’d, SigniWes that from you great Rome shall suck Reviving blood, and that great men shall press For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance. This by Calphurnia’s dream is signiWed. Julius Caesar 2.2.83–90

These two interpretations of the dream point to the dilemma of humanism’s entire identiWcation with Rome. With Caesar as the model of an old Rome to be admired, praised, and emulated, Caesar is ultimately cast down for what he lacks, and what he lacks (a more republican system of rule) is what Brutus and his supporters need to establish their own self-identity. Humanism looked at classical Rome in both ways: Rome was the source of self-consciousness, but it had to be destroyed, left in ruins for that self-consciousness to seem complete. Antony himself, grieving the loss of Caesar, states ‘Thou art the ruins of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times’ (3.1.256–7) and, as he thinks of revenge, he hypothesizes . . . But were I Brutus and Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruZe up your spirits, and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar, that should move The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. Julius Caesar 3.226–30

Also like Jonson, Shakespeare ultimately oVers no true reconciliation to the dualistic quality of Roman consciousness in the play. The fact is all the characters struggle to come to terms with a vision of Rome that is idealized but not realized. Stated another way, the characters on both sides of the conspiracy—Brutus, Cassius,

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Antony—understand there is something lacking in the Rome they have in front of them, that Rome is either in ruins or has the potential to fall to ruins. They all struggle with Wnding their place in a perceived centre of ‘Romanness’ that is illusionary. Some characters, such as Antony, return to the past to Wll the lack in the present Rome; others, such as Brutus, look toward the future and the destruction of the object (i.e. Caesar) that represents that past. As for the humanist, the characters must both bury and rebuild Rome and what it represents; destruction and rebirth are part of the same search for wholeness.

CONCLUSIONS When Harold Bloom wrote of the ‘anxiety of inXuence’, he focused almost entirely on the Freudian relationship of a single author with a single literary precursor, a ‘strong’ precursor, as he calls it. However, the anxiety inherent in identity formation spills over into much more than just literary imitation. Bloom’s Freudian understanding of literary history is indeed a psychoanalytical approach to history, and the collective consciousness of a culture attempting to Wnd a balance with its past and present, to Wnd individuality (in social terms) amidst the need to return to a source, is also ultimately a psychological crisis that must be considered in its social context. There is the tendency—as it was with Freud—to reduce Lacanian psychoanalysis to an examination of a closed system of psychic development; likewise, studies of cultural ideology too often focus on material culture without considering the psychic implications of a culture that must position itself around those material artifacts. The fact is ideology establishes the very Symbolic structure into which the individual, or the culture as a whole, must enter. When individuals base their conception of self on the remnants of a cultural Other, they are ultimately left with the crisis of validating themselves with an Other that must be shown to be incomplete. Without identifying that lack, consciousness experiences tremendous anxiety with its total dependence on that Other it can never possess. All that remains are the remnants of that Other, the objet a, but those remnants, those ruins of the Imaginary, are illusionary, Xawed, and must Wnally be shown to fail to provide wholeness.

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Humanists did indeed see Rome around them: in the landscape, in their cities, in the texts they read and wrote. However, this Rome was not the Rome of their present; it was a Rome that existed only in ruins. Still those ruins were the source of the humanist consciousness; they were the tangible objet a that could lead the Renaissance back to a unity with a Roman world now gone. These ruins were the source of a dialectic that called for an aYrmation and a negation of what it was they represented. The humanist could never be Rome—whatever it is that meant—so he had to undermine the very objects he admired. He had to show that those ruins represent the ruinous qualities of Rome, and only by recognizing that could a true self-consciousness be constructed. These individuals had to enter into the Symbolic Order of self-making, in which their very existence depended on identifying the lack in the Other now gone and Wlling that lack with a new sense of self that could transcend that Other and place the humanist world in the structural position of its Roman Other. Although such a crisis was at the centre of the humanist agenda as a whole, we begin to see literary representations of that crisis. Du Bellay explicitly looks to the ruins he must both praise and mourn; they represent a past greatness that must be emulated, but their material presence proves lacking, proves destructive, and proves to be a barrier to a new consciousness and sense of self. Even the ideological reproductions of Rome in the Roman plays of Jonson and Shakespeare reXect and project the humanist anxiety over dismissing the very thing that made the humanist what he was, but still those plays illustrate a vision of Rome in ruins and the diYculty— however, inevitable—of burying that which is necessary in order to overcome. Those works illustrate a dualistic Rome, one that is both worthy of conservation as well as one constantly in danger of being left in ruins. Projected onto the Wgures of the past, the anxiety over a perceived reality of Rome—a history of the self on the verge of falling away—consumes the characters, regardless of their initial ideological position. Catiline/Cicero, Sejanus/Tiberius, Brutus/Antony—the depictions of these Wgures mirror the humanist’s two paradoxical needs: to preserve Rome and to tear it away. As the traditional views of Renaissance humanism have attested, classical Rome was indeed central to humanism and the development of Western culture, but not as much in what it provided as what it lacked.

8 Sizing up Rome, or theorizing the overview* Caroline Vout

hinc septem dominos uidere montis et totam licet aestimare Romam . . . From here it is possible to see the seven sovereign hills and to gauge the whole of Rome . . . Martial, Epigrams 4.64.11–12

Are we as conWdent as Martial about man’s capacity to ‘measure the whole of Rome’? Not just elements of the city. All of her: what she is and what she stands for. Not simply scanning but surveying, so as to gain the knowledge to feel in control. What does it mean to ‘know’ a city anyway, whether Rome, Venice, or Naples? Does each place and people shape our education diVerently, or is there a basic rule-book about being a visitor? For the Classicist, Rome is a special case, even colloquially it is ‘la citta` eterna’. How do we make sense of her shifting landscape and her vast historical sway, capture her essence without fragmentation? * This chapter represents my Wrst foray into a new project on Rome and her hills. I thank Catharine Edwards, David Larmour, Katharina Lorenz, Elizabeth Speller, Diana Spencer, Susanne Turner, and the members of the Classics Department in St Andrews and the Latin seminar in the Institute of Classical Studies, London, for their helpful comments on various aspects. I also thank the anonymous readers. As the bulk of this research was done while at the University of Nottingham, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Classics colleagues there. This is for them. All translations are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise stated.

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This essay focuses on one particular strategy for fulWlling this ambition. Several cities could have helped me articulate why this one in particular, but very brieXy I begin with London: in part because of its familiarity (however ephemeral that might be) and in part, because there have been several excellent accounts of her recently. Perhaps the most monumental of these is Peter Ackroyd’s biography with its thematic approach to people’s interaction with the changing cityscape, and the most subtle, Iqbal Ahmed’s snapshot of the city today as seen through the eyes of several of her foreign residents.1 The strategy I have selected for Rome is diVerent again, although closer to the latter (if not in its methodology, then) in its emphasis. While the viewpoint shared by all my examples is that of a sightseer, separated from the Rome (s)he describes by birth and/or by millennia, my motivation is not to provide a precise Xavour, real or representational, over time or of the moment. Rather my interest lies in the seeing or description: in how they frame their experience of the environment. All of my visitors view the city from one of her hills. The claim is that such an overview aVords a glimpse of totality. Interrogating this claim allows me to discuss a wide range of literary and visual material from antiquity to the modern period. It also foregrounds issues of perspective which are central to this book’s key concern of the relationship between site and sight. In a sense, the examples are a random selection, their chronological sweep ensuring that this does not become a chapter about sixteenth- or nineteenthcentury perspectives, but stays focused on what it means to comprehend a city. Other texts could proWtably be added—some of them not yet written. The hope is that none of us will stand on the Capitoline again, unconscious of what we are doing. But how far is this way of looking peculiar to Rome? For Ahmed too, it is the view from London’s Parliament Hill that gives the clarity of vision for which he has been searching.2 1 Ackroyd (2001) and Ahmed (2004). 2 Ahmed (2004: 189–90): ‘it had taken me a long time to reconcile to the idea of calling a thirty-metre elevation a hill. I walked up to see the town painted silver by the light of the moon . . . It reminded me of my moonlight strolls in Srinagar and the years that had elapsed since I left the valley of Kashmir. Standing on top of Parliament Hill created a false impression in an onlooker that the town was laid out just across a Weld and that St Paul’s Cathedral was a short walk away.’

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Rome, however, is ‘the city of hills’ par excellence, her volcanic contours manipulated into an iconic seven summits. The identity of the seven has not gone uncontested: but they have come to deWne her—so much so that early maps often render her as a set of simple mounds without reference to the main artery, the River Tiber.3 By contrast, Venice, for example, is a city of depths or watery recesses: visitors there, returning to the idea of experiencing her from within or even below, or from afar as if a Xoating hill or island.4 More than any other city, there is a sense in which Rome is her hills, and her very quintessence is what is seen from their vistas.

A D O P T IN G A PE R S P E C TI V E So how does this process work in practice? How does climbing up and looking out over Rome convince the viewer (Xeeting though the impression may be) that ‘seeing is believing’? An atlas of cities published in Germany in 1575 includes within it an adapted version of Pirro Ligorio’s map of Rome Wrst distributed in 1552 and designed to show, ‘what could still be seen of its ancient monuments’ (Fig. 9). Perhaps the main diVerence between the two versions is the addition of the Wgures in the bottom right of the frame whose presence brings the idea of ‘spectatorship’ to the foreground. Although such Wgures are regular interlopers in the atlas’s re-engravings more generally, added perhaps to ‘make it more life like’ or to discourage Turkish forces, whose religious beliefs forbade them from looking at representations of the human form, from scouring its pages for reconnaissance reasons, they invite us, by having us watch them view the city, to examine exactly how we and Ligorio view.5 As soon as we do 3 See e.g. Fabio Calvo’s map of the city under Servius Tullius of 1527. Chapters by Ash and Spencer, in this volume, also deal with the signiWcance of the ‘seven’ hills, for understanding Rome. 4 See Tanner (1992: passim), and Larmour and Spencer’s Introduction to this volume. 5 Volume 2 of the Ciuitates Orbis Terrarum published in Cologne in 1575 and edited by Georg Braun, no. 49. Most engravings were done by Franz Hogenberg after drawings made by a number of travelling artists. See the 1965 reprint and the Historic Cities project of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library: http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il

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

this, we realize that the vantage point is the Janiculum, a fortiWed ridge to the west of Rome beyond the walls which deWned the ancient city.6 While the woman stands in her Renaissance Wnery with her arms outstretched, as though greeting the men and the scene in front of us, they, surprisingly perhaps, turn their backs on the vista. The style of their dress might suggest that they are ancient Roman soldiers who have travelled across the Tiber into the present.

(accessed on 3 October 2005). For the original 1552 map, entitled, VRBIS ROMAE SITVS CUM IIS QVAE ADHVC CONSPICIVNTVR VETER MONVMENT RELIQVIIS, by Ligorio, versions of which are in the Royal Library, Stockholm, the Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome, and—crucially, with the Castrum Praetorium added top left as in the 1575 version—in the British Library, London, see Huelsen (1915); CoYn (2003: 16–17); and Gaston (1988). 6 At over 80 metres, the Janiculum is the highest of the ‘hills’ of modern Rome but outside of the Aurelian wall. For a brief introduction to its topography and history, see Liverani (1996) and—still wonderfully clear—Hare (1923: 644–61), and, more fully, Steinby (1996a). For twentieth-century responses to Rome from there, and the American ownership of this perspective, Vance (1989: ii, 404–10).

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This convergence of now and then, of looking in and down and up and out, implicates the reader in the process of image-making and encourages them to interrogate what kind of Rome this perspective provides them. Although within the engraving’s frame, the Wgures are positioned outside the walls: identiWcation with them means contemplating our own detachment. Behind them, ‘modern’ structures such as the church of Santa Maria del Popolo to the north, built at the end of the eleventh century, and the Wfth-century foundations of San Pietro in Vincoli on the Esquiline and Santa Sabina on the Aventine jostle with ancient pagan landmarks (the circus of Nero and Circus Maximus, the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, the Theatre of Marcellus, the aqueduct of Claudius, the Pantheon . . . ) and with wide-open spaces like the Palatine that accentuate what is no longer visible. Despite Ligorio’s insistence on ‘what can still be seen’, these gaps are as important as the physical remains, as indeed are his labels which deWne what might otherwise be too diminutive, imprecise, or ideogrammatic to identify by looking alone. Even recognizable structures like the Flavian amphitheatre have more in common with their contours on ancient coinage than with their remnants.7 All of this calls the reader to question the constraints and autonomy of viewing. Like Ligorio, the Spanish poet Martial also chooses the Janiculum as his vantage point, as though standing above and beyond the limits of the ancient city facilitates our understanding of it. This is the ‘here’ from which he can gauge the whole of Rome, from the property of his close friend, Julius Martialis, as even the deWning seven hills (allowed to swell to the stature of dominos montes or ‘masterful mountains’) and, beyond them, the hills that frame the city, are down-sized accordingly. This property may be tiny but it is its commanding views that elevate it as the poet plays with the idea that her very recessus eminent, that even her slopes or recesses project upwards. As with the positioning of the Wgures in the atlas, the word ‘recessus’ infers a sense of distance or withdrawal as though disengagement aids familiarity. 7 Compare e.g. sestertii of the Roman emperor Titus with the Colosseum on the obverse: see Burns (1988: 27–31) on the comparable methods behind his famous Imago of ancient Rome of 1561.

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The few acres of Julius Martialis, more blessed than the gardens of the Hesperides, lie on the Janiculum’s long ridge. A high retreat rises from the hills; the Xat summit, a moderate swelling, enjoys serener sky, shining with a light all of its own while mist covers the winding valleys. Rising gently to the clear stars are the dainty rooftops of a lofty villa. On one side you may see the seven imperial mounts and appraise all of Rome; likewise the hills of

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Alba and Tusculum and whatever cool spot lies near the city, ancient Fidenae and little Rubrae and the fruitful grove of Anna Perenna that rejoices in the blood of virgins (?). On the other side the traveller on the Flaminian and Salarian Way is in view; but his carriage makes no sound, lest the wheel disturb soothing slumbers that neither boatswain’s call nor bargee’s shout can interrupt, even though Mulvius be so near and keels glide rapidly down sacred Tiber. This country place, or perhaps it should rather be styled a city mansion, is commended by its owner. You will think it your own, so open and ungrudging its welcome, so liberal and courteous; you would think it the hospitable household of Alcinous, or of Molorchus, newly become rich. You folk nowadays for whom nothing is big enough, go, till cool Tibur or Praeneste with a hundred hoes and consign perching Setia to a single tenant, so long as my judgment prefers to all that the few acres of Julius Martialis. Martial, Epigrams 4.64

The vision that this distance or alienation aVords, expressed as it is as a kind of rus in urbe, curiously works to make the reader-viewer feel at home in the city: ‘you would think it your own’, writes Martial of the villa.8 The ‘fact’ that the poet spies travellers on two of the major roads strengthens, by contrast, the sense that he and his reader ‘have made it’ (for the moment at least), like a wandering Odysseus received by Alcinous or a labouring Hercules entertained by Molorchus.9 Compared to those who covet larger estates beyond the city-limits, the advantage of this one is its view, and the capacity of this view to compress the landscape and have it conspire to serve the viewer (the conceit being that the traveller’s wheel is deliberately quiet). Villa and viewer are ediWed by this—described in approving terms that border on epic. Millions are the people who have climbed the Janiculum in search of similar ediWcation, many of them choosing to view from Bramante’s circular tempietto of 1502 which seductively shares its diameter with the Pantheon’s oculus. And not just the Janiculum with its ‘stupendous panorama of domes, towers and golden cupolas, churches, palaces, green trees and sparkling waters’.10 The Pincio to the north, identiWed 8 Martial may also be pushing his reader to equate him and his friend who shares the name ‘Martialis’. Pauca Martialis frames the poem in the Wrst and last lines and makes us think of the potential greatness of the poet’s own mini-works, his epigrams. 9 For the lesser-known story of Hercules lodging at the house of Molorchus, see Tibullus 3.7.12–13; Statius, Silu. 3.1.29–30; and Apollodorus 2.5.1. 10 French magistrate and scholar, Charles de Brosses, whose letters on Italy were Wrst published posthumously in 1799: Hibbert (1985: 202). On viewing from the

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in Ligorio’s map as the collis hortolorum or Hill of Gardens has long been a place to see and be seen, on which and from which ‘pictures will be stamped upon the memory, which will ever shed around them the serene light of undecaying beauty, never dimmed by disappointments, the burdens, the torpid commonplaces, and the dreary drudgeries of future years’.11 More canonical still are the vistas from the ‘seven hills’— of the forum from the Capitoline and across to the Capitoline from the Palatine.12 The highest of these hills is barely sixty metres above sea level. But it is what they (have) witness(ed) that is impressive.13 On the Palatine, one is shadowed by Aeneas as he and Vergil’s readers examine the site of his future settlement and thus elide the gap between Rome’s

tempietto, described by Mayernik (2003: 47) as, ‘one of the most memory-charged loci in the city’, see Vance (1989: ii, 404–5). 11 American lawyer and author, George Stillman Hillard (1853: 1, 160–1, and again, 2, 34). See also American reporter, Vincent Sheean’s Wnal view of fascist Rome from the Pincio (1943: 94). Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in the nineteenth century, sums up the hill’s function well when he says (2002: 78–9), ‘The Pincian Hill is a favourite promenade of the Roman aristocracy . . . Here, in short, all the transitory population of Rome, the world’s great watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades: here are beautiful sunsets; and here whichever way you turn your eyes, are scenes well-worth gazing at, both in themselves and for their historic interest, as any that the sun ever rose or set upon.’ 12 The Pincio is not one of the seven. However, these (and which were montes, which colles) were ‘up for grabs’ even in antiquity. Although the standard list reads Capitoline, Palatine, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal, this took a long time to become canonical: so, for example, in the festival of the Septimontium in the Wrst century bce, there are eight making sacriWces. John Lydus, meanwhile, writing in the sixth century ce (4.155) replaces Viminal with Velia while in the Curiosum Urbis Regionum XIV, a fourth-century description of the fourteen regions of the city, the seven are the Aventine, Caelian, Tarpeian (Capitoline), Palatine, Esquiline, Vatican (later known as Monte Mario), and Janiculum. For attempts at Xattening these crucial contestations, see Palmer (1976) and Langdon (1999). For a clear geological account of the formation of the city’s contours, see the excellent new book by Heiken, Funiciello, and de Rita (2005). 13 Compare e.g. Krautheimer, whose interests lie predominantly in how the hills shaped the physical growth of the city (1980: 237), ‘But in mediaeval Rome, the hills no longer counted . . . Ancient Rome had grown from the settlements on the hills and remained centred on the forum, the Capitoline and the Palatine. Mediaeval Rome was anchored in the Tiber’ (the decay of the aqueducts had done much to hasten their literal abandonment), and 243, ‘the Capitol was merely a cartographic landmark’ with Edwards (1996: 87), who describes the Capitol as a ‘metonymy of Rome itself ’. Also important on the rhetorical weight of the Capitol, from a ‘Classics’ perspective, is Wiseman (1979).

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Augustan and mythical topography, while Jupiter himself looks down from the Capitol.14 ‘A brighter [candidior] tract of sky and a calm [serenus] expanse marks the clear summits [culmina clara] of the seven hills’, wrote the Gallic prefect Rutilius Claudius Namatianus at the turn of the Wfth century in a passage that seems to echo Martial or certainly to sparkle with a similar clarity and contemplation.15 In the same period, the poet Claudian imagines the city actively enlarging her hills so as to appear more conspicuous (insignior) to the emperor.16

ANALYS ING THE APPROACH The overriding message of all of this seems to be that viewing Rome from above aVords something of an ‘objective’ stance that then enables the viewer to ‘take it all in’ or ‘be at one with the city’. At the same time—as is underlined by Martial’s close-up of the traveller—it is also an anatomizing view which allows us to examine her constituent parts in minute detail. This chapter explores this tension: between an all-embracing, panoramic, or panoptic vision on the one hand and a dissecting or selective vision on the other, between vision and omission, the emotional and the clinical. It thus engages with the ‘mosaic view’ discussed by Larmour and Spencer in the introduction—the idea that one must step back to make the most of the city’s ‘fragments’.

14 Vergil, Aeneid 8.306–69. Excellent on this passage and its ramiWcations for the Palatine and its wider signiWcance is Edwards (1996: 31–43). For Jupiter looking from the Capitol, see Lucan 1.195–6, and for Rome looking out at the whole world from her seven hills, Ovid, Tr. 1.5.69–70. 15 Rutilius Namatianus, De reditu suo 197–8: sed caeli plaga candidior tractusque serenus / signat septenis culmina clara iugus. 16 Claudian, Cons. Hon. 6.529–31, in a passage which, as Dewar notes (1996) ad loc., recalls two passages of Aeneid 2, the epiphany of Venus and the vision of Creusa: sic oculis placitura tuis insignior auctis / collibus et nota maior se Roma uidendam / obtulit (‘So Rome to be pleasing in thy sight, oVers herself to thy admiring gaze more glorious and with hills made higher and herself greater than thou hadst known her’). For further discussion, and for the personiWcation of Rome more broadly, see Roberts (2001). On the eroticization and gendering of the landscape as a principle, throughout history, see e.g. Cosgrove (1998: xviii–xix); Rose (1993); and Nash (1996).

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But what do these fragments add up to? Even Ligorio’s ‘scientiWc’ claim to show ‘what could still be seen’ is a Rome part-way between imagination and reality: where, for example, is the domestic housing? What does/can one person’s gaze encompass? ‘Students who visit Rome for the Wrst time would do well to take at once a general survey of the seven hills’, advised the University of Rome’s Professor of Roman topography, Rodolfo Lanciani,17 while it had already become a topos to recommend speciWc times for seeing the sites from the Palatine and Capitoline.18 Catharine Edwards has drawn attention to the idea expressed by several ancient authors, namely, that Rome is simply too vast to take in visually—from any viewpoint.19 What is the relationship between singularity, or subjectivity, and the objectivity implied by looking from a standard viewpoint at, or indeed for, the same city? In asking this, I acknowledge that the cityscape of Rome has changed beyond recognition since antiquity and, for that matter, since the nineteenth century—that we recognize ancient Rome as ‘ancient’ precisely because it is not the Rome that we see today—an issue that Larmour and Spencer’s introduction to this volume also makes clear. Michelangelo’s reorientation of the Capitoline to face west has had perhaps the most literal impact on the way in which we view. But it is just one of the reWnements made to Rome’s contours as her hills have been cut back by emperors and extended upwards by wealthy Italian families (each of them intent on siting themselves in the landscape).20 As recently as 1870, the view from the Aventine eastwards was still overgrown with trees, after the Palatine and everything below it returned to its pristine state of ‘hill and grass’ 17 Lanciani (1897: 4). 18 See e.g. Masson (1965: 19) and Hare (1923). 19 Edwards (1998). 20 Such was the building of families like the Frangipani on the Palatine and neighbouring area that in the Middle Ages it became known as Campo Torrechiato. In antiquity the most famous adjustment is perhaps the height of earth that was removed by Trajan’s engineers so as to accommodate his forum—the ramiWcations of which were built upon by Mussolini in 1932 when he further cut into the Velia to make his Via Triumphalis. But many are the popes, politicians, and emperors who have made their mark by shaping the landscape: Suetonius tells how Caligula bridged the Palatine and Capitoline (Cal. 22) and how Nero extended the Palatine further to the Esquiline (Ner. 31), while he has Vespasian play the role of Atlas by carrying piles of rubble on his back from his restoration of the Capitol (Vesp. 8).

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(collis et herba).21 Yet those who climbed to the top ‘pointed out ancient Rome on its seven hills’ or, more honestly yet no less selfconsciously, told how, ‘cattle grazed on the site of the forum as in the days of Evander’.22 It is these kinds of reactions, both in literature and in painting, these ‘pictures stamped upon the memory’, that are central here. This is not a chapter about what people see so much as a chapter on ‘ways of seeing’. This latter phrase owes much to John Berger’s book of the same title published in the early seventies. Of this, it is perhaps its discussion of looking at women that has proved most inXuential, largely due to its intersection with later studies on ‘the Gaze’, a term for analysing the way viewers look at people in or across texts or visual media, but one which has especially adhered itself to issues of gender and power in such formulations as ‘the male Gaze’. Although increasingly overused as a theoretical buzzword, ‘the Gaze’ is in a sense what this enquiry is about—but as a dynamic applied not to the viewing of people but the viewing of the cityscape and of the physicality and history of that city. At its core is the relationship between body and space, rather than body and body.23 This intellectual investment in the idea of looking at the landscape is not new: Geography, Landscape Archaeology, Architecture and Art History have each in their diVerent ways been examining the balance between ‘the ego’ and environment while scholars within Film Studies (the Weld that spawned ‘Gaze Theory’) have been exploring the 21 Propertius 4.1.1–4. See e.g. the emphasis on the Palatine’s wilderness in the guidebook by Mauro (1556), one of several in the sixteenth century to organize its exegesis of the city hill by hill, or Blaise de Vigene`re’s description of it as ‘un de´sert vague et inhabite´, ou pour le mieux une simple retraite de brebailles’ (‘a remote and uninhabited desert where the best one can hope is a simple retreat for sheep’) at 1586: col. 768. For a photograph of the Palatine and Caelian from the Aventine, see Krautheimer (1980: Wg. 199). For other late nineteenth-century views of the city, see Parker (1879). 22 Scottish lawyer and essayist, James Boswell, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, as cited in Hibbert (1985: 217), and Lanciani (1967), Wrst published (1901: 198–9). 23 Berger (1972). The literature on the ‘Gaze’ is too formidable to do justice to here. Crucially formative, however, are Mulvey (1975 and 1989) and Clover (1992). Also important here is Silverman (1992 and 1996), and for the application and criticism of ‘Gaze theory’ within Classics, Elsner (1996), Fredrick (1995), Morales (1996, 2004), and the collection edited by Fredrick (2002a).

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cinematic city in particular as ‘an object-to-be-looked-at’.24 Their theoretically-driven work encourages Classicists to think harder about what they mean when they state that ‘Rome is a palimpsestic city’.25 A key distinction, however, between this imperative and that of most landscape archaeologists, for example, is that whereas they are keen to bypass Western ways of seeing such as ‘the panoramic vista’ or ‘the abstracting map’ in favour of alternative ways of experiencing and recording the landscape in diVerent cultures and periods, this chapter tackles this Western viewpoint head-on and from antiquity to the present. This viewpoint is a ‘magisterial’, ‘traveller’, or ‘tourist gaze’ compared to that of ‘locals’ who see their city ‘in close-up’.26 Others have written about the speciWcally British or American reactions to Rome from the Janiculum or Pincio or about responses to the city in and unavoidably conditioned by the medieval period or the Renaissance or the eighteenth century.27 But it is general strategies for coping with the panoply of Rome-scape that interest me— the mechanics by which the act of looking on and down engenders a sense of ownership or order: why it is, for example, that setting foot on the Capitol or Palatine should make people feel that they are convening with antiquity;28 or how or why it should frustrate them; whether, in fact, it is not wishful thinking or a sense of frustration

24 Such is the cross-pollination between these Welds that the following divisions are crude. For Geography/Phenomenology, see e.g. Cosgrove (1984, 1998, 1993), Bender (1993), Tilley (1994), and Dubbini (2002). For Architecture and Art History, e.g. Gombrich (1966: 107–21), Alpers (1983), Mitchell (1994b), Sennett (1994), Labbe (1998), Adams and Gruetzner Robins (2001), Rotman and Savulis (2003). For Literature and Cultural History, Westling (1996) and Abrams (2004). And on city and the cinema, Clarke (1997), Fitzmaurice and Shiel (2001) and (2003), Barber (2002), and Beuka (2004). 25 See e.g. Edwards (1996: 28) and Gowers (1995: 23). 26 For the ‘magisterial gaze’, see e.g. Boime (1991); on the ‘tourist gaze’, e.g. Mulvey (1983), Adler (1989), Urry (1990), and in speciWc relation to the Grand Tour and to Italy, Pemble (1987) and Chard and Langdon (1996). Excellent on both are Pratt (1992), Wallach (1993), and King (2004). Particularly relevant to what follows is the contrast between ‘traveller’ and ‘tourist’ as extensively discussed by Buzard (1993). I shall be coming back to this distinction in the last section of this chapter. 27 See e.g. Edwards and Liversidge (1996), Vance (1989), and McGowan (2000). 28 So that, at its most extreme, Boswell’s companion on his climb of the Palatine breaks into Latin!

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(what Eleanor Clark calls ‘the foggy modern eye’) that leads to the moment of revelation;29 how revelation stems from ‘simply’ being there rather than looking—or not from looking at the city so much as looking inside themselves;30 whether one can ever ‘see for oneself ’ or whether what one sees is inevitably artiWcial. The answers to these questions inXuence the ways in which we read descriptions of the city, textual or visual, and force us to be more aware of our own modes of looking at ancient and modern Rome and of deriving meaning or unity from the physical evidence and its lacunae. There is a sense in which the distance from the material we study means that as historians we are ‘tourists’.

TH E MAG I S T E R IA L G A Z E Nineteenth-century travellers often used promontory views with pictorial conventions to present themselves as a ‘discover’ who has the power/authority to elevate, if not to possess a scene.31

There has been a considerable amount of work done recently on analysing the strategies adopted by European travellers to the Americas and to Africa in the nineteenth century or indeed to Italy on the Grand Tour for coping with and reliving the strange sights that confronted them—the emphasis being very much on the translation or taming of this strangeness under the banner of ‘cultural imperialism’. I want to implement a similar approach here, but to an ancient response to the city of Rome, thus highlighting how this ‘colonial’ model might also work for ancient evidence. The piece in question is by the 29 Clark (1953: 16–17). 30 See, e.g., Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac in a letter to Nicholas Bourbon, dated 25 March 1621, as cited in Zuber (1986: 107), ‘je ne monte jamais au mont Palatin, ni au Capitole, que je n’y change d’esprit et qu’il ne m’y vienne d’autres pense´es que les miennes ordinaries: cet air m’inspire quelque chose de grand et de ge´ne´reux que je n’avois point auparavant’ (‘I never climb to the Palatine nor Capitoline without having a change of spirit there and being overcome with thoughts other than my normal ones. That air inspires in me something grand and noble that I have never before known’). 31 Pratt (1992: 205).

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Latin poet Claudian, who was writing at the start of the Wfth century and was himself a relatively new recruit to Rome, having been born in Alexandria, and celebrates the sixth consulship and entry into the city in 404 ce of his patron Honorius, ruler of the west of the Empire, whose court was in Ravenna. We join them on the Palatine, from where Vergil had famously contemplated Rome’s grandeur and watch with him as they make sense of the city. As American scholar of English literature, Paul Fussell, recently said of tourism, ‘it requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way’.32 This time, however, it is her very emperor who is visitor and the august capital that is initially ‘Other’.33 Non alium certe decuit rectoribus orbis esse larem, nulloque magis se colle potestas aestimat et summi sentit fastigia iuris; attolens apicem subiectis regia rostris tot circum delubra uidet tantisque deorum cingitur excubiis! iuuat infra tecta Tonantis cernere Tarpeia pendentes rupe Gigantas caelatasque fores mediisque uolantia signa nubibus et densum stipantibus aethera templis aeraque uestitis numerosa puppe columnis consita subnixasque iugis inmanibus aedes, naturam cumulante manu, spoliisque micantes innumeros arcus. acies stupet igne metalli at circumfuso trepidans obtunditur auro. Agnoscisne tuos, princeps uenerande, penates?

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Certainly no other place was worthy to be the home of the world’s rulers; on no other hill is power more capable of measuring herself and perceiving the limits of her supreme jurisdiction. Lifting its head above the forum that lies at its feet, the palace sees the many shrines that surround it and is enclosed by so many protecting deities. See below the roof of the Thunderer’s temple the giants hanging from the Tarpeian Rock. See also the sculptured doors, the statues hovering in the thick of the clouds, the temples densely crowding 32 Fussell (1987: 651). 33 Excellent on this poem is the recent commentary by Dewar (1996). For its historical context, see Cameron (1970) and Schmidt (1976), and for Claudian and representations of Rome, Roberts (2001) and Long (2004). Although Dewar sees se aestimat as a simple stand-in for the passive, a move that is fairly common in poetry of the time, this need not negate the impact of the sustained personiWcation. Note too that aestimare is the same ‘scientiWc’ word that Martial uses.

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the air, numerous bronze prows welded on top of cloud-covered columns, shrines built on monstrous crags where the human hand has added to nature and countless arches Xashing with spoils. The gaze is stupeWed by the blaze of metal and ranging from object to object is beaten back by the overwhelming gold. Venerable princeps, do you recognise your home? Panegyric on the sixth consulship of the emperor Honorius, 39–53

In this section, imperial power is Rome, and Rome what can be seen from the summit. On this hill, ‘sovereignty’ (potestas) can measure itself, literally ‘perceive’ (sentit) the dizzy heights (fastigia) of its orbit. The ‘palace’ or ‘royal power’ (regia) joins in this personifying process, raising its ‘apex’ so as to see the structures around it (the combination of circum uidet and cingitur stressing the empowerment that this panorama aVords as well as the protection, defended as it is on all sides by the vigils of the gods, excubiae suggesting that the gaze is reciprocated). Thus the emperor’s sway is visualized in physical dimensions and relative locations. Lines 44–5 invite the poem’s audience to look also (iuuat . . . cernere) so as to appreciate what this means in practice. But it is as though the act of looking mystiWes further. So what if the imperial gaze can encompass the vast numbers of shrines (tot . . . tantis, 43) and render the forum and rostra subordinate? The longer we look, the bigger and vaguer everything seems until the eyes are assaulted (stupet, obtunditur) by the gold that overwhelms us. First to catch the eye of reader and poet is the neighbouring Capitoline, called here after its steep southern face, the rupes Tarpeia with its temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. This is hardly surprising: although the smallest of the seven hills, the Capitoline was the religious hub of the city and the Tarpeia sedes, the Wrst place that Aeneas reaches post-Palatine in a section of the Aeneid that perhaps inXuences our passage in another way: in its collapsing of time to describe the Capitol as ‘golden’.34 The reference to Jupiter as tonans 34 Vergil, Aen. 8.347–8: hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducet/aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis (‘Hence he leads him to the Tarpeian House and the Capitol—golden now, once bristling with woodland thickets’). Nunc jolts us into the present and to the realization that the Temple of Capitoline Jove was often celebrated as ‘golden’ after its restoration in 83 bce. Tarpeia is also a temporal leap forward for Aeneas to the betrayal of the citadel by a woman of that name in the period of Romulus.

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can also be called poetic plundering: either of Lucan’s Pharsalia, where it appears with Tarpeia de rupe, or as an inversion of Statius’ Siluae, where the palace of Jupiter Tonans is said to be ‘amazed’ (stupet again) at Domitian’s equivalent structure on the Palatine. In this way, Honorius’ arrival or induction into Rome makes him an Augustus and vice-versa. The pitting of the Capitoline against the Palatine was a tested means of measuring the emperor’s divine status.35 Less easy to understand are the Giants—until, that is, they are taken together with the adjectives tonans and Tarpeia and with the ‘monstrous mountains’ (iugis immanibus) that follow them.36 Everything about this view is massive, as though the act of looking cannot contain what it sees, but seems instead to increase its subject matter, making it too big to tame or civilize. This impulse makes more sense when set next to descriptions of Africa or the Americas by nineteenth-century Europeans. Rome is made as wild and alien to its visitor as these continents to (and by) their colonialist travellers. This sense of wildness is actively demanded by the visitor’s (in this case, a visiting emperor’s) need for mastery. The language of the passage leads us back to Augustus who vowed the Temple of Jupiter Tonans in 26 bce, through to the Republic when Rome’s criminals were Xung from the Tarpeian Rock, to the primordial past when giants fought the gods and helped explain the geology of Etna and Athos (an allusion which might signal the potential threat from Aleric and the Goths as much as it refers back to the famous sack of Rome by the Gauls). It is as though the city’s history surges out into a space precivilization and city, and requests refounding or re-cultivating. Only an emperor is capable of so much. As the poet pans in for a close-up of the doors and then across to statues, temples, columns, and arches, his problems of how to describe the scene intensify until Wnally he is blinded or beaten into submission. There is no mention of speciWc monuments (e.g. the arches of Augustus or Titus), the 35 Lucan 1.195–6 and Statius, Silu. 4.2.20–2. The pitting of the Palatine against the Capitoline was, of course, also a means by which Claudian could measure himself against Vergil: compare the contest between Mount Cithaeron and Mount Helicon in the fragment (Fr. 654 ¼ Campbell 1992: 26–8) of the Greek lyric poet, Corinna, which is sometimes read as contrasting the poetic prowess of herself and Pindar. 36 See e.g. Dewar (1996: ad loc.); Jeep (1872: 269–77); and Long (2004: 13–14).

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conceit being that there are too many to quantify. Instead, the statues that we see Xoat in cloud, temples choke the air, and columns and arches proliferate as the process of zooming in makes everything perversely less distinct and harder to pin down. It is only as our vision fails that Honorius can be Wnally recognized as princeps uenerande, as for the Wrst time in the poem Claudian addresses him directly and thereby reveals him to his audience. The verb agnoscis underlines how the emperor can see what we cannot; that it is this that makes him the emperor. What does he recognize? Tuos penates— as the ‘dwelling Wt for the world’s rulers’ (decuit . . . larem) is Wnally made ‘his’. The territorial possession prompted by the ‘magisterial gaze’ thus aVords his ‘homecoming’. This commanding view, and the control it aVords Honorius, contrast with what happens to another visiting Augustus (this time from the east), Constantius II, whose Wrst experiences of Rome in 357 ce are famously described by historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who like Claudian was not born in Rome but arrived there late in his career. This time, the emperor looks up rather than down at the city—together with the reader. It is the historian, with his visually detailed but selective summary, who occupies the ‘objective’ ground of surveying.37 deinde intra septem montium culmina, per accliuitates planitiemque posita urbis membra collustrans et suburbana, quicquid uiderat primum, id eminere inter alia cuncta sperabat: Iouis Tarpei delubra, quantum terrenis diuina praecellunt; lauacra in modum prouinciarum exstructa; amphitheatri molem soliditatam lapidis Tiburtini compage, ad cuius summitatem aegre uisio humana conscendit; Pantheum uelut regionem teretem speciosa celsitudine fornicatam; elatosque uertices qui scansili suggestu consurgunt, priorum principum imitamenta portantes, et urbis templum forumque Pacis, et Pompei theatrum et Odeum et Stadium, aliaque inter haec decora urbis aeternae. 37 For a detailed commentary of this passage, see de Jonge (1972: 125–31). Also relevant is Matthews (1989: 231–5), Schmitzer (1999), and Kelly (2003), whose sophisticated discussion of the absence of Constantinople in Ammianus uses Rome as a counterpoint. Although Kelly is right to say that Ammianus wrote ‘in Rome and for Rome’, he is perhaps a little too quick to dismiss the moments at which he emphasizes his Syrian birth to cast himself as visitor: see 14.6.2 and Matthews (1989: 12–13). For Ammianus’ oscillation between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in a diVerent passage, Hunt (1999).

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Then, as he surveyed the sections of the city and its suburbs, lying within the summits of the seven hills, along their slopes, or on the level ground, he thought that whatever Wrst met his gaze towered above all the rest: the sanctuaries of Tarpeian Jove so far surpassing as things divine excel those of earth, the baths built up to the measure of provinces, the huge bulk of the amphitheatre, strengthened by its framework of Tiburtine stone, to whose top human eyesight barely ascends, the Pantheon like a rounded city-district, vaulted over in lofty beauty, and the exalted heights which rise with platforms to which one may mount, and bear the likenesses of former emperors; the Temple of the City, the Forum of Peace, the Theatre of Pompey, the Odeum, the Stadium, and amongst these the other adornments of the Eternal City. Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.14

Although Constantius also processes to the Palatine, it is less clear that this provides him with his viewpoint. As well as ‘surveying’ or ‘scanning’, collustrans means ‘traversing’, as though the emperor is walking through the centre and its suburbs. Rather than attempt to ‘take it all in’, Ammianus isolates each element: his is explicitly not a totalizing but a fragmentary vision. Like Honorius, his emperor seeks a yardstick against which aestimare Romam, but the structures he meets keep getting bigger. First up—unsurprisingly after its prominence in Vergil and the Silver Latinists—is the home of Tarpeian Jupiter, followed by baths built in the manner of provinces, the ‘bulk’ of the amphitheatre, and the Pantheon like a regio of the city, complete with its spectacular loftiness, as though concentrating on each ampliWes them upwards and outwards. The viewer in turn is dwarfed, their vision scarcely able to cope with the extent of the Colosseum. It is an experience that chimes with what Pliny writes in his Natural History when he argues that it is the height or altitudo of Rome’s buildings that proves that she is without rival.38 This is Empire, etched into the eVort that went into their construction. 38 Pliny, HN 3.67: quod si quis altitudinem tectorum addat, dignam profecto aestimationem concipiat, fateaturque nullius urbis magnitudinem in toto orbe potuisse ei comparari (‘If one were further to take into account the height of the buildings, a very fair estimate would be formed that would bring us to admit that there has been no city in the whole world that could be compared to Rome in magnitude’). A similar perspective is given by Cassiodorus, Var. 4.51 and by Zola (1893) in Moatti (1993: 174), who dwells on the sheer mass of the ancient buildings and on the people walking around it looking like ants.

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Even the emperor is stunned by the achievements of his predecessors (whose images he also looks up to) sharing, as he does, a human perception that is necessarily partial. Does this mean that Constantius never fully arrives, or rather the inverse: that in experiencing ‘the density of marvels’, he is integrated, and sees not as a tourist (a possessor in the ‘colonial’ sense, whose view Xattens the complexities to render the city as surface) but as a local or (diVerent again) a ‘Princeps’ on the traditional model?39 Honorius and he are rare among fourth-century emperors in visiting the former capital: for them, it really is another country. Perhaps Constantius’ celebrated aduentus along the Via Flaminia, described earlier in Book 16, aVords him suYcient recognition to move from being a spectator to an actor in Rome, where he is then pictured meeting the senate and the people. Or perhaps, as is reinforced by the gap between the extravagance of the aduentus and the reality of his military record, his failure to master the cityscape undermines his status as emperor.40 Certainly his reaction to the buildings balances his godly arrival, where even Rome’s hills hail him, and when he is made to seem so close to God as to be godlike, a cult-statue almost, who is tamquam Wgmentum hominis.41 His colossal stature in that passage (described as he is as having to bend to pass through lofty gateways, and this, despite being perhumilis, very short or humble) is undercut as he shifts from mighty to mouse in the face of Rome’s ineVable greatness.

TO UCH IN G T HE VO I D To see the city from above is to gain an overview—‘like’—or so the viewer might fantasize as (s)he stands on the summit—the gods have an overview, hill to hill, monument to monument, the present to antiquity to prehistory. It also allows suYcient distance from the action

39 Ammianus 16.10.13. Also at 16.10.13 Rome is called imperii uirtutumque omnium larem, ‘the home of empire and of all virtues ’. 40 I draw here on Matthews (1989: 234–5). 41 At 16.10.9.

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to work out where and, crucially, with whom one stands.42 Only then can one arguably get the measure of Rome, even as an emperor, and even if the viewing process makes the scene expand exponentially. Few of us have the palace’s omniscience, but there is a sense in which our deWciency, as located in the limits of our vision, conWrms our status. There is also a sense in which our capacity to frame the view empowers us anyway. It matters little that some of it is hazy or obscured by other structures for, as archaeologist Julian Thomas puts it, ‘though the gaze aspires to be all-seeing’ and ‘to gather everything in’, ‘totalisation under the gaze is a dream of unity’.43 Or rather it matters a lot: for, in acknowledging what we do not see and the ephemera of our vision, we understand that Rome is greater than the sum of her parts. The preface to Claudian’s poem locates its audience in a hall or aula.44 It is one thing to have them imagine the view—quite another to have them stand there themselves and confront the often uneasy disjunction between expectation and reality. ‘This spectacle of the world, how it is fallen! how changed! how defaced!’, exclaimed Gibbon’s Poggio Bracciolini as he looked down from the Capitol.45 While for Claude de Pontoux, writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, the urgency of needing to see for himself is quelled by arresting belatedness. O qu’il fait beau marcher a` la fraiche diane . . . Allons au Capitole, allons au Palatin . . . Mais quoy que voyons nous icy nous arrestons, Toute vieille ruine; et qu’est ce que de Rome, Voila` que c’est, froissard, toute chose a son temps. O how beautiful to walk in the fresh early morning . . . Let’s go to the Capitol, let’s go to the Palatine . . . But what do we see here? Stop! Everything is old and in ruin; and what about Rome? This is what she is, broken. Everything has had its day.46 42 For seeing through other people’s eyes, try Masson (1965: 24), ‘it is quite possible that Poggio [Bracciolini] stood on almost exactly the same spot as we’. Here layers of looking take us back to the work of Edward Gibbon who also has Bracciolini accompany him in his Decline and Fall. On Gibbon’s use of Bracciolini in Chapter 71, see Craddock (1984) and O’Brien (1997). 43 Thomas (1993: 23). 44 Claudian, Cons. Hon. 6, pr. 26. 45 Womersley’s edition (Gibbon 2000: 741). 46 Claude de Pontoux (1579: 148), translated by McGowan (2000).

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In this vision of the city, the remains of ancient Rome serve to underline its absence. ‘One might imagine some great convulsion of nature had swallowed up the city and left a few fragments to tell the tale of its existence’, exclaimed Cambridge lawyer Henry Matthews in 1819. Much of it was indeed beneath his feet, but this image of swallowing up also served a metaphorical function as the notion of decadence or decline was inscribed as literal loss or reduction.47 Henry James was perhaps most vivid when he called the Capitoline ‘more of a molehill than a mountain’, from which ‘Roman history seems suddenly to have sunk through a trap door’.48 Looking down on the site exacerbates this sense of shrinkage and expansion. Words are perhaps better at inscribing absence, loss, or change over time than pictures. ‘I came to the Capitol, and looked down on the other side. There before my eyes opened an immense grave, and out of the grave rose a city of monuments in ruins, columns, triumphal arches, temples and palaces, broken, ruinous but still beautiful and grand—with a solemn mournful beauty! It was the great apparition of ancient Rome’.49 But ecphraseis such as this, by Feminist critic Frederika Bremer, fuel the imagination as opposed to feeding it concrete artefacts (stupet in Claudian’s view from the Palatine signalling that passage’s link with earlier descriptions of artworks and thus the literariness of the exposition). Ligorio aside, all of the above render the ‘landscape’ as ‘a page’.50 Ligorio copes by practising abstraction. But how do less abstract artists—nineteenthcentury painters for example—cope with ‘the then and now’ or turn the city into ‘landscape’? How do they compress the panorama from

47 Matthews (1820: 56). And on literally walking over antiquity, Montaigne (1965 edition: 92): ‘[Il] tenoit pour certain qu’en plusieurs endroits nous marchions sur le faıˆte des maisons tout entieres . . . et de vray, quasi partout, on marche sur la teˆte des vieux murs que la pluie et les coches de´couvrent’ (‘It would certainly hold that in several places we were walking on the rooftops of whole houses . . . and in truth, almost everywhere, one walks on the head of old walls that the rain and coaches discover’). 48 James (1992, Wrst published 1873: 126). 49 As cited in Hare (1923: 85). 50 Hillard (1853: 1, 220): ‘the history and literature of Rome are lying at our feet and the living landscape is a page, on which is written half of all that we have learned at college’ and Hawthorne (2002 edition: 127). See the excellent analysis of these in Vance (1989: 1, 5–6).

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the Capitoline or the Palatine so as to make it suYciently expansive? Do they paint what they see? How do they share the ‘dream of unity’ with others, render it recognizable?

J OI N I N G T H E DOT S I have had a hard grapple with ancient Rome—for I was determined to get the whole of the grand ruins, which I believe has not yet been done. I got a little pencil sketch of it from a window . . . then composed from it at home as I imagined it ought to come if all of it could be seen, and then worked the details from the tower of the Capitol where I saw everything—but 150 ft beneath me.51

Many are the artists who have tried to commit Rome to canvas— though, like our wordsmiths, their vision is informed and dictated by prior versions (so, for example, Ligorio’s later and most famous map of the ancient city, ‘most accurately formed from her antiquities’, published in 1561, where the emphasis on accuracy has more to do with his meticulous reliance on coins and classical representations of cities, and with claims to be better than his contemporaries, than it does with archaeology).52 This visual section of the chapter examines how Romantic artist Samuel Palmer rose to the challenge. Born in England in 1805, Palmer was already well established as a painter when he left for Italy in 1837 and a member of ‘The Ancients’, a group of artists whose members consciously turned to the past for moral and artistic exempla. Such was Palmer’s investment in antiquity that he was later to illustrate his own translation of Vergil’s Eclogues, but not before spending two years painting Rome, Pompeii, and the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, designed by Ligorio. All of these views were inXuenced by the topographical tradition of the early eighteenth century, and by the ideal-landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, especially those inspired by seventeenthcentury Italy (though less the cityscape than the campagna). Palmer’s paintings were contemporary with those of Turner whose stay in Rome 51 English artist, Samuel Palmer, 7 June 1838—Lister (1974: 1, 146). 52 Above (nn. 5 and 7).

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in 1828 spawned an image of the city which we shall be referring to as comparandum.53 My focus falls on two of Palmer’s watercolours (Figs 10 and 11), Wrst exhibited together in 1838 at the Rome Academy and today housed in the City Museum and Art Gallery in Birmingham (UK). Of roughly equal proportions, one is entitled, A view of ancient Rome, and the other, A view of modern Rome during carnival—a visual couplet which provides an overview in its ‘now’ and ‘then’ perspective. Except that this is no simple ‘spot the diVerence’, for each of the views is framed from a diVerent lookout: the former from the Capitol across a relatively unexcavated Forum and the latter from the Pincio across the Piazza del Popolo towards St Peter’s. For Palmer, the ancient and modern cities are best exempliWed by diVerent spaces or, more metaphorically, by dislocation: to view as a nineteenth-century visitor is to view from a diVerent perspective from an ancient. In another sense, however, the titles of the pieces prompt an alternative reading: namely, that a view of ancient Rome is somehow timeless whereas the modern view needs to be anchored in further speciWcity. The second painting is not simply ‘modern Rome’ but ‘modern Rome during carnival’ as Palmer’s contemporary viewpoint is explicitly located by its procession. One reason for this is that A view of ancient Rome is also modern Rome as signposted most obviously by the domed Church of Saints Luke and Martina in the bottom left-hand corner, not to mention the raised ground level and overgrowth, the golden glow of which merges seamlessly with the husk of the Colosseum in the centre. This is the ‘desolate’ scene that met Matthews, James, and Gibbon as they looked down from the Capitol and the one that was to be captured by Turner a year later as Modern Rome—Campo Vaccino in a painting in which the goats conspire with the title and the ‘locals’ in the foreground to site Turner as a foreigner and the image in the present. Turner’s painting was also part of a pendant, the companion piece

53 For a survey of Palmer’s paintings, see Lister (1985) and (1988). Also important here are the catalogue entries in Edwards and Liversidge (1996: nos 29 and 30, pp. 109–12) and the essay by Liversidge in the same volume, 38–52; Powell (1998: 26); and Barker et al. (2005: nos 105a and 105b, pp. 180–2). For Turner’s classical landscapes, see Powell (1987) and Nicholson (1990).

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Fig. 10 Samuel Palmer, A View of Ancient Rome, 1838. Watercolour, gouache, and graphite on buV paper laid down on board, 41.1
57.8 cm.

this time being Ancient Rome: Agrippina landing with the ashes of Germanicus. The triumphal bridge and the palace of the Caesars restored, the very title of which implies a contrasting approach to representing the ancient city.54 That said, viewers should not be fooled by his ‘reconstruction’, for the event depicted actually happened in southern Italy. This manipulation of history inevitably also calls the topography of the Palatine into question. Palmer makes no such claims to historicity. His canvas records merely ‘how it is’ in his day. But if that is so, why not call it ‘View from the Capitol’ or ‘The ruins of the Forum’ rather than A view of ancient Rome? Because the collapsing of time that the title aVords turns the work from ‘vista’ to ‘response’ by prompting the comparison of past and present. ‘I was determined to get the whole of the grand ruins, which I believe has not yet been done’, admitted Palmer ambitiously in a letter of the same year. Perhaps he manages it.

54 Edwards and Liversidge (1996: nos 10 and 11, pp. 83–6).

Fig. 11 Samuel Palmer, A View of Modern Rome during Carnival, 1838. Watercolour, gouache, and graphite on buV paper laid down on board, 40.9
57.8 cm.

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The Sites of Rome

Perhaps this sense of ‘wholeness’ stems from and is encompassed by the gap or (to put the emphasis diVerently) the compression. As French intellectual Madame de Stae¨l notes, again of the view from the Capitol, ‘the strict sense of antiquity and the greatness of Christianity are thus brought together in Rome across the centuries and are presented to the eye as well as to the mind’.55 This sense of compression is compounded by the torch-bearing Wgure to the bottom right of Palmer’s painting who, in a similar role to the people in the sixteenth-century atlas, facilitates the meeting by guiding the viewer under the arch into ‘the other world’ of the landscape. So too by the similar colours of his View of modern Rome where the Piazza del Popolo, recently redesigned by Giuseppe Valadier, takes the place of the Forum and St Peter’s, the Colosseum. The message of this painting is that modern Rome is a Christian Rome—the edges of the Piazza Xanked by the churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto to the left and that of Santa Maria del Popolo to the right, and by the procession of carnival revellers who wind their way up to the Pincio—again to meet viewer and artist. But the stress is on re-vision rather than radical replacement.56 ‘Carnival’ was the religious festival that preceeded Lent, but one which had its origins in the pagan city. While certain Wgures are represented sitting or lying on the slopes not unlike the twenty-Wrst century-Romans who relax in the gardens there today, their nineteenth-century status made most obvious by the bonnet on the head of the female Wgure who kneels at the side of a prostrate male, those taking part in the procession are made teasingly classical. From the half-clad Wgures and winged ‘victory’ leaning from the front of the cart to the chubby putto-esque boy on the goat playing the twin pipes and the gay abandonment of the Wgure leading them with tambourine and mask-like face, almost everything about the procession points to Bacchic revelry or (taking the imperial blue of the lead Wgure’s robe into account) a merry skit on imperial triumph. Again Palmer collapses the chasm between the nineteenth century and antiquity. 55 De Stae¨l (1998 edition: 63). 56 Although note that, for Henry James, a similar carnival procession was to be a stimulus for exploring the Wssure between pagan and Christian Rome: see discussion by Buzard (1993: 205–6).

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S E E RO M E A N D . . . Tourists still climb the Capitoline, Palatine, Pincio, and Janiculum in their thousands—not to see Rome so much as to situate their perspective: for, as we have discovered, what they see is not ‘real’, so much as relative. By stepping up and out of the meˆle´e of the city, they are confronted with their status as visitor. In turn, Rome is made alien and, therefore, oVers herself up (actively in the case of Claudian’s city increasing her hills for Honorius) to be understood or ordered. At that moment, the visitor becomes king or pretends (s)he ‘plays god’, captures the city’s complexity in a single frame or portrait. Does this process work diVerently depending on whether (s)he is outside the ancient city (e.g. on the Janiculum) or literally ‘on top of it’ (e.g. on the Palatine)? The gradient is certainly steeper from the latter and the centro storico closer at hand with the result that the sense of fulWlment or frustration is perhaps heightened. Veni, uidi, uici: except, of course, that Palmer’s picture speaks volumes about the limitations as well as possibilities of the gaze in oVering its audience a view as opposed to the view of ancient Rome. His panorama—even from the Capitol—is unique, promises a distinct ‘wholeness’, or hole, from other responses. These responses ultimately fragment the city further into a collection of competing mosaics or assemblages. This chapter has examined a cross-section of these responses in detail: from those of the ancient poets, Martial and Claudian, to the Renaissance antiquarian Ligorio and the modern painter Palmer. Its primary intention was not to analyse any of their ‘Romes’—rather to examine the very way in which they viewed. Rome has a heritage of being viewed from her hills: it is the importance of this heritage that makes Michelangelo’s adaptation of the Capitoline so masterful. It is also what makes Gibbon follow in Bracciolini’s steps and make Palmer think that he can see everything from its apex. It is crucial to understand the potential and constraints of their perspective if we are to appreciate the subtleties of their description. That said, a vision of Rome does emerge from these narratives: not that of a ‘palimpsestic’ city, in which layer upon layer of history has been erased to make way for the next, so much as a sprawling mass

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that wilfully resists such distillation, where visible landmarks are no more meaningful than lacunae. What all of our sources stress is that the advantage of ‘over-viewing’ or momentarily framing a chunk lies not in the extrication of the various elements but in their compression. Not that we as historians should be unsuspicious of this conclusion: we are all aware of the dangers of forcing scraps of ancient evidence together to form a false picture or of collapsing the chasm between ancient and modern sensibilities. I suggested earlier that historians are ‘tourists’, but a better aspiration must be to break the conventions of the tourist-mode as summarized by my quotation from Paul Fussell, and to cast oneself as a ‘traveller’.57 I Wnish in the hope that this journey has been both adventurous and independently directed.

57 See above, p. 307 and nn. 26 and 32.

9 Ancient Rome for little comrades: the legacy of classical antiquity in Soviet children’s literature* Marina Balina

My verse by labor will break the mountain chain of years, and will present itself ponderous, crude, tangible, as an aqueduct, by slaves of Rome constructed, enters into our days. Vladimir Mayakovsky, At the Top of My Voice, 1930

* I would like to thank Diana Spencer, David Larmour, Jason Moralee, and Mark Lipovetsky for their invaluable comments and criticism on earlier versions of this article. My deep appreciation goes to Leila Dadiashvili for her assistance in gathering materials essential to my research. I extend my gratitude to Genevie´ve Nehrt for providing visual support for this publication. My heartfelt thanks go to my colleague Scott Sheridan whose insightful commentary and stimulating discussions helped me during various stages of this project.

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The Sites of Rome TH ROUGH T H E BINA RY BINOCULA RS: ANTIQUITY SEEN WITH SOVIET EY ES

The most popular revolutionary poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, presents his deep fascination with the technological achievements of ancient Rome through a clearly ‘class-oriented’ gaze: his heroes are the nameless Roman slaves whom he wanted to immortalize with his poetry. The focus on the collective labour of many rather than on the technological genius of an individual inventor was very much in tune with the political discourse of the time, which described the radical changes in the Soviet social transformation. ‘Seeing’ past world history through the optics of ‘class struggle’—an interpretive strategy provided to Mayakovsky and his contemporaries by the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—was a standard procedure: according to the founding fathers of communism, ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’.1 The study of history in general and of antiquity in particular was dominated in Soviet Russia in the 1930s by the Marxist focus on socio-economic relationships and the investigation of diVerent forms of exploitation in ancient societies. The identiWcation of slavery in ancient societies as the Wrst state formation driven by class struggle is generally attributed in Soviet historiography to the public lecture ‘On Statehood’ given by Vladimir Lenin in 1919.2 Published only after Lenin’s death in 1929, this lecture was widely quoted and, supported by the simultaneous publication of the Russian translation of German Ideology by Marx and Engels, gave rise to the speciWc interpretation of ancient history as a juxtaposition between the oppressors (the slave owners) and the oppressed (the slaves), sharply focusing on the ‘revolutionary’ struggle of the past, namely, slave uprisings in antiquity.3 Pre-revolutionary scholars of antiquity who continued to teach during the early post-revolutionary 1 Marx and Engels (1976: 482). 2 Among Russian sources Frolov (1999) provides the most comprehensive account of the history of the study of antiquity in Russia. In German, see Christ (1972). An interesting personal account on this subject is provided by Markish (2001) in a special forum on Soviet culture in the Russian literary magazine Znamia. 3 Frolov (1999: 204).

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years either had to conform to this new ideological platform or they were declared ‘class-enemies on the historical front’.4 Such worldfamous scholars of antiquity in Russia as Faddei Frantsevich Zelinsky, Mikhail Ivanovich RostovtseV, Vladislav Petrovich Budeskul, and Sergei Aleksandrovich Zhebelev were among the Wrst victims of political prosecution: as a result of constant attacks, Zelinsky and Rostovtseff left Russia and Budeskul died in 1931. Zhebelev was forced to denounce publicly his own views. This Marxist focus never ceased to exist during the Soviet era. Even in the liberal period of the 1960s, the world of antiquity was viewed through a Soviet ideological lens: a special series of academic publications known as Studies in the History of Slavery in the Greco-Roman World (Issledovania po istorii rabstva v antichnom mire) was established that continued to publish studies of ancient Greece and Rome with this particular ideological angle until 1989.5 In the pre-revolutionary period, the study of antiquity was dominated in Russia by the study of ancient Greece. Many historians explain this phenomenon through what were seen as Russia’s special cultural and religious ties with Byzantium.6 The discovery of former Greek colonies within the boundaries of the Russian Empire, as well as numerous subsequent archaeological expeditions to the region of Crimea where ruins of Greek cities were found, also contributed to this focus.7 In eVect, Russia was in the process of discovering antiquity within its own ‘backyard’. During Soviet times, this historical emphasis on ancient Greece was partially balanced with attention to ancient Rome, in that the history of the Roman Empire provided more explicit examples of slave revolts. Spartacus, the gladiator who became the leader of a group of rebellious Roman slaves in 73 bce, was thus a household name in Soviet culture. The novel under the same title written by Giuseppe Rafaello Giovagnoli in 1874 was among the required reading for Soviet school children.8 A popular 4 Frolov (1999: 205). 5 For additional material on the interpretation of antiquity in the Soviet context, see, in Russian, Blum (2000) and, in English, Graham (1967). 6 Frolov (1999: 22). 7 Neverov (1977) provides an interesting account of artifacts of antiquity found in Russia during the Petrine reign. 8 On the subject of children’s literature in Russia, see Balina and Rudova (2005: 186–99). See also Kukulin and MaioWs (2003).

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Soviet sports club and a soccer team were named after this gladiator; in 1958 a ballet under the same name was created by the famous Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian who, in 1968, was awarded, along with the choreographer Jury Grigorovich, the highest Soviet recognition in the arts, the Lenin Prize. The solo dance by Spartacus in this ballet hereafter became a standard for state-sponsored concerts celebrating revolutionary anniversaries. The image of Rome that became part of popular culture in Soviet Russia was clearly divided into two: the Rome of the Patricians and the Rome of the Plebeians and slaves. Through literature and Wlm, prominent Wgures of Roman history who became part of the Soviet public domain were re-evaluated according to this binary scale. Thus, as an enemy of the tyrants, Cato—the arch-conservative supporter of senatorial power—became an acceptable subject for Soviet historiography; Cicero was viewed primarily as a saviour of Rome from Catiline, while Brutus and Cassius were celebrated as protectors of the Roman Republic.9 The greatest irony of this process of evaluation of the Roman socio-political legacy stemmed from the absence of direct visual contact with Rome: the ‘iron curtain’, with all its restrictions to travel in foreign (and particularly capitalist) countries prohibited Soviet citizens—professional historians as well as leisure-travellers—from direct contact with Roman historical sites. These limitations contributed to a distinctive anomaly of Rome’s representation within Soviet culture: narrative structures dominated over actual visual experience. However, such an approach was nothing new to the Soviet perception of Roman culture in its Russian context.

RE-‘VIEWING’ THE PAST, WITH AN EY E TOWARD T H E F UT U R E : ROYA L LE G AC I E S O F A N T I Q U I T Y In his monograph entitled Russian Antiquity: The Content, Role and Fate of the Legacy of Antiquity in Russian Culture, contemporary Russian cultural historian Georgii Knabe writes: 9 Zenkovsky (1974) provides an interesting interpretation of the parallel reading of Russia’s vision of Roman historical Wgures.

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The perception of the cultural experience of the past centuries . . . manifests itself on three levels. The Wrst level consists of the borrowing of single elements . . . The second level is expressed through the inXuences of the past culture on the latter culture as the result of historical contact between these cultures’ carriers. The third level which could be named entelechy (entelechia) of culture is represented through the absorption of content, character, spirit, and style of a past cultural epoch by a particular time period during which these characteristics of the past became congruent with the present moment.10

It was precisely this type of relationship that Russian culture has developed with the culture of antiquity in general, and Roman antiquity in particular. The adaptation of Rome to, and its inclusion into, Russian cultural discourse manifested itself in two diVerent forms: a metaphorical form, as expressed through verbal representation; and a visual form, which manifested itself primarily through architecture and sculpture. During various periods of Russian cultural history, preference was given to either one or the other, with occasional simultaneous representation of the verbal and visual as seen during the time of Peter the Great (the Wrst half of the eighteenth century) and Alexander I (the Wrst half of the nineteenth century). DiVerent socio-historical needs in Russia’s past sometimes required a more direct appeal to diVerent periods of Roman history, and the linear chronology of Rome was constantly manipulated by the tsars to better inXuence the operations of the Russian psyche. Thus, as early as the Wfteenth century, Russian interest Wrst turned to the Rome of early Christianity; during the reign of Peter the Great, it was the Roman Empire that captured the attention of the Russian tsar. While Alexander I perceived his reign to be in direct correlation with the golden age of the Roman Empire, the Russian educated e´lite, who were disillusioned with Russia’s social system at the time, turned to the image of the early Roman Republic for inspiration. Thus Rome was consequently valued in Russian culture as a metaphor that helped to explain and express Russia’s own inspirations and socio-political desires. The earliest expression of this approach may be found in the well-known concept of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ that originated

10 Knabe (2000: 19).

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during the ‘gathering of Russia’ under the Muscovite Grand Duke Ivan III in the Wfteenth century.11 Nicolas Riasanovskii writes: ‘The long reign of Ivan III, which extended from 1462 to 1505, has generally been considered, together with the following reign of Basil III . . . the beginning of the new age of Russian history, that of Muscovite Russia’.12 Ivan’s marriage to Sophia Paleologus, a Byzantine princess who was a niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI, placed Russia at the forefront of the defenders of the ‘true faith’—Orthodox Christianity. Nova Roma, or the Second Rome—the city of Constantinople—was destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and Moscow was ready to accept the honour as the new spiritual centre of Christianity. Teleological discourse of the time stressed the willingness of Russia to assume the new religious leadership of the Christian world. As a place, Rome is often referred to as stained with the blood of Christian martyrs. The prophecy of the highly ideological Wfteenth-century ‘The Tale of the White Cowl’ predicts that ‘in the new Rome, which has been the city of Constantinople, the Christian faith will perish . . .’ and declares that the true faith will be revealed in ‘the third Rome, which will be the land of Russia’.13 Thus, by calling itself ‘the Third Rome’, Muscovite Russia accepted the name but at the same time rejected the religious legacy of ‘old’ Rome, the Wrst as well as the second, which were both associated with negative ‘wrong’ religious convictions. By Wghting the Catholic Lithuanian princedom during the Wfteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovite rulers viewed themselves as protectors of the Russian people from the evils of ‘Roman law’, thus combining the desire to acquire the ‘eternal’ eminence of Rome in religious history while at the same time distinguishing itself from this image. In 1510 Russian monk Filofei wrote to Moscow Duke Vasilii III, declaring the Muscovite historical mission: ‘Pious Tsar! Listen and remember that all Christian kingdoms have now merged into one, your [tsardom]. Two Romes have fallen. The third stands Wrm. And there will not be a fourth.’14 Thus, in this new religious discourse, Rome was replaced by Moscow but it is important to remember that 11 See the actual text of the document in Zenkovskii (1974). For the discussion of philosophical applications see Zen’kovskii (1991). 12 Riasanovskii (1984: 103). 13 Zenkovskii (1974: 328–9). 14 Zenkovskii (1974: 232).

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the image of Rome in Russia’s culture of this period remained strictly symbolic, deprived of any concrete visual representation. Any new meaning that the ancient city of Rome acquired in this debate, under the name of ‘the Muscovite Third Romism’,15 would later become a bone of contention for further religious and philosophical struggles over the historical mission of Russia. Slavophiles and Westernizers of the nineteenth century, as well as twentieth-century religious philosophers such as Vladimir Solov’ev and Nikolai Berdyaev, would revisit this topic many times before and after the Revolution. In the years that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this debate resurfaced again and is an acutely relevant topic for both nationalists and liberals in their attempt to formulate the new ‘Russian idea’.16 The visual aspect of the Roman legacy is connected in Russian culture with Peter the Great and his creation, the city of St Petersburg. Peter was preoccupied with rebuilding Russia as an empire and creating a new European centre for his Westernized state: an imperial capital, which meant a new beginning for Russia entering the European stage. Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev stated that ‘The Third Rome moved from Moscow to the West [i.e. St Petersburg], coming closer to the intersection of international water roads . . .’.17 Peter took personal interest in Roman antiquity, an interest that was Wrst and foremost motivated by his desire to understand the Roman notions of the construction of the state: he himself was a meticulous student of Roman history. In his private book collection of 1621 volumes, there were translations of Samuel von Pufendorf ’s historical writings on Roman law, Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars, Tacitus, and Strategemata by Frontinus, among others. St Petersburg was both his political/ideological project as well as his historical mission, since this city embodied Peter’s desire for Russia’s new beginning and its new place in world civilization.18 15 On the history and meaning of this term, see Agurskii (1988) and Zernov (1930). 16 On Vladimir Solov’ev’s views on this subject, see de Courten (2004). In his discussion of the post-revolutionary meaning of this concept, Berdyaev (1960: 34) stated: ‘Instead of the Third Rome in Russia, the Third International was achieved, and many of the features of the Third Rome pass over to the Third International.’ 17 Solov’ev (1999: 211). 18 The most comprehensive study on Peter the Great’s impact on Russia’s visual culture can be found in Cracraft (1991).

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Russia did not have its own antiquities, so Peter did not hesitate to create an artiWcial link with the common past of Western civilization by borrowing from its visual arsenal of architecture, sculpture, and de´cor. Peter’s fascination with Rome went beyond the issues of statehood and military practice: while he simultaneously constructed the new sights of his capital, he likewise made his contemporaries an active part of his visual production. With Rome as a visual reference, the tsar made use of all things Roman in creating his stage de´cor. The Marquis de Custine, author of La Russie en 1839—travel accounts that were highly popular in the West and forbidden in their time in Russia—noticed this particular feature of the new capital when he wrote: ‘I came here to see a country, but what I Wnd is a theater . . .’.19 Theatricality was the major device by which Peter inscribed Rome onto the Russian psyche: assemblies, with their obligatory European clothes, dancing, and new codes of behaviour, became the privileged gatherings of new Petrine aristocrats where knowledge of everything Roman became the litmus test for cultivated individuals. In 1722, Peter ordered from Johannes Kraus in Augsburg a collection of prints from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.20 Trying to westernize his nobility, Peter demanded from them accurate knowledge of Roman mythology, which was considered to be as obligatory in the new culture as the ability to use silverware at the dining table or a handkerchief while cleaning one’s nose. In 1718, Peter the Great initiated the Wrst purchase of Roman sculptures for his Summer Garden which were delivered to his court in St Petersburg from Livorno (see Fig. 12). Sometimes his desire to make Rome part of Russian cultural topography led to several paradoxes: among the forty sculptures was the famous Venus—a copy of the Hellenistic Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles—that Peter had to put ‘under arrest’: the tsar had to station a permanent guard near the naked female sculpture to protect it from the outraged Russian public.21 The Summer Garden was a place for oYcial festivities in the new capital during the summer time, and while entertaining Peter would often stop in front of a statue and test his guests’ knowledge of Roman gods and goddesses and their adventures.22 However, underneath these desperate and 19 De Custine (1989: 149). 21 Ovsiannikov (1997: 31).

20 Frolov (1999: 33). 22 Ovsiannikov (1997: 32).

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Fig. 12 First laid out in 1704 at the special command of Peter the Great, the Summer Gardens were decorated with seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury Italian replicas of famous Roman sculptures. The Summer Gardens were Peter’s favourite site for holding assemble´es—society parties—during which he frequently tested his guests on their knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology!

sporadic attempts to educate his subjects was a conscious desire to create his own ‘Rome-in-the-North’, with its regular and wide streets, central squares, and stone buildings. It is generally assumed that Peter, inspired by the city of Venice, wanted to use boats as transportation on his new capital’s canals and its main river, the Neva. However, this notion is highly debatable since, according to various sources, Peter’s major inspiration was Amsterdam rather than Venice.23 Perhaps most of all it was his mission as the builder of the new capital that introduced Rome rather than Venice as the inspirational model. Peter I was an assiduous student of architecture: among his private book collections there were 169 volumes on architecture, including 23 On this subject, see Hamm (1976) and Volkov (1995). On the connexion between Rome and Venice as a self-conscious inheritor of Rome’s cultural capital, see Larmour and Spencer’s introduction to this volume.

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works by authors such as Vincenzo Scanozzi and Andrea Palladio (I Quattro Libri del’Architettura). Rejecting the Muscovite architectural tradition, Peter invited architects from the West to design his new Russian capital. Among the pioneers who participated in the tsar’s imperial project was the Italian architect Domenico Trezzini who erected in the new capital the majority of civic and private buildings. Among them were: The Royal Summer Palace with its Summer Garden, completed in 1711; and The Peter and Paul Fortress with its central Petrovskii Gate that strongly resembled triumphal arches commemorating military victories in ancient Rome, 1712. Although Xat and mainly swampy territory, the city of St Petersburg acquired its own Roman topography of ‘imaginary hills’: thus, Basil Island became its Capitoline Hill (the seat of the government), Nevsky Prospect served as its Palatine Hill (the locale of the rich), while Okhta with its predominantly poor population served as the city’s Aventine Hill. Riasanovskii wrote, ‘Peter the Great had the highest regard for law, and he considered himself the Wrst servant of the state.’24 During his reign, service to the state was elevated to new heights, and, following Peter’s orders, architecture was called upon to celebrate these emerging governmental institutions: thus, they broke ground in 1722 for the Twelve Collegia (Colleges), which were the new ministries of foreign aVairs, justice, income, commerce, Wnancial inspection, and control. In 1711 the tsar created the Governing Senate as the highest state institution to supervise administrative aVairs of the state, and in 1721, after a long struggle, he Wnally established the Holy Synod as a new organization of the Church. It was not until 1830, during the reign of Nicolas I, that the Petrine idea of the interdependence of government and religious institutions was ‘ediWed in stone’, with a complex designed by Italian architect Carlo Rossi which connected both Senate and Synod by a triumph arch, thus fulWlling Peter’s dream of a strong union between Church and State. While he was Wrst proclaimed tsar of Muscovy in 1682, in 1721 Peter the Great accepted the new title of Pater Patriae and Emperor of All-Russia from the Senate.25 These Latin names and titles were 24 Riasanovsky (1984: 230). 25 On Peter the Great, his life and policies, see Hughes (1988) and Massie (1986). A great Wctional account, although with a Soviet ideological twist, is given by Tolstoi (1961).

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imposed on the Russian psyche along with new visual images— straight rows of new buildings, pilasters and colonnades, arches and decorative murals that replaced traditional wood carvings and onion domes—all of which taught their Russian viewers the new language of belonging to the great tradition of Western civilization. Petrine work was continued by Catherine II and her grandson Alexander I. Embracing the European revival of the neoclassical tradition, Catherine hastened to forget the brief period of Empress Elizabeth I’s Russian Baroque with its playful ornamentation. Catherine’s motivations were rather of a political nature: as a German princess who came into power in Russia following the assassination of her own husband (Peter III) in 1762, she was desperate to connect with the memory of Russia’s true Westernizer, Peter the Great.26 Like Peter, Catherine engaged many talented foreign architects for her imperial project: one of them, Charles Cameron, spent twenty years in Rome studying Palladian architecture. His work can best be seen in the neoclassical style of Pavlovsk, the summer residence of Paul I, Catherine’s son. Italians Antonio Rinaldi and Giacomo Quarenghi built palaces for the Russian nobility, summer residences and theatres, reintroducing what the empress called the ‘taste of simplicity and grandeur’ into the life of the ‘Westernized’ Russian capital.27 Since 1764, the Academy of Visual Arts (established in 1757) made the Roman experience mandatory for young painters: the government provided scholarships every year for the twelve best graduates to continue their education in Italy and France.28 The sites of Rome could at last be examined in person by Russian artists, who in turn perpetuated the ideal of Rome within their homeland. This new pleiad of Russian painters, sculptors, and architects that had seen the ‘eternal’ city and understood the complexity of its visual imagery thus came into being: Andrei Voronikhin, Ivan Starov, Andrei Brylov, Stephan Pimenov, and Vasily Demut-Malinovskii. Perhaps Catherine’s greatest success in her Roman ‘re-invention’, however, is the 26 Catherine the Great’s life and cultural reforms are best described in Troyat (1994). Interesting accounts can also be found in the recently translated (Cruse and Hoogenboom, 2005) Memoirs of Catherine the Great. 27 Ovsiannikov (1997: 112). 28 On this subject, see Andreeva (1984) and Kagan (1996). For a discussion of the Roman impact on literature, see Kahn (1993).

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introduction of an equestrian statue into the city’s landscape (see Fig. 13). The timing was right: the empress had just lived through the bloodiest revolt of her reign, Pugachev’s rebellion in 1773. The Bronze Horseman was not only Catherine’s direct tribute to the legacy of Peter I, but also with this monument she was Wnally able to inscribe her own name into the list of Russia’s reformers. Created in 1782 by the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, it depicts Peter without the traditional attributes of imperial power (crown, orb, and sceptre), but rather as a Roman hero with a laurel wreath on his head, and with the intensely neoclassical architectural vocabulary of St Isaac’s Cathedral as its backdrop (see Fig. 14). With his toga Xowing in the wind, Peter gallops on his horse, which is destroying the snake, a symbolic image of the emperor’s enemies. The inscription

Fig. 13 The Bronze Horseman, St Petersburg. This monument became an important cultural emblem of St Petersburg during pre- as well as postRevolutionary years. The head of the Russian ‘Emperor’ (Tsar/Caesar) is crowned with a classical laurel wreath; his posture, with outstretched hand, resembles the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The statue’s backdrop (not in this view) is St Isaac’s Cathedral.

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Fig. 14 St Isaac’s Cathedral, St Petersburg (1818–58). Built on the orders of Nicholas I, to a plan by the French architect Auguste Montferrand, this vast ediWce was the fourth in a succession of ‘St Isaac’s’ to occupy the site (the Wrst, founded by Peter the Great, was named for his patron saint). It was intended to be the main Eastern Orthodox church of St Petersburg, and while only a small number of services are now held there—in the Soviet era it became a museum—the cathedral remains one of the biggest domed buildings in the world. Its structural elements also recall St Peter’s Basilica (Rome) and Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence).

on the monument’s pedestal is in Russian on one side and in Latin on another: Petro Prima Catarina Secunda. This monument became the genius loci of the city: the legend says that as long as it is there the city is indestructible.29 Even during World War II, although covered with sand bags and put into a special protective structure, the monument 29 The history of The Bronze Horseman is described in Schenker (2003). This is how Julie Buckler describes this odd vision of Roman tradition incorporated into this sculpture: ‘Despite its ‘‘local’’ references, the Bronze Horseman monument with its outstretched hand recalls the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline in Rome and proposes a similar classical identity between the ruler as lawgiver and an empire’s golden age’ (Buckler 2005: 73). Spencer’s essay (in this volume) draws comparisons between this equestrian monument, and the signiWcance of such monuments in classical Rome.

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remained in the city during all 900 days of Leningrad’s Siege.30 While it introduced a new type of monumental sculpture into the Russian architectural vocabulary, this image taken from the topos of the Roman Empire once again provided much-needed visual support for the discourse of power in Russia. During the reign of Alexander I (1801–25), the interest in the Roman legacy was extremely broad and inclusive. It was not just visual arts and their monumental forms (architecture and sculpture) which represented this legacy, however. The most impressive impact of the Roman tradition was on Russian education at this time. As with Peter the Great, Alexander’s insistence on spreading the knowledge of antiquity became an educational project. Alexander’s major focus was on the formation of umo-zrenie, which literally means ‘the ability to think and to see’.31 After the harsh policies and limited freedoms of his father Paul I’s short reign, Alexander wanted to convert the new generation into free thinkers, and thus the 26-yearold emperor preoccupied himself with education through both the mind and the eyes. The study of classical languages became the norm for all new schools established during this time, which were referred to as gimnaziia (from Greek gymnasion and Latin gymnasium).32 Alexander was obsessed with the mental ‘construction’ of the youth: like his great grandfather Peter, he attempted to create a new generation of patriots and servants to the State. For this purpose, a new school for Russian nobility, The Lyceum, named after Plato’s ‘school’, was created in 1811, whose goal was educating future civil servants. A focus on classical education, ancient history, and ancient languages and literatures contributed to the formation of this great generation of thinkers, literati, and revolutionaries. Among the Wrst graduates were the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Pushchin, and Wilhelm Kuechelbekker, who joined the liberal circle of the Decembrists, Russia’s noble opposition to the government and

30 For a discussion of Leningrad’s Siege, see Glantz (2001). 31 On the reign of Alexander I, see Zorin (2001). On the subject of imperial culture, see Ram (2003). 32 The resources in English that provide an overview of the Russian educational system include: Bereday and Penner (1960); Gorsuch (2000); and Kirschenbaum (2001).

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the emperor.33 The study of Latin authors in the original language was required at the Lyceum: Vergil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, and Suetonius were discussed during the lectures.34 The development of the intellect was supported by the study of the visual language of architecture and the arts. The school was part of the palace and grounds of the emperor’s summer residence in Tsarskoe Selo, with its great parks full of replicas of ancient ruins, Roman statues, and marble portraits of Greek philosophers and Roman rulers. A special neoclassical building designed by Vasilii Stasov housed the school; with its simple and modest form and its yellow-and-white colour palette, the school building created a much-desired contrast to the lavish decoration of Catherine’s Palace, designed by Rastrelli. Both sight and intellect underwent simultaneous inXuence while they combined together to create a new breed of civil servants for whom the classical tradition became part of their own heritage. Although the Lyceum was a unique school, Alexander I established classical gymnasia in all major provinces of his empire, and thus Latin became the required part of the university education. As an ‘old’ language (that is, ‘classical’ language, in comparison to ‘new’ modern languages such as French and German), Latin was always given preference over Greek.35 Although he modelled life in his country after the pinnacle of the Roman Empire of the Antonines, Alexander I himself was often associated with Augustus.36 It was Alexander’s desire to recreate the famous Pax Romana, or Roman peace, which he failed to do during his reign because of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. Visually, Alexander was best memorialized by the Alexander Column, the monument that was erected in 1834 by Auguste Montferrand. This monument resembled Trajan’s Column in Rome: in much the same way that the Emperor’s statue atop the Roman monument was replaced with the image of Saint Peter, the summit of the column 33 For the Soviet text on this issue, translated into English, see Fyodorov (1988). For historical background on the uprising and fate of these early revolutionaries, see Riasanovsky (1984). 34 See Balina (2005) for more information regarding studies of classical languages in the pre-revolutionary gymnasium. 35 See Markish (2001)—a personal account of his school experiences. 36 For more information, see Zorin (2001), as well as Burbank and Ransel (1998).

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in St Petersburg displayed the Wgure of a cross-bearing angel with Alexander’s face. The raison d’eˆtre of the column is obvious: while implying the glory of the Roman emperors, the statue conversely hints at Christian humility within the complexity of the socio-political as well as religious mission of the tsar. The Great Patriotic War of 1812 inspired a new vision of the Patria: the Napoleonic invasion of Russia inspired its citizens to unite and defend their state. The glorious victory over Napoleon was celebrated ‘in stone’: the Narva Triumphal Gates by Quarenghi welcomed Russian solders upon their return from Europe; the Cathedral of Kazan Mother of God, with its Roman colonnade by Voronikhin, commemorated the military genius of Mikhail Kutizov. Carlo Rossi completed the complex of the Palace Square, with the General StaV Building and its Triumphal Arch and the Quadriga. All these massive portals and magniWcent monuments aimed toward the celebration of Imperial Grandeur, while the times witnessed the formation of a generation that, by means of a classical education, was able to read and translate these visual symbols of power, as well as accept or reject them. Teaching umo-zrenie proved to be a dangerous enterprise when Wrst Russian noblemen in 1825 and later Russian radical intellectuals of the turn of the century began to rise against the authority of the one and for the greater good of the many. Knowledge of the Roman past entered into the domain of personal ethics: many noble ‘rebels’ modelled their social behaviour on their Roman predecessors. Thus, Alexander Radishchev, the radical writer of the era of Catherine the Great, chose Cato and his suicide as a form of personal resistance to the destruction of freedom;37 Cicero and Seneca were the inspiration for many Decembrists’ non-resistance to arrest and respect for the law after the failure of the 1825 uprising.38 At this time, Russia was ready to actualize its cultural emulation of the Roman Republic. Identifying this period as ‘high classicism’, Russian art historian Igor Grabar’ stresses its Hellenic rather than Latin nature.39 Although 37 Radishchev’s life is best described in Startsev (1990). 38 Two works of historical Wction depict detailed accounts of Decembrists’ lives: Eidel’man (1978) and Okudzhava (1971). 39 For a more detailed discussion of the subject, see Grabar’ (1994).

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only partially accurate, this notion was supported with domestic archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century. Russian historians worked at numerous excavations in the Crimea after discovering the remains of ancient Greek colonies.40 However, this development inXuenced the provinces more than the metropolis and mainly aVected the architectural structure of provincial estates: Greek Doric columns were used most frequently as architectural elements in construction.41 Corinthian style and Egyptian obelisks in the middle of muddy Welds, magniWcent colonnades that led to nowhere, roofs and portals that retained snow and rain and were not appropriate for Russia’s diYcult climate—it was in the provinces that Russian fascination with antiquity was brought to the level of the absurd and grotesque. As the French traveller de Custine wrote angrily: ‘Russians try their hardest to make us believe that they are a civilized nation’.42 All of these inadequacies—such as bad roads that isolated provincial towns from each other and the rest of the world, the horrible living conditions of the peasants, and expensive and oversized triumphal arches that were erected sporadically, not to commemorate but to demonstrate a sense of belonging to history which was not even theirs—were also part and parcel of the great ‘Roman project’ that never evoked serious transformation, and remained nothing more than a fac¸ade.43 Beginning in the 1840s, the Roman legacy of the city of St Petersburg drastically inXuenced its future; due to strong nationalist sentiments that began to surface at that time, the city was regarded as ‘too Western’, and therefore monotone, nonhuman, and boring.44 As a window to both then present-day Europe and the traditions of Western civilization as seen in ancient Rome, St Petersburg was in the end rejected for the same reasons that it had formerly been celebrated. When the Bolshevik government in March of 1918 deWnitively moved the capital back to Moscow, this eVectively ended Russian visual fascination with antiquity.

40 Frolov (1999: 49). 41 Turchin (1981: 11). 42 de Custine (1989: 289). 43 Kagan (1996: 132). 44 See Volkov (1995) and Kagan (1996) for further discussion.

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Contemporary Russian literary critic Irina Arzamastseva states: ‘Like every new culture, socialist culture had to lean heavily on the shoulders of antiquity in order to justify itself in history.’45 Since the tradition of Russian antiquity was strongly connected with the imperial idea of statehood, it could not have entered into the new culture in its imperial form, as it was recognized in the pre-revolutionary past. It needed to be readjusted to the post-revolutionary rhetoric and, according to Arzamasteva, it re-entered cultural discourse in Soviet Russia in its ‘reduced and hardened form oVering its readers simpliWed Prometheuses and Herculeses’.46 However, the problem lay not in this simpliWed version of antiquity but in its absence in the new culture. Five days after Lenin’s death in 1924, imperial St Petersburg fell victim to geographical nomenclatura, as it was replaced on the Soviet map with the city of Lenin—Leningrad, with its new politically correct toponymy. Thus, the Palace Square was renamed as Uritsky Square after Moisei Uritsky, the cruel Bolshevik Commissar for Internal AVairs who was assassinated by a member of the opposition party in 1918. Nevsky Prospect, the ‘Palatine Hill’ of the city, was then renamed after the October Revolution, the Prospect of 25th of October.47 The abolition of classical education by the educational reform of 1918 also contributed to this changing relationship with antiquity. A new type of school was established with its emphases on education in the spirit of new communist ideology. Latin and Greek did not Wnd a place within the new Soviet curriculum because, according to the new authorities in education, these languages were not practical anymore.48 During Soviet times, Latin was taught only in 1950 on an experimental basis in several schools in Moscow and Leningrad, during the introduction of the post-World War II new school reform. Ironically, since the Latin textbooks formerly used for classical gymnasia were long out of circulation, the new one that was created for 45 Arzamastseva (2003: 311). 47 Ovsiannikov (1997: 275).

46 Arzamastseva (2003: 311). 48 Ewing (2002: 34).

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this experiment was dedicated to Joseph Stalin.49 Histories of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome were telescoped into a single element of a general course on European history that represented only a minor part of the curriculum taught at Soviet schools, since the major focus of the history curriculum was Russian national history.50 Soviet ideological discourse of the post-revolutionary period signiWcantly altered and reduced any reference to Rome, allowing this name to enter the political debate only as an illustration of class struggle in antiquity. To this end Giuseppe Rafaello Giovagnoli’s novel Spartacus was successfully resurrected: Wrst published in Russian in 1881 as translated by the revolutionary S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, it was republished in 1895 as a children’s story, The Uprising of Slaves by Samoilova, and later appeared as an example of revolutionary literature. The new full translation appeared in 1919 by Kolomenkina and for young readers it became their initiation into the highly polarized world of the history of the Roman Republic as it was seen through the life of an oppressed gladiator slave.51 However, even this text was not ideologically uncorrupted, since Giovagnoli made his Wctional Spartacus fall in love with a patrician woman, Valeria, and even have a child by her. A new historical novel entitled Spartacus, written in 1933 by the Soviet writer Vasily Yan (Yanchevetskii), made the main character more suitable for the class-conscious Soviet readership, by depriving him of any emotional attachment except his goal of obtaining freedom. The ‘Communist International’ lyrics written by Eugene Pottier in 1881 promised that ‘the earth shall rise on a new foundation: we have been naught, we shall be all’, although the Roman ‘foundation’ for Soviet citizens remained the same: abandoned for Moscow, Leningrad was largely ignored, and the new revolutionary architecture of socialist realism did not have any signiWcant impact on the historical sites of old St Petersburg. It was the new generation that grew up in Soviet times that was disconnected from the antiquity of their country’s past. The paradox of the Soviet time was that the visual ‘text’ was there, but it was disconnected 49 Markish (2001: 189). 50 Vipper (1923) serves as a good example of how ancient histories were blended together. 51 The emergence of this new political agenda is described in Putilova (1982).

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from any type of historical reference, since this immediate reference would typically condemn it to the unacceptable glory of the prerevolutionary history of the Russian Empire. This situation drastically changed in the 1930s when the visual representation of the new Soviet power shifted from new experimental forms represented by early Russian avant-garde artists toward the demand to create images that would support the eternal and indestructible meaning of this new social order. The slogans of the revolutionary artists of the 1920s that called for ‘burning Rafael paintings for the sake of the new bright future’ were replaced by the statements that ‘Rome with its classical architecture corresponds best to our demands’.52 Stressing ‘the open character of this architecture’, ‘its purpose—for the masses’, ‘its grandiose impact on the world’,53 the Soviet artists came to the conclusion best expressed in the statement of one of the leading architects of the time, Aleksei Shchusev, who stated in 1932: ‘Communal and utilitarian buildings of ancient Rome are unique in their dimensions and in their artistic quality for the history of the world architecture. In this area we are the only true successors of Rome [author’s italics]’.54 This reintroduction of Rome into the Soviet reality of the 1930s was exercised in two major ways: in Leningrad it was mainly conducted through the conversion of the old buildings of the city’s historical centre into new Soviet establishments. For example, Nikolaev Palace (1851, architect Andrei Shtakenshneider) was converted into the Palace of Labour—the headquarters of Soviet trade-unions as early as 1918; Anichkov Palace (1741, architect Giacomo Quarenghi), the former residence of the royal family, became in 1937 the Palace of Young Pioneers. In Moscow, the new capital of Soviet Russia, the revitalization of Roman monumentality was connected primarily with the gargantuan construction of new buildings, such as proposed designs for the Palace of the Soviets (1931) that included all formal elements of the Roman classical period. Designers of the interior de´cor of the Moscow subway stations adapted both the visual style of the late Roman Empire as well as the use of the traditional building materials such as marble and granite. Once again, Rome became 52 Kirillov (1959: 228); Tolstoi (1932: 3). 54 Papernyi (1996: 48).

53 Tolstoi (1932: 4).

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included in the political discourse of the moment acquiring new ideological meaning and now serving the purpose of supporting the new Soviet idea of statehood. The diYcult task of this period was to rescue the new generation from their ignorance and to restore to them the Roman world without any politically undesirable gloriWcation of the Russian tsars. The task of providing Soviet citizens with this new vision that would permit them collectively to see the historical sites through new ideological lenses was assigned to literature. Again, Russia relied more on verbal meaning than on visual imagery, in order to reconstruct its own broken historical cycle. In discussing the revival of Rome in this new cultural setting, one should not forget the new demographical changes in Soviet society that were taking place. Richard Stites suggests: the ‘ruralisation’ or ‘rustiWcation’ of Soviet cities in the 1930’s aVected the economy and culture of Soviet civilization . . . The general inXux of poorly educated masses led to an overall narrowing of culture, and to a spread of ‘irrational and obscurantist tendencies’ in the workplace and in all walks of life. Peasants were unable to leave their values behind in the villages.55

It was diYcult, if not impossible, to re-educate this population; the children of this new generation of city dwellers, however, became the main target of this new literary Rome that was recreated for them in new historical novels. In the Soviet Union, children’s literature occupied a privileged position because of its central roˆle in constructing Soviet identity, and thus an enormous amount of critical attention was paid to it. The position of children’s literature and children’s reading was always paradoxical in the Soviet Union. Although children’s literature was a distinct part of Soviet propaganda, it remained at the same time one of the least-regulated domains of creative literary expression.56 The Russian critic Marietta Chudakova explains this special status of children’s literature as a direct result of the limitations of the Socialist Realist method. Many writers found it easier to deal with the ideological and stylistic ‘infantilism’ of Socialist Realism when working in children’s literature than in literature for adult readers. According to 55 Stites (1990: 82).

56 Kukulin and MaioWs (2003: 214).

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Chudakova, children’s literature was able to oVer Soviet writers an alternative way of creative expression that literature for adult readers denied them. In children’s literature, writers were able to move around undesirable ideological subjects,57 as did, for example, Kornei Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak, and Konstantin Paustovsky, whose works demonstrated a constant balancing act within the boundaries of Soviet literature. This comfort zone and relative freedom for children’s literature was nevertheless often elusive, and writers had to adjust their work according to the Party’s constantly changing rules and regulations.58 As a part of the general cultural-ideological policies of the State in the late 1920s and early 1930s, children’s literature was gradually becoming a Soviet institution, and children’s writers were expected to produce books that reXected the new Soviet values. Since children’s literature naturally inclines toward didacticism, the transition of children’s writers to Socialist Realism was smoother than for those writers who had to ‘educate’ adult readers along the new party guidelines. Imagination and fantasy, naturally strong elements of children’s literature, then came to dominate the genre and oVered a greater possibility of escape from the political tendentiousness implicit in adult literature. It is therefore not surprising that during many years of the USSR’s existence, and especially during Stalin’s purges of the mid-1930s, some writers ‘escaped’ completely to the world of children’s books where, despite institutional control, the diversity of literary production remained quite remarkable. This very same reason held true for many historians who also found inspiration and refuge in writing for Soviet children: they were still able to recount history objectively, that is to say, without any classoriented bias, in the form of a story. Although the major focus of historical Wction for children of the 1930s and 1940s was Russian national history,59 the 1950s brought writers a secret hope that historical Wction could possibly rescue and thus guarantee the continuity of the tradition of antiquity in Russia from the ideological restraints of Soviet discourse.60 57 Chudakova (1990). 58 Ronen (2000: 971). 59 Cherniavskaia and Rozanov (1984: 64). 60 See Balina and Rudova (2005).

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The late 1950s and the early 1960s provide an interesting framework for the discussion of the revival of historical Wction for Russian literature in general.61 History as a social science suVered severely during the 1930s. Stalin’s infamous letter of 10 October 1931, to the editorial board of the journal Proletarian Revolution (Proletarskaia literatura) became a landmark for the process of rewriting history in Russia. Stalin’s demand to reconstruct the past based on the ‘axiom of bol’shevism’ had far-reaching goals. With it began the campaign for the new political concept of history that found its culmination in 1938 in his own version of the Bolshevik party history known to many Soviet generations as the ‘Short Course’. The dogma of class struggle was elevated to unheard of heights, as it demanded a focus on the struggle between everything ‘old and bourgeois’ and everything ‘new and socialist’. The year 1935 saw the intellectual as well as physical extinction of the country’s leading historians, with the arrest and imprisonment of many.62 Writing history for children became in many instances an act of self-preservation because, under the protective guise of education and its fundamentals of essential world history, one still could remain an historian and not an ideologue.

TO S EE CL EA RLY: S OV I ET CHILDREN ‘READING’ ROME In 1937 Milii Vikentievich Eserskii published his Wrst historical novel, Aristonik, in which he told his young audience the story of an uprising of the Roman slaves in Sicily in the second century bce. The development of the plot comes close to Giovagnoli’s: here its readers Wnd the compulsory themes of class struggle and description of the masses as the main vehicle of revolutionary development, with an historical character as the agent of the will of the collective, who suppresses his individual needs for the goal of the common happiness. However, the text of the novel provides a much broader framework for the young audience, since its narrative structures take the form of a story that is told by a teacher to a young student. With a 61 See Balina (2003).

62 See Zhuravlev (1997: 30–1).

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timeframe that is shifted closer to the present, the structure allows the storyteller to include many elements from later historical periods than that of the fall of Rome. Thus, by discussing the Roman past, as narrator Eserskii used a Wctional teacher character to introduce to his student ideas of utopian communism by Thomas More and others. Eserskii’s characters dream about ‘the State of the Sun, the State of Free Labour’—a dream that could be seen as potentially subversive in the heyday of the Stalinist repressions of 1937 and the prisoner slave labour of the Gulag. Thus the teacher explains to his student, Aristonik, how he sees the future. ‘In this new state, everybody will have equal access to what life has to oVer, just as all of us are entitled to sunshine. There will be no place for slaves, deprivation, poverty, or decadence. The earth will belong to everyone, and it will produce abundantly. We will have everything—bread, oil, and wine. Fruit will ripen on trees, and everyone will have only to reach for it’ (Eserskii 1937: 18). The text of Aristonik requires constant decoding since it is very heavily rooted in its demand for comparison between past and present, which the young audience is not capable of doing on its own. The importance of this novel stems from its metaphorical nature: as if in a crooked mirror the history of the past can reXect the present, Eserskii was able to critique Soviet reality through his critique of Roman history, whilst historical Wction dedicated to Russia’s national history was supposed to glorify Russia’s past. Eserskii’s novel was aimed mainly at the educated reader or at the least an adult with the ability to see the historical resemblances between Rome and Russia, and make their own conclusions on tyranny and bloodshed. Referring to studies in classical philology in Soviet Russia, Simon Markish came to the conclusion that Soviet scholars of classical traditions realized that ‘classical literature reached explosive proportions as it became a carrier of uncontrollable subtext’, becoming ‘an antidote to Soviet barbarism and ignorance’.63 A quite diVerent approach can be seen in the works that appeared in the much more liberal atmosphere of the 1960s. Khrushchev’s celebrated speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, in which he denounced Stalin’s crimes, was looked upon as ‘a historic turning point’.64 The period known in Soviet history as ‘The Thaw’ allowed 63 Markish (2001: 189).

64 Suny (1998: 392).

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many forgotten topics back into circulation. Frolov (1999) in his description of the state of aVairs in the Soviet study of antiquity suggested that the desire to know overruled the ideological approach to this knowledge, setting aside political correctness as an element of imposed textual focus. However, the desire to take advantage of ancient history as a reXection of the tensions of the present persisted throughout all the years of Soviet life. Thus, for example, in the ‘stagnation’ period of the Brezhnev years, the well-known Soviet historian of ancient Rome, Sergei L’vovich Utchenko, published in 1972 his study of Cicero and his times, in which Utchenko discussed the nature of the resistance of Roman intellectuals to the pressures of the tyranny of Caesar. Educated contemporary readers could readily associate this historical tyranny with the persecution of the intelligentsia during Brezhnev’s time, such as the political measures (seizure and arrest) taken toward the tamizdat and samizdat literature.65 Of utmost importance remains the question of how these changes aVected Soviet children’s literature on Rome. Russian cultural historian Iakov Gordin deWnes historical Wction in Russian during the Soviet years as ‘oppositional enlightenment’.66 He insists that by using crucial moments in world civilization as its benchmarks, popular historiography used historical narrative as its Aesopian language in creating the discourse of intellectual resistance to governmentally approved propaganda. Thus, Nathan Eidel’man, the most popular writer of historical Wction during the 1960s and 1970s, would choose as his heroes Pavel Lunin and Alexander Herzen—two of the most radical representatives of governmental opposition in nineteenth-century Russia. While such a juxtaposition of the past and present was aimed toward an adult audience, historical literature for children was aimed at education, the object of which was to Wll in the gaps left by abbreviated versions of the past familiar to Soviet children in their schoolbooks.

65 Samizdat, the ‘self-printed’ literature that circulated among close friends, usually included works that, for political reasons, were never published during Soviet times; tamizdat, meaning those works published outside of the country (‘published there’), usually referred to controversial and politically critical works smuggled from abroad. 66 Gordin (2001: 180).

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The historical novel for children Tiberius Gracchus by Alexander Iosifovich Nemerovskii appeared in 1955, and The Travel of the Boy and His Dog by Nadezhda Feliksovna Ostromenskaia and Natal’ia Nikolaevna Bromlei was published in 1962. Nemerovskii, chair of the department of ancient history and classical languages in Voronezh, was a professional historian recognized by his colleagues for his contributions to the study of Etruscan civilization in Russian territories. The author of several textbooks on ancient history, Nemerovskii was equally well known to young readers in Soviet Russia as the author of engaging historical Wction. Ostromenskaia and Bromlei were teachers with extensive and diverse backgrounds. In writing their novel, they employed professional historian and well-known specialist in ancient Roman history, Maria Efremovna Sergeenko. These books are linked not only in their status as ‘cult’ books for Soviet children on Roman history but also in their subject matter and narrative structure. All three writers present Rome to their young readers through the legitimate and politically correct lenses of their time and with characters approved by the Soviet censorship. Tiberius Gracchus was recognized in oYcial historiography as the hero of common people and an icon for the struggle for equality.67 Little boy Kleon and his dog Lev (Lion) live and travel at the time of Spartacus, and Kleon’s main goal is in fact to join the gladiator’s ranks in his Wght for freedom. Thus, both stories are written within a larger context of the oYcially approved vision of Rome as seen through the optics of class struggle. Both narratives provide enough reference to social injustice by painting vivid pictures of the lives and misfortunes of the underprivileged: Kleon’s father is taken to prison for not being able to repay his debt to one of the cruel Roman publicani; and the Wctional character Blossius, a poor farmer who becomes a soldier and who is rescued on many occasions by Tiberius, is Wnally killed together with the Tribune. Moreover, it is signiWcant that, in Ostromenskaia and Bromlei’s story, Kleon reaches the camp of Spartacus only at the very end of the book, and the entire description of his encounter with the governmentally approved ancient hero is described within ten short pages out of the book’s total of 390 pages.

67 On this subject, see Utchenko and Kallistov (1955).

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The story of Tiberius starts with the early days of his schooling, his experience in the last Punic War: the story details the education and maturation of an individual at the time of the Roman Republic, resembling more an Erziehungsroman than a story outlining the formation of a political leader of the plebes who is Wghting for the ideologically ‘right cause’. Both stories introduce many Wctional characters that represent a wide spectrum of social classes, who are commingled with historical Wgures in order to present Roman history as real and tangible to their young readers. Thus, we can see that the politically correct setting is used primarily as a camouXage, as it provides writers with the opportunity Wrst and foremost to educate their young audience and present them with a vision of Rome that is far more complicated than the binary opposition of plebeians and patricians illustrated in Soviet history books. Thus, in Tiberius Gracchus, Nemerovskii goes into great detail when describing the state of a freedman in Rome, by creating a Wctional slave character named Spendius who is instrumental in obtaining his own freedom. In his objection to the use of violence by both slaves and Patricians, Spendius proclaims that his freedom will liberate others: So, thought Spendius, now I am free. What do I need my freedom for? I want to make the slaves free and give them happiness. No one should destroy farms and livestock, or take things that don’t belong to him. But everything that we work for with our own hands belongs to us, not to the rich. My freedom will mean freedom for others.68

In fact, the notion of freedom and the necessity to acquire it at any cost becomes the focus of the narrative. Putting the discussion of freedom within the context of Soviet political reality—with the attacks on ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘bourgeois nationalism’, and the ‘doctors’ plot’ in the 1950s—one can see that, as in Eserskii’s Aristonik, Nemerovskii makes a conscious attempt to reXect on the Soviet past through Roman history. Thus, in discussing the brutalities of war, the author explicitly describes innocent victims, which eVectively uses children’s literature for its capacity to keep in mind the atrocities of World War II:

68 Nemerovskii (1955: 77).

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The Xames were destroying everything in their path. The sound of buildings being destroyed intermingled with the screams of burned victims. Among them were women and children who, if they were lucky enough to escape the Wre, fell prey to Roman Legionnaires, who Wnished them oV without mercy. This was all after Cippian promised to spare their lives.69

The personal story of Tiberius Gracchus is simultaneously developed on many diVerent levels, including personal, political, and ideological; and in this text it is precisely this story of the formation of an individual that overwrites the history of Rome. In Tiberius’ conversation with Octavius, Tiberius underscores the responsibilities of political leaders faced with diYcult decisions, as he calls for justice and compassion. ‘ ‘‘Friend, reconsider your decision. The people before you await your Wnal word. Look into the faces of those who fought together with you. Don’t you think they deserve justice?’’ ’.70 This quote, put into the context of the 1950s with the then-recent death of Stalin and the bringing to light of his crimes against his countrymen, was meant to make the children at that time aware of the responsibilities that come with political leadership. As a city, Rome comes alive in the minds of young readers through the story by Ostromenskaia and Bromlei: although Rome is set up as a stage for political struggle, the novel provides very rich and detailed information about the times of the Roman Republic. The story of the boy Kleon is composed as a travelogue. It starts with his departure from his home in Sicily, which he leaves in order to Wnd help and money to pay his father’s debt. ‘ ‘‘This is great’’, says Zerulius. ‘‘Iwill give you the litter and litterians to protect you, so that you will travel like one of those noble Romans. They constantly drag with them slaves and clients to boast about their wealth’’ ’.71 Although this text seems very politically correct within the Soviet context, its main goal is to provide knowledge of Roman realia: the printed text appears heavily footnoted, thus providing necessary historical background while keeping in tune with expectations that it deal with issues of class. Captured by pirates and sold into slavery, Kleon ends up as a kind of ‘living toy’ for a little boy of a rich patrician family: Through a small doorway, Kleon entered the atrium. The poor shepherd did not understand what was before him. A chapel? A great hall? Was he inside 69 Nemerovskii (1955: 65). 70 Nemerovskii (1955: 135). 71 Ostromenskaia and Bromlei (2002: 200).

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or outside? The mosaic Xoor was covered with strange and beautiful patterns. Heavy lilac curtains hung in place of doors. At the far end of the room was a beautifully decorated lararium.72

Once again, the reader is accurately introduced to the world of the Romans, by dint of copious footnotes detailing architecture and de´cor. Kleon Wnally escapes from the family to join Spartacus who, foreseeing his own future defeat, in turn saves the boy’s life by putting him on a ship and sending him back home to Sicily. Spartacus’ army is introduced to the young reader in a somewhat controversial way: the authors attempt to describe the slaves’ diverse reasons for following Spartacus, thus creating a very diVerent picture from the wellknown version in Giovagnoli’s book. Not everyone was happy with the stern discipline enforced by Spartacus. Some slaves joined his army to enjoy revenge. Some just wanted to line their pockets and disappear. These people killed their masters and brought great horses as a bribe to Spartacus, and they could not understand why he did not celebrate their actions. Unhappy with not being recognized, they went on their own and started to rob not only the estates of the wealthy but also peasant farms.73

The journey is complete when Kleon returns home as a real hero of a novel of education. Kleon becomes wise and knowledgeable about the world, as do the book’s young readers because, together with the main character, they travel through the slave markets of Rome, live in a patrician uilla urbana, and work at a latifundia in the countryside. Kleon and his huge dog Lev survive their separation and Wnd each other again despite all the obstacles in their lives. They walk together through the streets of Rome and pass the Circus Maximus where they witness chariot racing, the Forum Romanum, and the Roman Colosseum; they eat and drink typical food of the time, and they learn the names for Roman monetary units. As they learn together with Kleon about the daily routines of the Roman household, young Soviet readers recognize the meaning of words such as atrium, lararium, toga, and bulla. Ostromeskaia and Bromlei violated textual boundaries of the narrative by constructing another layer within the text in their extensive footnoting and explanatory references to the actual text. 72 Ostromenskaia and Bromlei (2002: 249). 73 Ostromenskaia and Bromlei (2002: 387).

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This paratext of references (in the sense used by Genette 1997) creates an alternative and unexpected vision of the city that should have been depicted as the place of social conXict between the oppressors and the oppressed. While the constraints of the framework of the novel (with its outer focus on the slave revolt of Spartacus) should have narrowed the representation of Rome to the compulsory discourse of class struggle, the footnotes open up the text to the broader and complex visualization of ancient cultural history. The readers see Rome simultaneously through historical and ideological optics. It is important to note that the entire book, although written for children, is completely deprived of illustrations. One reason for this omission is perhaps the authors’ desire to appeal to their readers’ creative imaginations: they want to take their young audience away from the standard pictures of Soviet history textbooks on a journey to a diVerent world described in great detail. These details, especially architectural details—descriptions of colonnades, triumphal arches, altars, quadrigae, and so on—bring the surprised readers to the realization that they have already seen those details in real life, during obligatory family vacations to Leningrad and in many photo albums of the city with its suburban parks and museums, as well as in old buildings of their own cities. Words such as senate, pantheon, and assembly are no longer merely foreign words; they acquire clear and speciWc meanings. The connection to history (neither revolutionary history nor imperial history, but simply history) is reinscribed through the story of the boy and his dog who together bravely open the door to this world of the past that was carefully suppressed and closely controlled by ideology. It is diYcult to assign the function of resisting the oYcial ideology to the historical Wction written for children in Soviet Russia. The same children who were reading Tiberius Gracchus or the story of Kleon were simultaneously exposed to literature that unambiguously promoted socialist ideals. Books by Eserskii, Nemerovskii, and Ostromenskaia and Bromlei were in fact not required, but rather recommended as optional to schoolchildren. However, these texts oVered an alternative and multifaceted vision of the past, while allowing the possibility not only to resurrect Rome in all its complexity and glory but also to reconnect the new Soviet generations to the glorious past of their own history, by Wnding the proper place for Russia’s own antiquity within its post-Revolutionary cultural discourse.

10 The sites and sights of Rome in Fellini’s Wlms: ‘not a human habitation but a psychical entity’* Elena Theodorakopoulos

The site of Fellini’s Rome is, mostly, studio 5 at Cinecitta`—just as its sight is, mostly, Fellini’s. Even the Colosseum and the jammed autostrada which surrounds it in Roma (1972) are sets created for Fellini—so are the Baths of Caracalla, the Via Veneto, and, even, the dome of St Peter’s in La Dolce Vita (1960). In Fellini Satyricon (1969), classical Rome is mostly absent, or else unrecognizable. In this sense, Fellini’s Rome is artiWcial and constructed—it is also spectacular, and dream-like. It is Xooded with memories, both personal and collective. It is diYcult to Wnd cohesive routes and vistas through it—and it is diYcult to distinguish past, present, and future—let alone fact and Wction. Ruin and decay permeate it as much as energy and vitality. It is impossible to categorize generically: the Satyricon is history and science Wction, Roma is documentary and Wction, La Dolce Vita is narrative and non-narrative. Rome is both home and exile (in Satyricon), maternal and sexual (in Roma), welcoming and alienating (in La Dolce Vita). Like many of the sites and sights discussed in this volume, Fellini’s cinematic Rome is a city of the imagination, in which past and * I owe thanks to Diana Spencer and David Larmour, and to OUP’s reader, for their generous and insightful comments on the Wrst draft of this piece, and to Susanna Binelli for helping me with translating Italian.

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present coexist and merge, as they do in our dreams (or, more famously, in Freud’s dreams). Fellini’s Wlms may be said to visualize Freud’s much-quoted idea 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.1

There are interesting parallels between this and Fellini’s own reXections on 81⁄2 (1963), the Wlm that really lays the foundations for all of Fellini’s subsequent work:2 A portrait [of a man] in which all the possibilities of his being happened— their levels, story after story, like in a building whose fac¸ade is crumbling . . . ... A life made up of tortuous, changing, Xuid labyrinths of memory, of dreams, of feelings, of the everyday . . . a mingling of nostalgia and presentiment in a mixed up time, where our character doesn’t know who he is any more or where his life is going.3

That life is also, I think, the life of the city of Rome, and its crumbling fac¸ades, as Fellini treats it Wrst in the little known A Director’s Notebook (1968), and then in Satyricon and Roma. And for Fellini, there is an added aspect to Rome’s life: the history of the spectacle of cinema, and of Fellini’s own experiences as a spectator. Fellini’s imaginary Rome has more to do, in fact, with his memories of old Italian Wlms than with the monuments of the classical city. In A Director’s Notebook, made for NBC television, which documents (in a broad sense) the preparation for Satyricon, and anticipates the style and preoccupations of Roma, Fellini says: ‘Tramping around from ruin to ruin doesn’t mean anything to me. My Rome is from the movies of my childhood.’ In a similar vein he writes to the producer of Director’s Notebook, Peter Goldfarb, of his ideas for the Wlm: 1 From Civilisation and its Discontents I (1930): see Freud (1991). 2 The Wlm 81⁄2 is Fellini’s Wrst full-length feature after the phenomenal success of La Dolce Vita. It marks a change in direction, not least because it introduces the selfreferential concerns (the protagonist is a Wlm-maker, the Wlm is about Wlm-making) which recur in a number of later Wlms, including of course A Director’s Notebook, Roma, The Clowns (1970), and, later, Ginger and Fred (1985) and Intervista (1987). 3 Fellini (1988: 158–9).

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Satyricon, which is set in the Rome of decadence, brings back memories of the very origins of the cinema: that world of rags and splendour, made of dusty battles, second-rate actors and extras with a toga or a sheet on them, with a cigarette in their mouth and their wrist-watch quite visible; that gives us back our Wrst magical and fabulous encounters with the cinema. And this is the Wrst time that I can recreate, in my own way, with a lucid amusement, my Wrst feelings as a spectator.4

Fellini’s Rome is the site of all this then: the city’s own fabric and history, Fellini’s dreams and experiences of it, and its cinematic and spectacular past. In what follows I look in some more detail at the ways in which Fellini’s three main Roman projects illuminate this range of sites, and sights, of Rome.

DREAMING RO ME: FELLINI’S SPECTACLES In his seminal (though fairly impenetrable, at least to this author) work Cinema 2, the theorist Gilles Deleuze asserts that in Fellini’s Roma: ‘The only unity of Rome is that of the spectacle which connects all its entrances. The spectacle becomes universal, and keeps on growing . . .’5 It is clear, even to the casual observer, that Fellini’s love of spectacle is what unites his entire oeuvre—and is also what distinguishes him, from the start of his career, from the Italian neorealists. And it is important, I think, to realize that for Fellini spectacle is most true to itself when it is divorced from Wction or narrative. So, it makes sense that the circus (and the variety show) is such a dominant image in many of his Wlms. Fellini would have liked, in another time, to have been a circus director—precisely because the circus is a spectacle without Wction—the opposite of the theatre.6 4 From Fellini’s letter introducing the project of A Director’s Notebook to Peter Goldfarb, published (translated into French) in Positif, 413–14 (July–August 1995). My translation. 5 And, in a similar vein, Deleuze (1989: 89): ‘spectacle in Fellini, with no distinction between watching and watched, without spectators, without exit, without wings or stage: less a theatre than a kind of giant Luna Park, where movement, which has become movement of world, makes us pass from one shop-window to another, from one entrance to another through all the cubicles’. 6 Quoted in Amengual (2003: 87).

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I try, in the section following this, to give a more politicized reading of Fellini’s Wlm than is usual, and to show him as engaging seriously with Rosselini amongst others. But it is important to realize, too, that much of the alienation and anarchy of Fellini’s routes through Rome, both in Roma and in Satyricon (and in Director’s Notebook which lays the foundations for both) has far more to do with spectacle—and with his obsession with the dream—than it does with a neorealist project of reappropriation of Rome for its ordinary inhabitants. If Fellini can be seen to reappropriate the city at all, it is mainly for the grotesque brothels and variety shows, and for the dream-like spectacles he places here. Rome, for Fellini, is a site of dreams and spectacles. It is a site, too, in which—as in the dream—time is immaterial, and in which space can in fact be traversed willy-nilly, and characters appear and disappear without any regard for narrative continuity. As in the Satyricon, and to a large extent in Dolce Vita, too, Fellini’s Roma dispenses with the need for narrative altogether. For Rome this means, as we see below, also the complete absence of any linear or cohesive routes through the city. It also means that chronology is not an issue—and neither is history. History—or indeed any plot or narrative—is replaced in Fellini’s Roman Wlms with spectacle. All three Roman Wlms contain a performance in their Wrst scenes. The action of La Dolce Vita begins, after the famous introductory sequence of the statue of Christ carried by helicopter over the postwar suburbs of Rome to St Peter’s square, with an abrupt cut to an ‘exotic’ dance show in a glamorous restaurant on Via Veneto. The three dancers are dressed in costumes alluding to Javanese dance (and probably to nineteenth-century interest in orientalizing spectacles, and in Javanese dance in particular).7 Surrounded by wealthy diners and spectators—who themselves provide a spectacle for the journalists—these dancers can surely be seen as versions of the exotic entertainments we associate with imperial Rome and its lavish

7 See for instance the popularity of the Javanese dancers during and after the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. Alternatively, the ritualistic, ‘primitive’ looking dance might be read as a critique of Bourgeois performances (along the lines of Antonin Artaud’s admiration for the Balinese theatre). In that case, Fellini is more explicitly denouncing the complacency of the spectators in the club.

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banquets—not least because they are a cinematic convention.8 In this way, the Roman e´lite gathered in the fashionable restaurant are the direct equivalent of their cinematic cousins, the feasting, decadent Romans of historical Wlm. And the journalists’ interest in what they are eating and drinking links directly with Roman—and cinematic— traditions of ostentatious consumption.9 Satyricon opens with the protagonist’s monologue, directed at the camera, in front of a bare wall covered in graYti—in other words, much like a modern play at the theatre. After Encolpio’s monologue, Ascylto addresses the camera with his side of the story—only then do the two meet in what turns out to be a cavernous public bathhouse. Ascylto confesses that he has sold Encolpio’s boyfriend/slave Gitone to the actor Vernacchio. What follows is a grotesque and violent, mainly inarticulate spectacle—perhaps what one imagines a Roman mime might have looked like—with an element of the sadistic spectacles of punishment described by Tertullian.10 This spectacle, which culminates in the amputation of a man’s hand on the stage, is observed by a dissolute and rather decrepit group of spectators—mostly only half-involved in the action, and in various stages of sexual arousal. In many ways, this is the exact antithesis to the opening spectacle of La Dolce Vita with its formal, if also only half-interested, audience and its polished and glamorous performance. The Satyricon spectacle is not in the least pleasurable with its decrepit performers and unmitigated violence—so unlike the glossy orientalism of the dancers in the Via Veneto. In making antiquity look so peculiar, so gross, Fellini emphasizes its strange otherworldliness. He also draws attention to the crucial role played by sadistic and eroticized spectacles in conventional cinematic Rome, and creates here a far more

8 One thinks for instance of the appearance, only a couple of years earlier, of the Ballet Africain at Arrius’ banquet in Ben Hur (1959)—with its interesting political ramiWcations (a troupe formed with an expressly pan-African and emancipatory agenda to coincide with and celebrate the independence of Guinea from French colonial powers collude with a fairly exploitative use of their music and dance in the ‘Bacchanals’ scene at Arrius’ house). 9 Much later, in Intervista (1987) Fellini comments on the links between Fascist colonialism and cinematic representation (e.g. equating Cinecitta`’s representation of Abyssinia with Mussolini’s colonial activities in Ethiopia). See Burke (1996: 277–9). 10 On this see, with bibliography, Coleman (1990).

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aware and problematized treatment of Roman spectacle than La Dolce Vita’s equivalent. In Satyricon, there is no proper seating arrangement for the spectators, and the performers are themselves very clearly amateurish, and disinterested. The disembodied bene actum (‘well done’) pronounced after the amputation is clearly an ironic and detached comment on the degeneracy of the whole scene. When the performance is disrupted by Encolpio’s demand to have Gitone returned to him, it quickly turns into an auction, with the spectators making their own bids for the boy. The absence of any amphitheatrical seating arrangements, or indeed of the celebratory, ludic, atmosphere one would expect as the backdrop for this spectacle, helps to erode the boundaries between performers and spectators. The audience at Vernacchio’s is a long way from both the suave Italian aristocrats in La Dolce Vita, and the gold-lame´ed Romans of historical Wlm. In all, this scene (and many others in Satyricon) amount to a critique of the conventional spectacles of reclining, grape-eating Romans, and the exotic, erotic objects of their (and our) gaze. Roma opens with a whole series of spectacles after a brief introductory approach to Rome (a group of travellers passing a milestone showing the 340 km between Fellini’s hometown of Rimini and Rome, then the schoolboys’ crossing of the Rubicon, followed by an old man chanting anti-Mussolini rhymes at the statue of Julius Caesar).11 After this, there is an abrupt cut to a bombastic theatrical scene of the assassination of Julius Caesar, all columns and white togas. A heavy red velvet curtain falls after ‘et tu Brute’—and we encounter the principal actor enjoying a drink at the bar a little later. Next comes the celebrated slide-show of ancient Roman monuments shown to a group of schoolboys—which ends in chaos when an erotic photograph Wnds its way into the show. This show is followed by the scene at the cinema where the audience feast on a historical epic, complete with bathing empress, gladiators, and Christian martyr saved by Roman soldier. The newsreel footage of the celebrations of 28 October (the date of the ‘march on Rome’ in 1922) completes the sequence of performances which introduces Roma.12 So far, 11 See Wyke (1997: 2–3) on this opening. See Laurence (1999b : 190–1) on the statue of Caesar. 12 This gives rise to the brief but evocative sequence in which one of the female spectators turns into a sexually voracious, excited Roman aristocrat.

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just Wfteen or so minutes into the Wlm, Rome is associated with ancient history, with fascism, above all with dramatic and cinematic spectacle—and a smattering of erotic fantasy. The idea of Rome as intimately linked with spectacle, with the gaze in every sense, is thus fundamental to all three Wlms; and it is carried to its extremes in Satyricon and Roma, although Fellini’s obsession with both the dream and spectacle Wrst germinates in La Dolce Vita. It is generally accepted I think that Dolce Vita marks a signiWcant shift in Fellini’s persuasion, and is in many ways the beginning of a lifelong commitment to artiWce, dream, and personal memory.13 That this trajectory in the Wlm-maker’s life should so clearly be identiWable with his three separate approaches to Rome must surely have something to do with the hallucinatory, phantasmagorical power that many ancient and modern authors recognize as belonging to the city.14 But the circus is only one part of the phantasmagorical in Fellini. The other, less political, more personal aspect of Fellini’s imagined Romes is to do with the dream, and with memory—once more ideas which are central to a great many approaches to Rome, ancient and modern. Our editors point to the way in which the multiplicity of stories which populate the site of Rome, with their simultaneous forward and backward looking, lend a dream-like quality to the very act of wandering its streets. As they put it, a walk through Rome becomes ‘a perambulation through individual and collective consciousnesses’. As Fellini’s dream, the city is populated by memories and Xeeting individual moments, but also by excessive, loud, shocking spectacles which fascinate and repel at the same time. Much is made of the ecclesiastical fashion parade in Roma on this count—and it is a tour de force, combining Fellini’s love of the parade with his talents as a designer of sumptuous, and grotesque, spectacle, and of hilarious comedy. But to me, it is the two parades of the prostitutes which are perhaps the most Roman of spectacles. The brothels simply appear in the Wlm—there is no narrative justiWcation beyond the narrator’s question ‘do you remember the brothels?’. As in a dream, we Wnd ourselves in these very peculiar worlds. What is striking about the two scenes is the challenging and aggressive tone of the women: you 13 Bondanella (1992: 148–9).

14 See Larmour and Spencer in this volume.

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would expect them, as prostitutes, to oVer themselves up to the male gaze, passive and ready to be consumed in a sense. Instead, they shout at the men, challenging their virility in an incessant stream of obscenity. To a degree, they advertise themselves; but mainly the point of this parade is that the customers are challenged, and put in a position where they need to prove themselves. As spectacle, this is further complicated by the somewhat freakish appearance of most of the prostitutes—in both brothels, not just in the ‘cheap’ one. It would be possible to analyse this scene, in Laura Mulvey’s terms, as undermining the scopophilic pleasure of the gaze, and the position of ‘woman’ as object of that gaze.15 I am not certain that this would be a particularly fruitful way to regard what is going on here, however. I think that it is clear that Fellini (like others) sees Rome as possessing certain feminine, sexual, and maternal qualities—one need only remember what he says to Anna Magnani about her symbolic qualities (discussed below).16 He sees the prostitutes, in a sense, as embodying Rome—its femininity and sexuality, but also its variety, and its particular form of spectacularity. Like the prostitutes, Rome is not merely a spectacle for consumption—it challenges the viewer to ‘be man enough’ to take it on, it asks for active participation, rather than the touristic gaze of the consumer. There is a rather curious and chilling scene which I think says a lot about consumption and the gaze: when a tourist coach Wlled with middle-aged American women drives into the Borghese Gardens and the women descend, overexcitedly, to take photographs of the view over the city some of the fragments of their conversation are clearly to do with picking up Italian gigolos. There follows a brief scene in which one such character approaches the women and is visibly appraised by a particularly grotesque American. In response to her gaze at him, he oVers to take her picture—turning her, in all her awkward ugliness, into the object of his gaze. In this way the American tourist does not obtain her shot of the view, but instead becomes the view.

15 Mulvey (1975). 16 In quite a diVerent context, see also Crassus’ well-known speech in Kubrick’s Spartacus, immediately after the oysters and snails scene—here Rome, viewed from the luxury of the villa, is seen as both mother and lusty dominatrix, demanding complete subjugation.

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The oscillation between spectacle and engagement which characterizes the brothel parades is continued and brought to a point in the variety show that follows on the scenes at the Borghese Gardens. Here, the performers are constantly heckled and abused by the audience, who perform a kind of show of their own. The camera moves constantly between stage and auditorium, and there are constant exchanges between the two groups. The boundaries between performers and spectators are simply non-existent here, in another self-conscious and complex approach to the idea of spectacle.17 For the spectator in the cinema, the whole thing is a compelling spectacle of course—but it challenges us too, in its manic, hectic, noisy atmosphere, in its disconcerting changes of perspective—and of course simply by appearing out of nowhere, another layer of history laid bare. The interaction between performers and spectators is in fact central to a lot of what Fellini does—this can be seen especially clearly in the long closing sequence of A Director’s Notebook. The Wlm concludes with Fellini auditioning extras for Satyricon—a parade, a crowd, of people keen to attract his attention. It is clear that these people are not merely ‘objects of the gaze’—they want his engagement, ask him questions, show him photographs. Like the whores in Roma, they are a challenge—to Fellini, and to us, too.18

RO ME—AN OPEN CITY? Walking around Rome, in Fellini’s Roman Wlms, is a disconcerting and fragmented experience. In rejecting conventional narrative structure Fellini also rejects conventional ‘routes’. We never get a full grasp on the city as he represents it. Rather, it is a collection of fragments, or moments, in which, as in a dream, the protagonists move about freely. (In fact, one might argue that there barely are protagonists— certainly in Roma, there are not, and the ones in Satyricon are so 17 Compare Horace, Ep. 2.1.194–209 on audiences as spectacle—and on noisy audiences not unlike Fellini’s. It is interesting to see what Fellini himself has to say on the spectator as consumer in an essay on his television work, translated by Bondanella (Fellini 1978a: 11–12). 18 See Rosenthal (1978: 289–90).

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strangely fragmented, not least by the deliberately oV-beat dubbing, that they are only marginally recognizable as individuals.)19 Added to this is the fact that, mostly, Fellini’s actors do not do anything: they observe action, sometimes comment on it—but they hardly ever eVect it. In this way, too, Fellini subverts the conventions of narrative cinema, in which the landscape is a backdrop to action, and in which the actor moves through the landscape with a goal, which he (usually) obtains through action. Time, in narrative cinema is linear, of course.20 In Fellini’s Wlms, the landscape or cityscape frequently is the protagonist; the protagonist does not move through the landscape in any chronologically systematic or linear way; and the protagonist mainly observes rather than acts. What does this mean for our understanding of Fellini’s reception of Rome? For a start, Fellini’s Rome in Roma and Satyricon is not the setting for signiWcant historical events—it is emphatically not the imperial Rome of Hollywood and of early Italian cinema, with its Christian martyrs, and decadent Roman empresses. It is also not the Rome of the Fascists, with its monuments and its reconstructed classicism, and with its processions and public spectacles.21 And it is not the Rome of the tourists with its coherent routes and wonderful vistas, and its chronologies.22 In this way Fellini’s obsession with the dream and with autobiography can be seen to be rather more than sheer self-indulgence: his approach to the landscape of Rome, and his approach to the experience of traversing that landscape add up to a

19 See Burke (1996: 155–222), on protagonists, individuation, and fragmentation from 81⁄2 onwards. 20 In this there is a fair amount of common ground between Fellini and the neorealists. See p. 366, below. 21 For instance, the two big fascist exhibitions opened in 1937 to celebrate the bimillennium of the birth of Augustus, Mostra augustea della romanita` and Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. See Stone (1999: 215–19). 22 On the links between fascist organizations of space and the presentation of such spaces to the tourist gaze in Rimini, see Lawrence (1999b). Of course, this view of tourism is—today—replaced by a multiplicity of forms of engagement with touristic sites and their consumption. For Fellini, this is not so. Tourism for him is a form of consuming ‘tradition’ which has a lot in common with the fascist project of recreating the present in the image of the past. The most important discussions in this Weld are Lowenthal (1985) and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).

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fairly radical questioning of our idea of Rome as part of a great European history and tradition. A part of this questioning also addresses Mussolini’s myths of continuity between classical and fascistic Rome, not least by avoiding the monuments and symbols which underpinned such myths. In de-historicizing Rome, as he does in Roma (but also in Satyricon, which succeeds in removing history from a historical Wlm), Fellini takes away our point of view. As a recent scholar puts it, the fascists’ use of historic Rome as a stage for the enactment of romanita` in eVect ‘turned the city and its Roman monuments into a spectacle’.23 The anarchic spectacles of Fellini’s Wlms antagonize and deny the fascist spectacle with its forced perspectives and coercive rhetorical spaces. And Fellini draws a very deliberate contrast between the fascist experiences of space and spectacle forced on the children in Rimini at the start of Roma and the exuberance and lack of structure which characterizes the ‘real’ Rome of his Wlm (see, for example, Fig. 15). Fellini’s anarchic Rome bombards us with fragments and moments, allowing us no sense of linearity as we move through time and space. We have, as spectators in these Wlms, absolutely no control over the city. It is interesting for example that the only great view of Rome we get in Roma is a brief glimpse, shot from the Borghese Gardens—a favourite location of course for tourists’ pictures of the view of Rome. This shot follows immediately on the inferno-like entry into Rome on the (studio-built) autostrada, which in fact serves as a parade of a range of ‘Felliniesque’ creatures: prostitutes (inevitably), a white horse, some odd vehicles and carts, political protesters, hippy hitch hikers. But there are also, all along the way to the Colosseum, in the torrential downpour and subsequent thunderstorm, a series of burning vehicles and buildings—and in the Wnal stages of the journey a number of dead cows, looking suspiciously like sacriWcial animals, litter the road. It is hard, given all this, not to

23 Stone (1999: 218). See Wyke (1999: 168–9) on how ‘fascist political culture became a form of public spectacle or theatre’. One aspect of the fascist tendency to spectacularize can be seen in the repeated references to the ‘framing’, or isolating, of monuments or views in the Piano Regolatore (the 1931 Master Plan for the re-planning of the city). See Baxa (2004: 10–16).

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

see the passengers in the cars, often shot at close range, and— inevitably—looking rather melancholy, as the souls of the damned travelling through the inferno that is Rome’s traYc system. Throughout the scene, the camera crew, and Fellini himself, travelling in another car, are in evidence—posing really in their roˆles as Wlmers of documentary—and observing the chaos and despair around them. The scene ends at the Colosseum, lit up for the night, with one of the few views of classical Roman landmarks (although this one is built for the purpose, along with the stretch of autostrada) on which the camera rests for a moment. The very next shot is the view from the Borghese Gardens, oVered for the briefest possible time. It is clear that there is a contrast intended between this view from above—controlling to an extent, in that it gives the observer a sense of how everything Wts together— and the view from below, the infernal view that has characterized the

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autostrada scene. But, tantalizing though it is, Fellini does not let us enjoy the heavenly, powerful position of the view from above for long. What follows is the tour-bus Wlled with grotesque American ladies I mention above. They, it seems, are the antidote to the pretty aerial view from the Borghese Gardens—which we never return to. With their cameras, and their pointless strutting around the Piazza di Siena in the gardens, they remind us of the control such aerial views can achieve, and they remind us of some of the ways in which touristic and fascistic views of Rome converge in their desire for the vista, but also for control—essentially for a good map and/or a good guide. In this way Fellini responds, after almost thirty years, to Rosselini’s treatment of the city in Roma Citta` Aperta (1945). Rosselini’s Wlm can I think be said to revolutionize the cinematic image of Rome, reclaiming it from both the bombast and rhetoric of the imperial Rome which had been the city of both fascist and historical spectacle (and of the way the two had merged). Shot outside Cinecitta` entirely,24 Rosselini’s Wlm avoids classical and fascistic Rome alike: there is no Colosseum, no Arch of Constantine—not one classical monument in this Wlm. Equally, the gathering places and boulevards of fascist Rome (e.g. the Piazza Venezia or the Via dell’ Impero) are absent. In eVect, this means that cinematic Rome is reappropriated as a place of dwellings, of ordinary people, untouched by the touristic or the fascistic gaze (both look to history to construct their Romes). Only at the very end of the Wlm do we get a panoramic view of Rome—as the little boys, after witnessing the execution of Don Pietro, walk down the Via Trionfale (Fig. 16). The close-up, domestic, and peripheral Rome which occupies the rest of the Wlm can be disconcerting to the viewer—it is diYcult to form a mental map of the unfamiliar locations, interspersed with many interior, domestic scenes. Deleuze says of this, and of the subsequent Paisa (Fellini was involved in both projects) that Rosselini has ‘discovered a dispersive and lacunary reality . . . a series of fragmentary, chopped up encounters’.25 A couple of years later, a similarly disconcerting representation 24 The studios had been requisitioned by the Nazis, and were not yet back in operation in 1945. 25 Deleuze (1986: 212).

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

of Rome characterizes De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948). Once more there is no trace of classical Rome as the protagonist moves, ineVectually perhaps, largely encountering or observing rather than acting, through the urban environment. De Sica’s Rome, like Rosselini’s, is fragmentary and decentred, and void of familiar landmarks—impossible to imagine as a coherent landscape—and impossible to control.26 The tradition of an essentially domestic, ‘hidden’, Rome continues—so that for instance Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) has a similar focus on the residential margins of Rome, and eschews classical and fascist monumentality.27 (And Pasolini has Anna 26 See Marcus (1986: 73): ‘De Sica’s Rome . . . is a fragmented, decentred space with few familiar landmarks and no sense of cohesion . . . Rome is presented as a maze . . . and Antonio’s movements are as aimless and random as the streets themselves.’ 27 Mamma Roma contains one panoramic view of Rome, which is juxtaposed with the isolation cell of the prison.

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Magnani’s deWning role as Pina in Roma Citta` Aperta in mind, of course, in casting her as the symbol of his Rome.) The need for the view from above—the aerial photograph, the map, is attributed solely to the Nazi occupiers by Rosselini—it is they, not unlike tourists which in a sense they also are, who strive for control, for overview. So, a few minutes into the Wlm, we are shown a map of the city divided into sectors, which, as the German Gestapo chief Bergman explains, allows the ‘scientiWc round-up of large masses of men with the deployment of minimal forces’. Bergman is presented as considering himself—through his maps and photographs, in total control of the ‘open’28 city: ‘Every evening I take a long walk around the streets of Rome without leaving my oYce.’ However, the view from above is not the only one—and it is clearly not as comprehensive as the occupiers like to think. There are hidden routes all over the city, a network of communications used by the resistance activists, and for the ordinary inhabitants of Rome. These routes and locations are not merely hidden from the view from above—they are in fact a parallel city, away from the centralized, cohesive spaces envisaged by the Nazi maps.29 In a sense, it is this ‘hidden’ Rome, of Rosselini (and De Sica, and Pasolini) that is also the protagonist of Fellini’s Roma. Here, too, as we have noted already, there are few monuments until the Wnal sequence. There is also the juxtaposition of interiors (especially the boarding house the young Fellini arrives at upon entering Rome, but also the brothels, and the palazzo which forms the location of the ecclesiastical fashion show) with exterior scenes. And the emphasis on the life of the small piazza, and the narrow streets of Trastevere at the Fiesta de Noantri at the end of the Wlm all contribute to a sense of a Rome that is encountered as decentred and fragmentary, in the neorealist tradition. It is worth noting that this eVect is clearly striven for in Satyricon, too—one need only look at the opening scenes, with their narrow chaotic sidestreets, leading up to the 28 The term ‘open city’ had a speciWc meaning during the war when it designated a city that was not to be used for military operations of any kind (it applied to Athens and Cairo, too). Rosselini’s title uses it ironically—since the Germans Xouted the agreement almost immediately. 29 All this is well discussed in more detail in Forgacs (2000: 37–45). And see Losemann (1999) on Nazi ideas about Rome.

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dilapidated tenement block. Of course, Satyricon eschews anything resembling a panorama of ancient Rome, and indeed anything resembling a recognizable Roman monument. Roma is not so absolute, however, in its rejection of conventional views of Rome. As we have seen, Fellini likes to tempt us with such views—the Colosseum by night, the view from the Borghese Gardens, several views of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Spanish Steps. All these feature in the Wlm— but are subjected to Fellini’s personal vision, and to the constant merging of past and present views, of dream and documentary, fact and Wction. So, in Roma, we have a city which is recognizable, and potentially coherent—but a director who frustrates our attempts at making sense of it. In this way, Fellini can very obviously not pay homage to Rosselini’s Rome—while acknowledging its existence, and to a degree its importance. The view from above also has consequences for the manner of transportation around Rome. The small streets, and hidden routes over rooftops and through basements and back alleys used by the resistance activists in Citta` Aperta, are directly opposed to the big boulevards and piazzas which serve as the city’s arteries for the marching Nazi troops with their tanks. In Roma, there are no Nazis—but there is the tourists’ tour bus, there is the traYc jam on the autostrada, and underground there are the various mechanized forms of transport used by the archaeologists and by the subway engineers. All these, however, are in various ways immobilized or have diYculties in moving through the city. Thus Rosselini’s opposition between the Nazi occupiers’ motorized possession of the city and the Italian resistance’s subversion of this possession is destabilized in Fellini’s Rome. The motorcyclists who roar through the city at the Wlm’s close may be seen to revert to the fascists’ obsession with speed and ease of movement through the inner city. They do appear to make use of the routes opened by the 1931 Master Plan (Piano Regolatore)—most instantly recognizably the Via dell’ Impero.30 But there is more to this apparent ‘barbarian invasion’ than meets the eye.31 The bikers appear to move, swift and unimpeded, in full possession of the space, which is now completely empty of any 30 I thank the anonymous reader for OUP for pointing this out to me. 31 See Bondanella (1987: 247).

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competitors. In this, it is true, they resemble Rosselini’s (and indeed the historical) Nazis, who had pretty much exclusive control over motorized transport—and so always had the advantage of speed and surprise over the resistance.32 But if we look a little more closely at the motorcyclists’ itinerary it becomes clear that this, too, is part of the Wlm’s decentring, disorienting strategies.

CLOSING DOWN ROME My engagement with Fellini’s Romes initiated with the stunning and imaginative close of Roma—and the brief scenes which lead up to it. It is here that Fellini in my view most deWnitively eschews both sentimentality and ideology—as he does not manage to do so successfully in La Dolce Vita and Fellini Satyricon. Both Wlms share in the rejection of narrative structure, and embrace a fragmented or episodic perspective instead. In this they anticipate Roma’s idiosyncratic manner of representing Rome. But both earlier Wlms return at their ends to an idea of salvation, which is vaguely Catholic, and is projected onto images of youth and beauty. It is worth looking at them in detail here. La Dolce Vita ends after a kind of ‘orgy’, a spectacle which can be seen to anticipate some of the aesthetic and mood of Satyricon. For instance, the two young cross-dressing boys are reminiscent of the boys in Satyricon, and the multi-lingualism at the party anticipates perhaps the Babel-like feel of the opening scenes of Satyricon. The villa itself, in its secluded setting, and invaded by the revellers, is revisited in Satyricon’s villa of the suicides. And the night’s activities are watched over by an ancient or oriental-looking bust—a reminder of the way in which antiquity overshadows modern life throughout the Wlm.33 When the night’s amusements are over, the party walk 32 Forgacs (2000: 40). Also, see Baxa (2004: 14) on how the views and ‘frames’ created by the new plans, and by the demolition of much of the old medieval city are created speciWcally with the Xow of traYc in mind. 33 For instance, in the constant juxtaposition between the shiny and luxurious newness of Anita Ekberg and, variously, the Trevi Fountain, the Baths of Caracalla, and St Peter’s.

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through the woods to the beach where they discover a bizarre sea monster pulled ashore by local people. The Wlm ends here, where the protagonist, Marcello Mastroianni’s character Marcello, catches sight of a beautiful—and innocent—young woman he had encountered earlier in the Wlm. Waving and calling to him across the estuary, she tries to make contact, but much is made of the fact that Marcello cannot hear her. Rather than move towards this Beatrice Wgure, however, Marcello walks away from her. Where Fellini’s earlier Wlms are at least ambiguous about the possibility of salvation for their protagonists, Dolce Vita shows Marcello emphatically unable to seize the opportunity to save himself. Nonetheless, after the bleak and impassable world he has created, Fellini decides to end the Wlm with an exceptionally long shot of the angelically beautiful—and very clean—Paola, and not on the damned Marcello’s departure. (In fact, Marcello has told Paola at their Wrst encounter earlier in the Wlm that she looks like an angel in an Umbrian church—which is true.) In this way, the viewer is oVered at least a potential escape from the hell that has dominated throughout the Wlm.34 Marcello has of course been a somewhat unsympathetic protagonist, and his own Xaˆneur-like detachment and alienation from the world he observes—and muddles in— without any real engagement, are central to the Wlm’s froideur, but also to its revolutionary approach to Wlm-making. In some ways then, ending La Dolce Vita by oVering its viewer the comforts of a Botticelli beauty is a cop-out. It is also a token of Fellini’s inability to free himself from a perhaps sentimental attachment to the possibility of salvation— and to the appeal of a certain kind of innocent femininity—even as he is able to capture the depths of modern despair. A decade later Fellini returns to his Roman theme, essentially the juxtaposition of Rome ancient and modern, with Fellini Satyricon. Once more, the narrative is fragmented and episodic, and the protagonists not always easy to identify with. Once more, the detached, alienated observation of decadence and spectacle form the core of the work. With the close of the sixties Fellini celebrates a new modernity here—and one which he himself observes with the enthusiasm and

34 Bondanella (1992: 148) sees this as a signiWcant departure from the ambiguous optimism of the ‘trilogy of salvation’: La Strada, Il Bidone, and Notti di Cabiria.

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admiration of middle age. One need only look at Gideon Bachmann’s documentary Ciao Federico! to witness Fellini’s delight in the ‘hippy scene’ he surrounds himself with in the making of this Wlm. A similar delight in the association of his work with the new youth culture of the day can be seen in Fellini’s notes on the premiere of Satyricon in Madison Square Garden, after a rock concert: The show was a knockout. The young people applauded every scene; many slept, others made love. Amid total chaos the Wlm went on relentlessly on a giant screen that seemed to reXect an image of what was happening in the hall. Unpredictably, mysteriously, in that most improbable ambience Satyricon seemed to have found its natural site. It didn’t seem mine any more in that sudden revelation of secrets understood, of subtle, unbroken links between the ancient Rome of memory and that fantastic audience from the future.35

And so, at the end of this Wlm, Fellini condemns the antique Roman aristocrats to the corruption and decadence of their age, while allowing the young representatives of a kind of counter-culture to escape into the future (he referred to Satyricon as an ‘essay into the scienceWction of the past’).36 With its closing scene—the cannibalization of Eumolpus’ corpse—Fellini Satyricon reaches the nadir of corruption. The contrast between the corrupt old men who agree to eat their erstwhile friend in order to obtain their inheritance, and the aloof smile of the young Encolpio, who, along with the other young people, leaves this scene behind to pursue new adventures, could not be more marked. Not surprisingly perhaps, the Wlm ends mid-sentence, with a rather open-ended hint at the future in Encolpio’s voice-over narration: ‘a young Greek told me that in years . . .’. A long shot of Encolpio, which is reminiscent of the shot of Paola at the end of La Dolce Vita, turns into fragments of fresco paintings of the Wlm’s characters overlooking the sea on a Greek island. In this way, the optimism and hope of youth are balanced by the inevitability of death. That, too, might be an escape from the Satyricon’s disconcerting world—and the stillness 35 Fellini (1988: 174). Interestingly perhaps, I have not yet met anyone who remembers this event, or remembers hearing of it. This may then be a particularly piquant example of Fellini’s famous tendency for self-mythologizing. What matters, of course, is that Fellini sees his Wlm as embedded in contemporary culture in this way. 36 In Costantini (1995: 69).

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of the frescos is a way to hint at the presence and permanence of the past. (In Roma, perhaps a more pessimistic Wlm, very similar frescos crumble and disappear as soon as they are discovered by archaeologists—the past unable to face the present.) Perhaps its emphasis on the young people’s escape from the corruption of the Roman aristocrats makes of modernity a new kind of salvation. (La Dolce Vita’s modernity had been base and jaded by contrast, and needed renewing.) Certainly, this is an optimistic ending, and a hopeful and celebratory view of ‘youth’ seen, I think, in the celebration throughout the Wlm of the hippyish good looks of the young protagonists Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, and Max Born. The comparison between Paola and Encolpio is useful: it shows that Fellini continues to use youth and beauty as a way out, and continues to be interested in oVering his viewer a place to go, away from the despair and impasse that has dominated so much of this Wlm. Fellini writes in a magazine article in 1970 of his enthusiasm for the sexually liberated atmosphere of the 1960s in the US in a way that also shows his continued belief in the possibility of salvation: I remember going to The Electric Circus, with its dance Xoor aswirl with multicolored tropical Wsh, the Xoor carpeted with semi-nude bodies, and those enormous holes in the walls from which four Wve six pairs of feet, male and female, black white yellow, protruded . . . To be able to lose oneself in that caldron, where everything is burning, and where the old myths, and yesterday’s utopias, are all melting away, there is something sacriWcial in that moment. . . . a moment in which a new way of being a man, and in which salvation, is perhaps still possible.37

What is new about Satyricon, however, is not just its celebration of youth but also its interest in bridging the gap between past and present. Where Dolce Vita’s despair comes from the modern Xaˆneur’s inability to access the authenticity of the past,38 Satyricon draws on Fellini’s new preoccupation with the dream in order make possible a 37 In Esquire (August 1970: 23), quoted in Burke (1996: 172). 38 Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of modern life’ (1863) and Walter Benjamin’s 1939 essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ are central texts for modernity and the Xaˆneur. On modernity in La Dolce Vita see Riccardi (2000: 204): ‘La Dolce Vita might well be retitled The Spleen of Rome, and Marcello, the Wlm’s brooding protagonist, would represent the last of the urban Xaˆneurs.’

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world in which the past, however alien and fragmented, can come to life and impact fully on the present. In Satyricon we no longer view the Roman past through the jaded, and ‘shocked’, eyes of a Marcello—instead we are invited into the dreamy world of the young who experience it Wrst-hand. Both Wlms denounce corruption and decadence, certainly. But Satyricon ultimately oVers us the presence of a dream-like, futuristic, yet somehow authentic and accessible, past as a positive. By contrast, La Dolce Vita is oppressed by the solidity and monumentality of its Roman past, as much as by the sordidness of its present. ‘History’, or the past, is not what Satyricon is about: ‘It is not a historical Wlm, but a fantasy Wlm. The Rome of Ascilto, Encolpio, Trimalchio is more remote and fantastic than the planets of Flash Gordon.’39 The de-linearization, or fragmentation, of Rome’s historical layers makes its Wrst appearance in A Director’s Notebook. This Wlm, which poses as a documentary, and features some ‘interviews’ with Fellini himself and some footage of preparatory work for Satyricon, is also a farewell to Fellini’s unWnished project ‘The Voyage of G. Mastorna’. The Wlm has no protagonist and dispenses with plot and narrative in a way which anticipates Satyricon to a degree and, more clearly, Roma. It is best described perhaps as an essay, or sketch, for the ideas realized more fully in Satyricon and Roma. It introduces, for instance, the idea of a modern Rome peopled by ancient Romans, who crop up—as in a dream—without scrutiny or questioning. One striking scene has Fellini’s team travelling on the underground in Rome with a ‘Professor of Archaeology’: the train after a while begins to sweep past platforms occupied entirely by people wearing togas and such like, at Wrst silent and still, then increasingly animated. It is unclear whether these Wgures are observed by the professor alone, or by the crew as well. In a similar vein, a group of prostitutes on the Via Appia turn into their ancient counterparts—and are joined by a group of truck-drivers who transform themselves into Roman soldiers. All this is accompanied by a voice-over narration, which shows no alarm or surprise, but maintains the steady and rational tone of a documentary narrator. In another scene Fellini is looking for authentic Roman faces to cast in Satyricon. He Wnds them, to his 39 Fellini (1980: 104). My translation.

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evident delight, at the abattoirs outside the city, where an impromptu gladiatorial Wght is staged between them. Here, too, we meet a rather grand Italian actress, Caterina Borrato, who ‘auditions’ for the part of a Roman aristocrat. She is dressed up in all the right gear, and tries out various cruel and/or decadent grimaces, and then plays at being a spectator at the gladiatorial games, concluding—inevitably— with a ‘thumbs-down’ gesture. All this is almost carnivalesque in the liberties it takes;40 but it lays the ground for the two more serious Roman projects, and it introduces the irreverence vis-a`-vis the grand historical narratives which characterizes Fellini’s Romes. In Roma, history is not eliminated but Xooded by personal memory and autobiography. The quasi-documentary aesthetic of the Wlm is a blind, of course: for a start, Fellini’s Rome here is just as made-up and constructed—more so probably—as that of La Dolce Vita.41 Roma apparently dispenses with narrative altogether—and in this sense can be seen as the natural end of a trilogy of fragmented, antinarrative examinations of Rome, ancient and modern. In this last Wlm, the gap between Rome past and present is closed by autobiography and personal memory. In Roma, Fellini is not the jaded voyeur/ Xaˆneur of La Dolce Vita with his inability to access authentic memories; he has subjected Rome completely to his own story, representing the city as, eVectively, the stage or scene of his own subconscious, and as completely his creation. Still captured by the mood of the late sixties and early seventies, Fellini’s Roma continues to celebrate youth, and hippy culture—one need only think of the extended scenes at the Spanish Steps, with its many almost erotic close-up shots of young people.42 Given this context, it is hard to believe the bikers at the end of the Wlm are meant to be seen as the new ‘barbarians of a mechanical and brutalizing civilization’.43 Their sympathetically diverse and colourful clothes, their long hair 40 Fellini says that the lack of structure ‘made me feel very joyful. I felt I was walking faster, unhampered by luggage . . . I saw the chance of doing something new’. Cited in Keel and Strich (1976: 117). 41 See Keel and Strich (1976: 67–83); Bondanella (1992: 138–40). 42 The parallel between the ‘hippies’ of the Satyricon and those in Roma is made by Fellini himself in ‘Preface to Satyricon’: ‘Encolpius and Ascyltus, two hippie students, like any of those hanging around today in Piazza di Spagna.’ Fellini (1978b : 17). 43 Tassone (1978: 268).

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and scarves Xuttering in the wind, and the fact that they all seem to ride in boy-girl pairs means that they are of a piece with the other sympathetically portrayed young people in the Wlm, and part of Fellini’s approval of the youth scene of the late sixties and early seventies. I suspect that they may represent rather a new version of that favourite of Fellini endings: an ambiguous escape or way out of the impasse posed by the Wlm. Instead of a close-up of young, fresh-faced beauty regarding us calmly and reminding us of the eternal promise of youth, we are presented at the close of Roma with the speed and energy, and the only slightly menacing, newworld, vitality of the bikers (Fig. 17). Traversing the city at breakneck speed, the bikers oVer an alternative vision of the city: they do not sight-see, they do not indulge in personal, or collective, memorializing. A ‘mental map’ of tourist sites is not easy to keep in mind as one watches this fast and furious, vaguely circular itinerary—and there are moments, such as the

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

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juxtaposition of the Forum Boarium sites with the columns of the Temple of Saturn in the Forum, which are clearly intended to throw us oV the mark. There are some very choppy cuts, and the tour is frequently interrupted by complete darkness in which only the headlights are visible. Lighting is arranged, as are camera angles, to disorient the viewer with huge shadows, and distorting glare. We can delight visually in (or be unsettled by) the contrast between the motorcyclists’ motion and the static monuments they circle and taunt. Occasionally, we see the monuments themselves, and sometimes their gigantic shadows moving, disconcertingly questioning their own permanence and solidity. This Wnal scene is the Wlm’s only indulgence in conventional ‘views’ of classical Rome—but the views are often distorted or diYcult and, in any case, the speed of movement precludes contemplation. In a curious, and perhaps unexpected way, the motorcyclists’ tour does recall, as we have mentioned already, the possibilities laid open by the 1931 Piano Regolatore. In particular, the speed of the bikes, and the complete absence of any population in the city recall the fascist planners’ keen interest in traYc, and in a city almost ‘brought to life’ by traYc.44 The planners were also especially delighted by the idea of challenging, novel ‘frames’ and juxtapositions, laid open by the new routes.45 Again, something of this may be seen in the bikers’ use of the city—and in Fellini’s manipulation of the tour. The bikers’ view of the city is the closest we come in this Wlm to the conventional view of Rome as a set of famous landmarks, as a historical set—as a tourist experience. And yet this tour is confusing and disorienting—and draws a great deal of attention to its own artiWciality—and so, once more, to ways in which all sights and itineraries are constructs imposed on the fabric of the city.46 It is fairly clear, for instance, that the huge shadows thrown by the statues of Castor and Pollux in the Piazza del Quirinale are created by special lighting eVects, and 44 See the comments of the president of the commission in charge of the plan, Boncompagni-Ludovisi, quoted in Baxa (2004: 16). 45 Again, see Baxa (2004: 14). For instance, Baxa quotes from one of the contributors to the plan, Antonio Munoz, who is especially pleased with the counterintuitive Via dell’Impero be because it ‘disoriented even the most tenacious of advocates for the liberation of the fora’. 46 See also the essays by Vout, and Spencer and Larmour in this collection.

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Fig. 18 Rome and EUR (Henry Buglass).

serve to draw attention to Fellini’s, and the camera’s, gaze—as well as alienate a familiar view. Camera angles change frequently from following the bikers, to facing them, to tracking the monuments themselves. Towards the end of the tour we are led rather counterintuitively to the Arch of Janus and the so-called Temple of Vesta in the Forum Boarium and then back to the Forum and out along the Via Sacra and the Via dei Fori Imperiali towards the Colosseum. The idea of a large group of bikers actually driving through the Forum is improbable, and we are not meant to believe in it, I think. This is made clear by the fact that the notion of the bikers riding in circles around the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campidoglio (the original statue was still there in 1972) is plainly absurd: this vertiginous and exhilarating moment is created by the camera alone, with the sound of the bikes’ revving superimposed. Finally, the bikers appear to be approaching the Colosseum along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. This last iconic site looms larger and larger in the

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picture—and the viewer expects it to be the Wnal image of the Wlm. Instead, there is a cut and another change in perspective, as the bikers rush past the Colosseum without so much as a glance, only to appear, leaving town, on the Via Cristoforo Colombo—towards the new world implied in the name of the road, and towards the modern suburbs which were once the intended site of the 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma.47 Despite the fact that they obviously exploit the possibilities of the Piano Regolatore, Fellini’s bikers do not, I think, stand for the fascist obsession with traYc Xow. The contrast between these free, young people with their Xowing hair and scarves, and the sleek black motorcars which populate fascist images of the motorized city is too great. Their speed, too, is modern, and quite antithetical to the 1930s and 1940s notion of eYcient traYc. And it is not compatible with the kind of contemplation and meditation on the monuments that the fascists’ planning was keen to encourage. Quite simply, at the shocking speed the bikes are going, none of the ‘frames’ is solid enough for touristic/fascistic gazing to take place, as it should do, even from the inside of a car, in the ideal of the Piano Regolatore. Fellini’s bikers will not sit and watch the world go by—towards its inevitable death. Instead, they shock and disorient us with their speed, and with this new form of tourism—characterized by the aimlessness of the American road movie (for instance, Easy Rider (1969) had made an enormous impact only recently) rather than the old European model of the Grand Tour.48 Their pace forces Fellini’s camera, too, to embrace modernity as the only way to escape the oppressive monumentality of the ancient city. Once more, then, youth and its rejection of the backward-looking, ultimately corrupt, voyeur (Fellini himself, in this case) provide an optimistic way out. It is clear, at all times, that Fellini exercises a very visible control over this route through the city, for all that it looks at Wrst sight as though he is letting the bikers have it. The city is open then—but open also 47 See Fig. 18 for the relationship between Rome and EUR. In La Dolce Vita, EUR is where both Marcello and Steiner live, in high modernist buildings, Wlmed to capture fully the contrast between them and the baroque squares and fountains which form the backdrop for other aspects of the Wlm’s action. See Riccardi (2000: 211) on the connexions between modernist architecture and death in La Dolce Vita. 48 See Urry (1990: 1–15, 82–102) for theory of diVerent forms of tourism.

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to interpretation, to decentring, fragmenting, chopping up, and putting back together.49 And Wnally, to being left behind. As has been pointed out before, the Wnal exit is made by Fellini’s camera itself in pursuit of the bikers.50 In this way Rome remains open, uncontrolled, and with the camera’s back to it—unseen. That too is a sight of Rome. Interestingly perhaps, the Wrst screenplay envisaged that the Wlm would end at the Camposanto, with the Roman dead talking to the living protagonist.51 There is a lot of emphasis laid in that Wrst screenplay on the Romans’ obsession with their dead, and with their cemetery—and one gets the sense that this was one of the initial ways in which Fellini approached the idea of the merging of past and present in this Wlm.52 It is to his credit, I think, that he Wnally rejected this perhaps rather sentimental idea in favour of the motorbikers’ uncompromising modernity.53

C I AO F E D E R I C O—ANNA M AGNANI GOES TO BED Another retreat introduces the Wlm’s Wnal sequence—that of Anna Magnani to her bed. It was with the international success of Citta` Aperta that Magnani’s star status was established—as was her identiWcation with Rome itself. Her obvious, and maternal, earthy femininity, and somewhat dishevelled look, husky voice, and Roman intonations, alongside her roˆle as a quasi martyr in Citta` Aperta, ensured her enduring roˆle as the personiWcation of Rome itself. Fellini is of course aware of this—and chooses for this reason clearly to give Magnani 49 The scene is literally stitched together with great eVort—shot apparently over twenty-one diVerent nights, each square or monument lit separately. See for instance Baxter (1993: 278). 50 Bondanella (1987: 251). 51 Zapponi (1972). 52 See Costantini (1995: 76). But see also the fact that Fellini is clearly aware of the comedic potential of this sort of approach: in A Director’s Notebook, the deranged ‘Professor Genius’ attempts to commune with the dead in the graves along the Via Appia. 53 One way in which the bikers perhaps can be seen to stand for both, modernity and death, is as an intertextual reference to the bikers in Cocteau’s Orphe´e, who are in fact messengers from a futuristic land of the dead. The fact that Fellini claims never to read anything, or to have seen many Wlms, need not trouble us unduly here.

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one of the Wlm’s Wnal scenes, referring to her as a symbol, both she-wolf and vestal virgin (un simbolo; lupa e vestale). She merely says goodnight, refusing to make any comment on the city of Rome. The background to this refusal is illuminating I think. In his account of the making of Roma, Bernadino Zapponi relates how he and Fellini went to see Magnani in her apartment in Rome, to ask her to participate in the Wlm.54 They suggest that she might play some kind of elusive roˆle—describing more or less the scene as we have it now; Magnani is to be an apparition, a symbol, elusive and mysterious, retreating into her doorway: Un’ apparizione, come una vestale o una Wgura un po’stregonesca . . . Il simbolo di Roma. Tu ti ritrai, fai un sorriso, entri e richiundi il portone . . . Questa citta` misteriosa che non si fa svelare.55

Magnani has seen some of the Wlm, or knows of it, and seems reluctant to be in it: Fellini has made such a beautiful Wlm, she says, he has really grasped what Rome is about. Why does he need her, or Mastroianni?56 Would that not be too obvious? Zapponi and Fellini look at her—Zapponi says that Fellini was quite intimidated by her, but insisted: ‘But you are Rome.’ Like Rome, she is maternal, bitter, mythological, devastated (hai quell di materno, di amaro, di mitologico, di devastato . . . ). In fact as they look at her they see that her face is a landscape, ravaged, full of experience—and they realize she’s right; the symbolism is too obvious (L’equivalenza Magnani-Roma e Wn troppo ovvia.). As it turns out, this encounter seems to be what prompts Fellini to think about how to end this Wlm—what does he want to end up saying, and how can he achieve closure? Zapponi and he descend from Magnani’s apartment, and Fellini suddenly understands. What he wanted was that she should disapprove of the Wlm, she should oppose it, become his antagonist. Now that she is so enthusiastic about it, that is no longer possible. However, she remains part of the landscape: 54 The scene is described in Zapponi (1972: 67–8). 55 ‘An apparition, like a Vestal virgin, or a little like witch-like Wgure . . . you withdraw, you give a smile, you go in and close the door . . . That mysterious city which will not be revealed.’ 56 There was an ‘interview’ with Mastroianni included in the Noantri sequence. Mastroianni Xew in from Paris, where he lived (!) in order to appear as one of the ‘symbols’ of Rome. Like Magnani, he has nothing to say on the subject of Rome. The scene was edited out eventually.

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Dunque, rientra docilmente nel paesaggio; e` uno dei tanti volti di Roma, e` come la colonna Traiana o Castel s. Angelo. Ed io ho appunto evitato queste immagini cartolinesche. Se ho lasciato fuori la colonna Traiana, perche dovei mettere nel Wlm la Magnani? 57

Trajan’s column remains absent—but clearly Fellini decided eventually that he could not do without Magnani. Her ambiguity and silence are essential to the Wlm’s close—and in many ways I think are representative of Fellini’s own sense of the inconclusiveness of his Wlm. In a sense, Magnani creeps into view—as initially envisaged, as an apparition of sorts—a nod to her status as Rome personiWed. But though her face is the last Roman face we see before the motorcyclists take over the city, and though with its furrows and its deep tiredness it is expressive, perhaps, of Rome’s ‘eternal feminine’ qualities, Fellini shrewdly eschews reducing Rome entirely to this. He has said, repeatedly, that he does not feel he has done Rome justice with his Wlm. For instance, he is quoted as saying, in an interview with Costanzo Costantini: After shooting Roma . . . I suddenly had the frustrating feeling that I hadn’t even touched the surface of the city. It still existed and would continue to exist, fascinating, unknowable, supremely ignorant of the Wlm I thought I had made about it, and extraneous to that Wlm.58

This is said in contrast to the sense of mastery Fellini sees himself has gaining over parts of the city through other Wlms: In my other Wlms, the themes I handled seemed to me exhausted after I had Wnished shooting. For example, after making The Nights of Cabiria it seemed absurd to me that the Passegiata Archaeologica was still there. In the same way via Veneto was Wnished as far as I was concerned after the last pieces of scaVolding were dismantled on the set. In fact every time I walk down it, I’m amazed it’s still there: that the Cafe´ de Paris, the Excelsior and Doney still exist.59

57 ‘And so she re-enters gently into the landscape. She is one of the many faces of Rome, she is like Trajan’s column, or Castel s. Angelo. And yet I have avoided all those postcard images. If I have left our Trajan’s column, why should I put Magnani in the Wlm?’. 58 Costantini (1995: 76). 59 Costantini (1995: 75).

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Perhaps the very size and solidity of Magnani’s front door, and the Wrmness and swiftness with which she closes it, are expressive of Fellini’s ultimate inability to penetrate Rome. (Or, indeed expressive of his desire to make his viewers believe in this inability—as are his repeated assertions in various publications that he has not really grasped Rome at all.) I mentioned earlier that Fellini was interested initially in the idea of Rome as a city of death—and intended to conclude the Wlm with images of the Roman dead rising to speak to his protagonist at the Camposanto. He says, in one of his interviews with Costantini, that death is present everywhere in Rome: ‘It is present not just in the ruins, but also in the severity of the baroque palazzi, in the facades of the churches, in the city’s religious rituals. It is present . . . in the heart of Roman life.’60 That, pretty much, is what Fellini has Gore Vidal say in the closing sequence of Roma. But Vidal is, surely, undermined by his own smugness, by the self-satisWed smirks of his company, by the admiring glances of the young woman next to him. In fact, Vidal poses his own question, not waiting to see what the crew want to ask him. ‘I suppose you will ask me why I live in Rome . . .’, he says, before launching into an obviously well-prepared speech on Rome, the city of death and illusion. He begins, patronizingly, paternalistically, by comparing the Romans to cats—they do not care whether they live or die. He Wnishes by claiming Rome as his vantage point, his observation site. The site of Rome, site of so many deaths, oVers the best view of the end, for Vidal. He talks about how Rome is the site of illusions, and of makers of illusions, like Fellini himself. This is the last cohesive part of the Wlm’s ‘dialogue’—and it is shown up by what follows as both shallow and frigid—as though Fellini understands that his own obsession with death and decadence, and with merely observing, is not, Wnally, enough. The Rome he shows immediately before and after Vidal’s diatribe is colourful, vibrant, and very modern (as well as very ancient in some crucial ways). Vidal and his group, seated at their table, are detached from this vibrancy, choosing the position of the voyeur, and (I think) misreading what goes on around them. The Fiesta section of the Wlm has opened with a lengthy sequence showing people walking 60 Costantini (1995: 76).

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along the narrow streets, and some sitting down at tables or on the street. Among the ‘ordinary’ inhabitants of Trastevere there are many Wgures dressed in spectacular, colourful costumes, many wearing wigs, and with painted faces—not unlike the characters who people the Wrst scenes of Satyricon (Fig. 15). One overhears fragments of conversations in both Italian and English—this multilingualism is again a reprise of Satyricon. The theatricality of some of the characters (and the look of some of their clothes) gives the scene overall an air of the exuberant antiquity of Satyricon. Immediately following Vidal’s pronouncements, we return to the celebration of youth which underlies so much of both Roma and Satyricon: a group of young, hippy-ish people are sitting on the steps of a fountain and singing a folksong. This is contrasted with the elderly bourgeois diners in the restaurant facing the fountain—and the serenading which entertains them (in other words, they are merely consumers, like Vidal and his crowd before, not producers of music and sociality like the young people on the steps). The diners comment distastefully on the young layabouts who are all over the city—and meanwhile the police remove the young people, rather violently, from the square. It is clear where Fellini’s allegiances lie; but more than this, it is clear that—in drawing an implicit parallel between Vidal and the Roman bourgeoisie as mere consumers and spectators—this scene shows that Rome is a living city, not a vantage point for decadent intellectuals. After Vidal’s scene there is a kind of gladiatorial show: a boxing match in a small square, where an excited crowd shouts, ‘Kill him’, and a painted, exotic looking young woman looks on in a state of semi-excitement reminiscent of representations of such female spectators in both nineteenth-century paintings and historical Wlms. While alluding to the decadent spectacles of the arena, this scene also lays a great deal of emphasis on the crowd’s engagement and participation and so can be seen as a powerful critique of the idea of pure spectacle suggested by Vidal’s comments. In all, the closing scenes of the Wlm, beginning with the clash between the hippies and the police and culminating after the Noantri sequence with the motorcyclists show Fellini continuing to engage with the idea of decadence, and its denial by the young. While clearly fascinated by the sense of civilization crumbling, Fellini is also able to see that death and spectacle are not all there is—and he sees youth, as

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I have argued throughout this essay, as the solution. We can conclude by looking at his own remarks on decadence and rebirth: So, I am happy to be living at a time when everything is capsizing. It’s a marvellous time, for the very reason that a whole series of ideologies, concepts and conventions are being wrecked . . . This process of dissolution is quite natural, I think. I don’t see it as a sign of the death of civilisation but, on the contrary, as a sign of its life . . . The young are aware that a new world is beginning.61

Where better for that new world to rise out of the rubble of the old—which will never quite go away—than Rome. And after all, Roma does not end with death—or with spectacle. The life (and the tiredness) in Anna Magnani’s face, the way she looks at us and closes the door on us, returning the gaze of the spectator, and shutting it out, and her almost friendly ‘buona notte’ are more true to the complex and vibrant Wlm Fellini has made. It is a good thing, I think, that he ends by letting Magnani refuse her own iconic status—and letting the bikers wreak havoc with our expectations of what icons and monuments should do (stand still, mainly, to be looked at). And so, the site of Rome is left behind in this Wlm with the swiftest of glances—its sights are blurred and destabilized, our own sight follows the bikers out of Rome and into the darkness. But in Fellini’s Rome where, as in Freud’s imaginary Rome, ‘nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away’, and where there are no signposts and no solid monuments, a departure need not be permanent. 61 Keel and Strich (1976: 157).

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General Index abject, abjection 16, 39–41, 46–7, 175–8, 183, 189–91, 202, 208–10 see also excrement; Kristeva Ackroyd, P. 296 Actaeon 107–8, 125–35 Aeneas 44, 102, 118, 122–3, 137, 167, 195, 302, 309 aestheticization 28 n. 76, 53, 55, 92 Africa 150, 307, 310 after-image 2 n.2 Agenor 102–37 Agrippa 64 Portico of 174 Ahmed, I. 296 Alba Longa 102, 246, 252 Alberti, L. B. 278 Alexander I, Tsar 327, 333, 336–7 alienation 9 n. 24, 17–18, 29, 36, 40, 44, 56, 171, 181, 208, 353, 356, 370, 377 Althusser, L. 274–6 America, American 14, 34, 56–7, 59, 306, 378 imperialism, 59 tourists, 360, 365 see also Chicago; Las Vegas; New York; Washington, DC; World Trade Centre Ammianus Marcellinus 311–12 anarchy, anarchic 37, 50, 140, 356, 363 Anchises 91, 195 Anna Perenna 267, 301 Antony, Mark 182, 291–4 anxiety 29, 92, 176, 197, 272–3, 277–84, 294 of influence 272 n. 3, 293 teleological 32, 44 Apollo 106, 127 in Forum 181–2 Palatinus 71, 153–4 Apuleius 52 aqueduct(s) 19, 193–4, 299, 323 of Claudius, 299 Ara Pacis 64 n. 7, 181 Arcadia 50, 112

arch(es) 21, 106–7, 191–3, 196, 201, 271, 281, 309–11, 315, 320, 332–3, 338–9, 352 of Augustus 310 of Constantine 365 of Drusus 201 of Janus 377 of Septimius Severus 100 of Titus 21, 310 archaeology, archaeological 2–3, 10, 15–17, 40, 64 n. 7, 99, 277–80, 283, 305–6, 314, 316, 325, 339, 368, 372, 381 archetype, archetypal 2–3, 6, 45, 64, 87–9, 166, 171 Architectural Review 9 arena 10, 27, 37, 38 n. 87, 41, 47, 51–4, 66, 81, 133, 158, 169, 171–2, 174, 180, 187–90, 202, 207, 210, 229 n. 42, 383 see also Colosseum Arzamastseva, I. 340 Ascanius 91 asylum 70–1, 230–1 Athens 21, 24, 45, 87 n. 56, 104, 138 atopia 121 Attali, J. 67–8, 100 Augustus, Augustan 3, 10–12, 17, 21–4, 26, 38, 44, 46, 50–1, 55–6, 61–101, 105, 111–16, 122, 126, 136–9, 141, 151, 153–61, 166–7, 182, 194, 203, 223, 244, 303, 310–11, 337 authorial refraction 4 n. 8 autobiography 362, 374 Automedon 179–80, 188, 204–5 autostrada 353, 363–5, 368 Aventine hill 22, 28, 33, 71 n. 23, 224, 299, 304, 332 Bachmann, G. 371 Bacon, F. 161

420

General Index

Bakhtin, M. M. 4 n. 8, 9, 15, 31, 44–5, 61, 139–40, 151–2, 176 n. 15, 238–43, 253, 269 lower bodily stratum, 151–2 see also carnival(esque); chronotope Barkan, L. 3, 7, 10–11, 128 n. 50, 133–4, 278 n. 13 Barton, C. 133 Basilica Ulpia 21 Baths of Caracalla 353 Baudelaire, C. 59, 372 n. 38 du Bellay, J. 271–3, 281–3, 288–91, 294 Bely, A. 18, 64 n. 7, 169 Benjamin, W. 9, 12, 13 n. 36, 15, 17 Bentham, J., see panopticon Berdyaev, N. 329 Berger, J. 305 Berlin 2, 14, 169 biography 71, 240–3, 249, 252–4, 269 of London, 296 of Rome 43, 46 Biondo, F. 279 Bloom, H. 272 n. 3, 293 body, bodies 9–11, 39–40, 120, 139, 151, 130–67, 168–210, 214, 233, 276, 305; see also corpse Bo¨mer, F. 111, Borghese Gardens 360–1, 363–5, 368 Botticelli, S. 370 border, boundary 11, 17, 22, 27, 40–2, 46, 54, 70, 78, 82, 114, 168–210, 231, 238, 245, 252, 256, 259–65, 268, 270, 325, 344, 351, 358, 361 Bouwsma, W. J. 284–5 Bracciolini, P. 278, 280, 314, 321 Bremer, F. 315 Breton, A. 9 bricolage 75, 93, 99 Bromlei, N. N. 348, 350–2 Brutus 207, 216, 291–4, 326 Budeskul, V. P. 325 Buondelmonti, C. 278 Burkhart, W. 55 Byzantium 26, 325 Cadmus 102–37 Caesar, Augustus, see Augustus Caesar, Julius, see Julius Caesar calendar 205, 245, 263–4, 267

Calpurnius Siculus 52 Camenae 193, 196–7, 200, 210 Cameron, C. 333 Camillus, Furius 29, 86, 93, 226, 233–5 Camposanto 379, 382 Campus Martius 19, 22, 28 n. 76, 62, 64, 69, 77, 81, 97, 168, 174, 179–80, 208, 244 cannibalism 41, 60, 71, 371 capital(ism) 3, 9 n. 14, 52–4, 326 Capitol 38–9, 73 n. 25, 84–5, 90, 97, 168, 180–1, 211–37, 302–3, 306, 309, 314–18, 320–1 Capitoline hill, 22, 31, 37–9, 62–3, 65, 69 n. 18, 70–1, 75, 77–8, 81–3, 95, 211–37, 258, 260, 296, 302, 304, 309–10, 315–16, 321, 332, 335 n. 29 carnival(esque) 37, 138–67, 317, 319–20, 374 see also elegiac carnival Carthage 118, 214 Cassius Dio 92, 224 Castel Sant’ Angelo 368, 381 Castor and Pollux, 95–6, 376 Temple of 93 n. 69–70, 95–6, 208, 226 n. 37 Catherine II, Tsar 333, 338 Catiline 76, 204, 294, 326 Jonson’s Catiline 39, 287, 288, 294 Cato 50, 143, 147–50, 161, 165, 326, 338 Cavallini, G. 279 cave 106–7, 174, 192, 196–8, 200, 245, 357 see also grotto cemetery, cemeteries 187–8, 210, 379 centripetal movement or view 32, 52, 213 de Certeau, M. 3, 7 n. 16, 8 Chicago 2 Chilver, G. E. F. 229 chronotope 14–15, 31, 45, 61, 171, 173, 196, 199, 238–70 meta-chronotope 270 Chudakova, M. 343–4 Cicero 29–30, 33, 76, 96, 120–1, 165, 182, 211–14, 225, 249, 284, 287–8, 294, 326, 337–8, 347 Cinecitta` 353, 365 Circus Maximus 52, 158, 174, 179–80, 207, 245, 299, 351

General Index Circus of Nero 299 cityscape 8, 14, 19, 24, 28, 31–2, 41, 69, 74, 138, 140, 151–2, 160, 170, 172, 177, 180–1, 191, 201–4, 207, 252, 269, 196, 304–5, 313, 316, 362 city-text 169, 171 civil war(s) 39, 55, 79, 122–3, 183, 211–37, 329 Clark, E. 307 Claudian 303, 308, 311, 314–15, 321 class struggle 30, 32–3, 324, 341, 345, 348, 352 Classical crisis 32, 272, 277 Classical tradition 4, 333, 337, 346 Cloaca Maxima 19 n. 51, 65, 86–9, 187 see also sewers closure, enclosure 9, 31, 44, 52–3, 59, 63, 175, 177, 197–8, 241, 308, 380 Clytemnestra 174 Coleman, K. 52 colonization 10, 12–13, 19, 52, 125 n. 46, 307, 310, 313, 357 n. 8–9 Colosseum 6, 14, 19, 23, 52–3, 60, 190, 207, 286, 299, 311–12, 353, 363–5, 368, 377–8 see also arena; gladiator Concord, Temple of 180–1, 208, 219, 221–3, 226 Consualia 73–5 consumption 36, 42, 48, 53, 87, 113, 164, 177, 188–90, 205, 210, 240, 256, 294, 357, 360–2, 383 Constantius II 311–13 contamination 31, 40–1, 45–6, 55, 58, 99, 180, 201, 205, 208 Le Corbusier, 4 n. 9, 5, 35 corpse 152–3, 190–1, 196, 208, 277, 379 of Eumolpus 371 of Juvenal 187 of Tigellius 144–5, 150, 161, 166 cosmopolis, cosmopolitan 2–3, 29 n. 79, 46, 53 n. 101, 58 n.111, 80, 138 cosmopolitanism (Soviet) 349 Crispinus 139, 171–2, 182, 185 Cronenberg, D., Crash 146 Cumae 41, 191, 196 Curtius, see Lacus Curtius, Marcus Curtius, Mettius Curtius de Custine, Marquis 330, 339

421

Danaids 134, 155 Debord, G. 52–3 see also Situationist movement; spectacle death 38, 58, 63, 69 n. 19, 74, 77 n. 38, 80 n.47, 81, 124, 134–5, 140, 143–8, 150–1, 153–5, 163–4, 174, 190, 206 n. 90, 219, 221, 227, 232, 241, 259, 268, 282, 371, 378–9, 382–4 see also corpse; decay; deuotio; ghost decadence 315, 346, 355, 357, 362, 370–1, 373–4, 382–4 decay 10, 39, 55–7, 60, 92, 94, 153, 191, 353 degradation 37, 40, 133, 140, 152, 164–5, 177 Deleuze, G. 37, 66–8, 70, 75, 79–80, 355, 365 deuotio 66, 83, 86–9, 97, 227 dialectic 9, 45, 49, 66, 71, 79–80, 101, 269, 272, 294 dialogue, dialogic 4, 9, 28, 30, 34, 36, 40, 58, 60, 64, 82, 96, 273, 361, 382 Diana 107–8, 125–36 didactic, didacticism 42–3, 151, 344 Dio Cassius, see Cassius Dio Dionysius of Halicarnassus 63, 90, 96, 246–7, 251, 260 Dioscuri, see Castor and Pollux dislocation 26, 30–1, 36, 39, 213, 317 Disney, W. 49 n. 93, 50 Do¨blin, A. 169 Domitian 21–2, 94, 212, 310 Domus Aurea 3, 22, 23 n. 64, 49, 51, 53 Domus Transitoria 22 Dondi, G. 278 Dos Passos, J. 169 dream, dreamscape 16, 19, 23, 44, 104, 139, 149, 291–2, 314, 316, 346, 353–6, 359, 361–2, 368, 372–3 see also hallucination; nightmare Drusus, Arch of 201 Dublin 18, 169 Dume´zil, G. 260 dystopia 15, 29, 48 edge, edgy 13 n. 36, 41–2, 46, 48, 54, 77–8, 107, 197, 209–10, 242, 252, 268, 320 see also border Edwards, C. 2, 5, 29, 304

422

General Index

Egeria, 48, 54, 191–2, 195–200, 205, 208, 210 elegy 27, 37, 41–2, 104 n. 8, 136, 138–42, 154, 160–2, 166–7 elegiac carnival 140–60 praeceptor amoris 154, 156, 160, 166–7 Embankment (Agger) 168, 174 enargeia 212 epic 27, 42, 102–4, 109, 122–3, 169, 172, 178, 211, 240 n. 8, 252–3, 268, 301, 358 equestrian(ism), Equites 62–101 equestrian elevation, statues 21, 37, 62–101, 334–5 see also gaze erotodidaxis 154 escape 40, 46, 91, 99, 182, 209, 266, 275, 344, 350–1, 370–2, 375, 378 see also exile Eserskii, M. V. 18, 345–6, 349, 352 Esposizione Universale di Roma, EUR 24, 64 n. 7, 377–8 Etruria, Etruscan 20, 97, 171, 251–2, 348 Evander 78, 302–3, 305 excess 116, 142–51, 157, 161, 165, 205–6, 359 exclusus amator 136, 158, 160 excrement 175–6, 184, 186, 190, 205–6, 209 see also abject; Kristeva exile, exiles 3, 29, 37, 41, 48, 110, 114–15, 125–6, 136, 142, 156–8, 175, 209, 212, 225, 353 eye 3, 11 n. 30, 14, 20, 35, 38, 44, 87, 99, 128–9, 131, 136, 172, 197, 202, 224–7, 296, 301, 307, 309, 312, 314 n. 42, 320, 336, 373 see also gaze; spectator; voyeur Fabius Pictor 214 Falconet, E.-M. 94, 334 fantasy 28, 42, 46–9, 51, 53–4, 67, 132–3, 156, 161, 175, 213, 243, 280, 313, 344, 359, 373 see also dream; hallucination Farrell, J. 88, 96 fascism, fascist 8 n. 19, 17 n. 43, 24, 26 n. 70, 36, 353–84 Favro, D. 69, 77, 90 n. 61 Feldherr, A. 63 n.6, 65 n., 67 n. 13 Fellini, F. 30, 33–4, 40, 59–60, 353–84 A Director’s Notebook 354–6, 361, 373

La Dolce Vita 353–4, 356–9, 369–74 Nights of Cabiria 381 Roma 34, 59–60, 353–84 Satyricon 353–63, 367–74, 383 ‘The Voyage of G. Mastorna’ 373–4 Ficus Ruminalis 245, 247–9 Fides, Temple of 180–1, 199, 200, 259 fire, Great 22, 194 n. 64 flaˆneur, flaˆnerie 8–9, 15, 17–18, 21–3, 37, 44, 47–8, 172–3, 210, 351, 359, 370, 372, 374 Florus 214 focalization, see eye forest, woods 42, 51–4, 28, 106, 127, 133, 200, 370 see also rus in urbe; Statius Forma Urbis Romae 35–6 Fortuna, Temple of 198 Fortuna Redux, Altar of 201 Forum Augustum 21, 24, 62, 100, 181–5, 189, 208 Forum Boarium 185 n. 42, 376–7 Forum Julium 21, 24, 100, 155, 183 n. 36 Forum Pacis 311–12 Forum Romanum 11–12, 14, 21, 24, 36–7, 47, 62–6, 67, 70, 71 n. 24, 78, 81–2, 84–5, 87, 89, 93–100, 168, 208, 211–37, 245, 254, 302, 305, 308–9, 317–18, 320, 351, 376–7 as arena 38 n. 87, 188 n. 50 as monumentum 62 Forum Trajanum 21, 24 n. 66, 304 n.20 Foucault, M. 6 n. 14 fracture 16, 29–32, 34, 36–7, 287 fragment, fragmentation 3, 7, 14, 17–18, 20, 23, 29, 31–6, 44–6, 55–60, 172, 177, 231, 272–5, 277, 280, 283–4, 286, 295, 303–4, 312, 315, 321, 360–74, 379, 383 fratricide 104, 124, 262 see also Romulus French Revolution 57 Freud, S. 9, 12 n.32, 14–16, 23, 29, 45, 58 n. 111, 60, 142, 145–7, 150, 293, 354, 384 death drive 145–6, 150 pleasure principle 140, 142–50, 161, 166

General Index reality principle 142–6, 166 Freudenberg, K. 27, 142, 148 Frolov, E. 347 furor 47, 122, 137 Fussell, P. 308, 322 Galba 220–1, 228 gardens 23, 28, 49, 51, 53, 56, 107, 169, 300, 302, 320, 330–2, 360–1, 363–5, 368 Garibaldi, G. 64 n. 7 gate, gateway 21, 40–1, 47, 76, 81–2, 174, 177, 192–4, 201–9, 262, 264–6, 270, 313, 332, 338 see also Porta Capena; Porta Mugonia; Porta Palati Gates of Janus 262, 264–6, 270 Gaul, Gauls 38, 233–6, 303, 310 gaze, 3, 10–11, 23, 32, 37–9, 45, 49, 57, 61–2, 73–4, 78, 85, 136, 227, 271, 304–5, 314, 358–62 of buildings 217, 228–9 of camera 305–6, 359–61, 377 Christian 279 class-oriented 324 fascistic 362, 365, 378 from above 38, 47, 78, 87, 89–90, 105, 228, 303, 313–14, 321 of Great Other 13 n. 34 Humanist 280, 288 imperial 17, 41, 309 magisterial 307–13 male 305, 360 mediating gaze of narrator 212–3, 217, 228 of reader 73, 95, 193 of Rome 92–3 satiric 171, 178, 193, 208 of tourist 306–7, 362 see also equestrian elevation; eye; perspective; point of view Genette, J. 352 genre 6, 13, 18, 26–8, 36, 41–3, 50, 54, 138–41, 148, 151, 160, 165–6, 177–80, 182, 188, 191, 209, 211, 238–40, 253, 286, 244, 353 ghosts, ghostly 10, 37, 46–7, 77, 99, 188–90, 196, 379 see also death; Underworld Gibbon, E. 17, 20 n. 55, 55, 314, 317, 321

423

Giovagnoli, G. R. 325, 341, 345, 351 glade, grove 12 n. 31, 42, 48, 51, 54–5, 107, 129, 131, 191–3, 196–201, 205, 208–10, 301 of Diana 125–35 of Egeria 54, 191–205 see also forest; garden; grotto; rus in urbe gladiator, gladiatorial 27, 86 n. 54, 155, 158, 187, 189–90, 202, 214, 325–6, 341, 348, 358, 374, 383 Ridley Scott, Gladiator 23 see also arena; Colosseum Goethe, J. W. 16 n. 42, 32 n. 81 Golden Age 28, 119, 139, 174, 197, 288, 327 Gowers, E. 87, 187 Gowing, A. 2 n. 1, 21–2, 183, 233 Grabar’, I. 338–9 Gracchus, Tiberius 348–52 satirized descendant of 188–9 Grand Tour 56 n.106, 306–7, 378 Greenblatt, S. 40 see also self-fashioning Greene, T. M. 277 grotesque 37, 133–4, 139–40, 143–4, 152, 176–7, 205–6, 219, 339, 356–60, 365 grotto 12 n. 31, 28, 51, 55, 196 see also cave Habinek, T. 56 Hadrian, Hadrianic 22 hallucination 23, 47, 50, 106, 108–9, 359 Hannibal 16 Harari, R. 280 Hardie, P. 103–4, 130 Haussmann, G.-E. 26, 36 Harvard Project on the City 6, 100 Heath, J. 133 Hegel, G. W. F. 37, 66, 68, 70, 79–80, 92, 101 Henderson, J. 147 Hercules 301, 340 Temple of 198 Hesiod 216 Highet, G. 139 Hillier, B. 69 n.20, 78 n. 42, 82 n. 49 historiography 42–3, 45, 65–6, 80, 92 n. 66, 101, 211–37, 243, 321–4, 326, 347–8, 356

424

General Index

holes 32, 39–40, 54, 63, 67, 80, 85, 143, 146, 148, 150, 161, 177, 202, 209, 321, 372 see also void Honorius 308–13, 321 Hopper, D., Easy Rider 378 Horace 17–18, 26–7, 36–7, 41, 56, 58, 138–67, 178, 182, 187, 191–2, 337 Horatii and Curatii 194–5 horses, see equestrian(ism), Equites humiliation 141, 164–5, 216, 225 hyperreal, hyperrealism 42, 49, 53 n. 101

Kirchner, E. 169 Potsdamer Platz 169–70 Knabe, G. 326–7 Koolhaas, R. 67–8 see also Harvard Project on the City; R/OS_MM Kristeva, J. 9, 12, 15–16, 40, 175–7, 190, 208–10 deject 175 le corps propre (the clean and proper body) 173–4 see also abject

imperialism 3, 10, 13, 34, 36, 52, 59, 62, 77–8, 95, 136, 307 impermanence, permanence 22, 31, 36, 63, 88–9, 99–101, 175, 183, 190, 205, 257, 330, 372, 376, 384 intertext, intertextual 2, 132, 227–8, 235, 273 Irigaray, L. 148 Isis, Temple of 174, 206

labyrinth 283, 354 Lacan, J. 9, 12, 15, 40, 47, 108, 118, 121, 130–1, 139–40, 145–6, 272–7, 279–81, 293 Imaginary 12, 150, 276, 293 jouissance 121, 146–7, 166; lack 130, 143, 146, 148–50, 161, 271–3, 278–85, 288–90, 293–4 le nom/non du pe`re (the Name of the Father) 118–19, 121, 124, 129–31, 134, 275 le pe`re jouisseur (the Father of Enjoyment) 121, 124–36 logic of enjoyment 139–51; 160–2, 164–6 objet a 280, 284, 293–4 Symbolic 12 n. 32, 47, 50, 108–9, 116, 121–2, 133, 137, 139, 275–7, 282, 285, 293–4 see also Other Lactantius 215 Lacus Curtius 37–8, 47–8, 63–5, 68, 70, 73–5, 80, 81, 82–5, 86–9, 94, 95, 97–100 Lacus Juturnae 95–6 Lacus Regillus 95 Ladin, J. 239, 269 Lanciani, R. 304 Las Vegas 5–6, 36 n. 86 Lateranus, (?) Plautius 203–7 Lenin, V. 324, 340 Leningrad, see St Petersburg libertas 138, 161, 165, 187, 191, 206 Liebestod 161 lieux de me´moire 169 Ligorio, P. 31, 45, 57, 278, 297–9, 302, 304, 315–16, 321

Jaeger, M. 8, 62 n. 1, 65, 70, 77, 79 James, H. 315, 317, 320 Janiculum hill 45, 57, 298–302, 306, 321 Janus 45, 238–70, 377 Gates of 262, 264–6, 270 Jews, Jewish 48, 164, 193, 200, 203, 205 Jonson, B. 34, 39, 273, 286–92, 294 Joyce, J. 18, 169 Julius Caesar 24, 62, 83, 105, 112, 114, 122, 160, 212, 174, 182, 289–93, 329, 347, 358 house of 174 Temple of 83, 223 Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar 39, 290–2 Jupiter 105–6, 111–16, 124–5, 133–5, 159, 198–9, 204–5, 303, 309–10, 312 Capitolinus 20, 38, 69 n. 18, 76–7, 174, 214, 218, 227–8, 232–3, 260, 308–9 Feretrius 71 Stator 75–80, 95, 255 Tonans 227, 308–10 Juvenal 17–18, 28, 36–7, 39–41, 48, 54–5, 60, 138–41, 160–7, 168–211 katabasis 47, 74, 89 Kermalus 245–7, 249 Khachaturian, A. 326

General Index limen, liminal zones 39, 54–5, 69, 181, 177, 180, 189, 191, 208–9 see also border; edge Livy 17, 29, 37–8, 43, 47, 54, 62–101, 124, 194–5, 199–200, 217, 226–8, 231, 233–6, 245–9, 251, 261, 285 locus amoenus 41, 52, 107–8 London 2, 34, 296 Lorrain, C. 316 Lucan 27, 33 n. 82, 56, 58, 65 n. 9, 212– 13, 226–7, 285, 310 Lucilius 27, 161, 165, 178, 180, 187–8, 191–2, 195 Lupercal 245 lusus Troiae 91–2 McEwan, I. K. 19, 39 n. 88, 63 n. 5, 64 n. 7 Madison Square Garden 371 Maecenas 27, 92, 161, 166 Magnani, A. 59–60, 360, 367, 379–84 maps, mapping 6, 8 n. 21, 11, 31, 35, 40, 45, 49, 70, 76–8, 95, 108, 160, 169, 172, 177, 209, 236, 242, 245, 252, 272, 277, 297–8, 302, 316, 340, 365, 367, 375 marble 2, 20, 26, 35, 54, 64–5, 89, 99, 108, 153, 163, 192, 197–9, 337, 342 Marcellus 153 Theatre of 96 n. 78, 299 Marcus Aurelius Column of 299 statue of 334–5, 377 Marcus Curtius 38, 65–6, 80, 84–5, 86, 87, 88–9, 94–5, 97, 227–8 margin, marginality 8, 10, 17, 39, 51, 197, 208, 366 see also edge; limen Markish, S. 346 Mars 104, 124,159, 235 n. 58, 263–4 Temple of, on Via Appia 90 Ultor, Temple of 21, 159, 183, 208 Martial 27–8, 295, 299, 300–3, 321 Martindale, C. 29 Marx, Marxist 324–5 Mastroianni, M. 370, 380 de Matociis (Mansioario), G. 278 Matthews, H. 315, 317 Mayakovsky, V. 323–4

425

memory 1–2, 7–8, 12, 15, 17, 19, 32, 40, 62–5, 87–8, 96, 169, 183, 228, 237, 302, 305, 333, 353–4, 359, 374 memorialization 35, 217, 236, 337, 375 metamorphosis 8 n. 21, 24, 42, 47–50, 124–5 metonymy 11, 23, 37, 49, 138–40, 143, 145, 149–52, 154–5, 159–61, 164, 173, 193, 202, 302 n. 13 Mettius Curtius 38, 63–4, 65–6, 80–1, 82–4, 88, 89, 94–5, 97 Michelangelo 304, 321 Miles, G. 75 n. 31, 88, Milton, J. 291 mirror, mirroring 46–8, 53, 65, 78, 90, 104, 117, 127–8, 131–3, 144–5, 245, 257, 346 mise en abyme 39, 47 Montaigne, M. de 57, 284–5, 315 n. 47 Montferrand, A. 337 monumentum 8, 62–3, 65, 67, 75, 77, 79–80, 83–4, 88, 190, 225 Morris, P. 238 Moscow 2, 327–9, 339–42 as ‘‘Third Rome’’ 26, 327–9 Mulvey, L. 360 Mussolini, B. 16–17, 24, 64 n. 7, 304 n. 29, 357–8, 363 see also fascism myth-making, mythic 3, 5 n. 13, 18, 23–4, 35, 38, 40, 45, 47–8, 59, 63–4, 67–8, 87–91, 95, 99–101, 103–6, 112, 123–4, 137, 154–5, 167, 242–5, 249, 254, 272–4, 285, 303, 330–1, 363, 372, 380 Naples 295 Napoleon 57, 337–8 Narcissus 47, 103 n. 6, 107–8, 130 narrative, narratology 4 n. 9, 9–10, 12, 15, 30, 32, 39–40, 43–4, 48, 57, 59–60, 67–8, 70, 74–9, 86–8, 92–3, 102, 109, 122, 127–9, 133–4, 151, 154, 172, 191, 200, 211–70, 321, 326, 345, 347–53, 355–6, 359–62, 369–70, 373–4 nationalism 271, 329, 339, 349 Nemerovskii, A. I. 18, 348–52

426

General Index

Neptune 73–4, 82, 84 Nero, Neronian 3, 19, 21–3, 49, 51, 53–4, 167, 194 n. 64, 203, 221, 299 New York 2, 7 n. 16, 34, 169 Nicolet, C. 214 night 36–7, 138, 141, 162–3, 166, 175, 184, 190–1, 193, 195, 199, 201, 203–5, 233, 291 nightmare 50, 106 Numa 24, 42, 45, 54, 123, 181, 192–3, 199–201, 205, 238–70 numen 46, 135, 192, 197–8 Odysseus 122, 301 Oedipus 109, 123, 126 Ostromenskaia, N. F. 348, 350–2 Other 13 n. 34, 52, 100, 109, 185, 190, 272, 276, 280, 284, 287, 293–4, 308 Otho 228–9, 235–6 Ovid 17, 27, 29, 33, 36–7, 41–2, 46–51, 102–67, 179, 216, 249, 261–2, 267, 330 Palatine 22, 31, 33, 62–3, 65, 70–1, 73, 75–9, 81–2, 153, 181, 220, 225, 251–2, 258, 332, 340 old gate of 75, 81–2 palimpsest 3–4, 6, 9, 20, 23, 26, 33, 45, 74, 97, 236, 306, 321 Palladio, A. 332–3 Palmer, S. 57 Palus Caprae 64 n. 7 panopticon, panoptic 6, 303 panorama, panoramic 42, 44–5, 56–7, 71, 101, 303, 306, 365 see also gaze Pantheon 22, 299, 301, 312 papacy 57, 277, 279 paraclausithyron 139, 158 paradox 5, 10, 20, 23, 33, 36, 39, 41, 44, 50, 52, 55, 113, 117, 125, 127, 130 n. 56, 213, 262, 277, 279–81, 288, 294, 330, 341–3 Paris 2, 9, 17, 26 Pasolini, P. P., Mamma Roma 366–7 pastoral 27–8, 51, 54, 56, 102, 172 Patterson, J. R. 223 Peace, Temple of 24 n. 66, 35, 181 Pentheus 105, 112–13

permeability 19, 33, 60, 64, 80, 147, 175, 185, 187, 194, 198, 200, 207–8, 270, 382 see also border; gate; holes personification 211–27, 250, 309 perspective 4, 6–7, 8–9, 11, 13 n.36, 17–18, 20, 22–4, 27, 31–2, 33, 34, 37–9, 45–6, 47, 50, 52, 59, 61, 68, 69, 77–8, 91, 93, 95, 101, 135, 169, 171, 208, 210, 296, 297–303, 312 n. 38, 317, 321, 361, 363, 369, 378 see also gaze, panorama, point of view Peter the Great, Tsar 94, 327–36 as Pater Patriae, 332 Petrarch 29 n. 79, 278–9 Petronius 27 see also Fellini, Satyricon Piano Regolatore (Master Plan) 24, 363, 368, 376, 378 Piazza Augusto Imperatore 24 n. 70 Piazza del Campidoglio 377 Piazza del Popolo 317, 320 Piazza del Quirinale 376 Piazza di Siena 365 Piazza Venezia 365 pietas 47, 74, 86, 110–18, 122, 125, 127, 137, 278 Pincio hill 301–2, 306, 317, 320–1 Plato 142, 146, 336 Pliny the Elder 20–1, 86, 181, 312 Plutarch 17, 42, 44–5, 238–70, 290 point of view 6, 11, 62, 69 n. 18, 77–8, 79, 87, 93, 217, 363 see also gaze; panorama; perspective polarity, polarities 10, 33, 67, 70, 79, 81–2, 111, 144, 156, 277, 324, 326, 349 Pompeii 23, 316 Pompey 93, 152–4, 182, 215 n. 10, 312 Theatre of 153, 311–2 de Pontoux, C. 314 Porta Capena (or Idymaea) 48, 192–4, 201–7, 213 Porta Mugonia 76–7 Porta Palati 82 Porticus Agrippae 174 Porticus Liviae 153–4

General Index Porticus Metelli (Octaviae) 76–8, 153 postcolonial criticism 11–13, 20, 307, 310, 313 see also colonization postmodernism 3, 8, 10 Prometheus 340 propaganda 43, 68, 153, 182, 343, 347 Propertius 12 n. 31, 17, 19 n. 49, 24 n. 67, 27, 166 psychogeography 4, 9, 39, 47, 185 psychosis 50, 105, 108–9 Puccini, G., Madame Butterfly 146 Pudicitia, Altar of 174, 183–5, 190, 198, 203 Purcell, N. 62 Pushkin, A. 336 Pythagoras 123, 216 Quintilian 26, 173, 228 Quirinal 21, 235, 376 Quirinus 189, 256 Rabelais, F. 152, 206 Radishchev, A. 338 rape 37, 105, 110 n.23, 124, 141, 143–4, 148–9, 151, 155–6, 159, 161, 265–6 rebirth 31, 293, 384 reception 3–4, 7, 32, 44, 56 n. 106, 60, 65, 74, 101, 362 Remus 71, 104, 109, 251–2, 258–9, 263 Renaissance Humanism 271–94 and Rome 1–3, 10, 17, 24, 30–3, 44–5, 56 n. 107, 58, 271–322 and Venice 18 Riazanovskii, N. 328, 332 Rimini 358, 362 n. 22, 363 Rogoff, I. 8 Romanitas 55, 143, 148, 153, 167, 210, 236, 293 romanita` (Fellini) 363 Romantics 30, 56, 59, 316 Rome as archetype 2–3, 6, 45, as arena 10, 38 n. 87, 41, 66, 81, 180, 187–8, 202, 207–8, 214, 229, 383 as bazaar 5 as body 9 n. 24, 10, 39–40, 175–7, 210, 233

427

as castrated 285 as chorus 213–14 as circus 179–80, 207–8 as city of hills 14, 33, 70, 78, 214, 297, 299, 302–3, 304–5, 309, 313, 332 as cosmopolis 2–3, 46, 58 n. 111, 80, 138 as Eternal City 1–4, 7, 31, 103, 138, 153, 161, 165, 213 n. 4, 237, 257, 288, 295, 312, 328, 333; see also urbs aeterna as head (caput) 214, 216, 234 as metatext 7 as model for historical discourse 42–3 as mosaic 20, 23, 169, 303, 321 as museum 10, 207 as paradox 5, 33, 44 as person 211–37 as sewer 10, 202 as theme-park 10, 48–51 Augustan 3, 10–12, 17, 19 n. 51, 21–4, 26, 38, 44, 46, 50–1, 55–6, 62–101, 139, 151–2, 155, 157, 161, 166–7, 182, 194, 198, 244, 303 and empire 2–3, 10, 19, 29, 38, 52 see also imperialism Flavian 3, 23 n. 64, 53, 211–37 foundation of 3–4, 44–5, 50, 59, 70, 74, 76, 91, 97, 155, 240, 250–7 Neronian 3, 19, 21–3, 49, 51, 53–4, 167, 173 n. 7, 194 n. 64, 203, 299, 303 n. 20 Numan 24, 42, 45, 238–70 refoundation of 44, 70–1, 74, 153 Renaissance 1–3, 10, 17, 24, 30–3, 44–5, 56 n. 107, 58, 271–322 Romulean 24, 29, 42, 44–5, 238–70 Soviet Russian 17, 30, 32–3, 43, 323–52 Romulus 24, 29, 42, 44–5, 63–4, 70–1, 73–9, 81–4, 86, 95, 104, 109, 153, 155–6, 189 215, 231, 238–70 Rosselini, R. 356 Paisa 365 Roma Citta` Aperta 365–9, 379–80 R/OS_MM 4 n. 9, 6, 100 Rostovtseff, M. I. 325

428

General Index

Rubicon 212, 358 Rudd, N. 142 ruin, ruins 2, 10, 14, 19, 22–4, 32, 55–60, 99, 271–94, 313–18, 325, 327, 353–4, 383 Rumina 248–9 rus in harena 52 rus in urbe 28, 48–55, 301 Russia 26, 30–2, 49, 323–52 see also Soviet Russian Revolution 324, 326, 329, 336, 340–2 Rutilius Namatianus 1, 303 Sabines 63, 75–8, 81–4, 88, 95, 155, 254–6, 258, 260, 266, 268 de Sade, Marquis 161 sadism 47, 113, 115, 121–2, 128, 136, 139–42, 145–50, 161–2, 167, 357 St Peter’s Basilica 317, 320, 335, 353, 356 St Petersburg 18, 26, 32, 50, 64 n. 7, 169, 329–41 Alexander Column 337–8 Bronze Horseman 94, 334–5 Lyceum 336–7 Narva Triumphal Gates 338 Nevsky Prospect 332, 340 Okhta 332 Peter and Paul Fortress 332 Petrovskii Gate 332 Quadriga 338 St Isaac’s Cathedral 334–5 Summer Garden 330–2 Sallust 288 San Pietro in Vincoli 299 Santa Maria dei Miracoli 320 Santa Maria del Popolo 299, 320 Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence) 335 Santa Maria in Montesanto 320 Santa Sabina 299 satire, satura 26–8, 35, 37, 41–2, 48, 138–212 Saturn, Temple of 226 n. 37, 376 Scanozzi, V. 332 Schiesarro, A. 56 Scipio 120, 188–9, 242 Scott, R., Gladiator 23 Second Sophistic 13 n. 14, 42

Sejanus, 166, 222 n. 29, 224 n. 31, 288–90, 294 Jonson’s Sejanus 288–90 self-fashioning 12, 32, 37, 40 n. 89, 44, 47–8, 161, 165, 275–7, 292–4 see also subject Senaculum 201 Seneca the Elder 215–17, 232 Younger 337–8 Sergeenko, M. E. 348 Serres, M. 20 Sertorius Macro 290 sewers, effluent 10, 42 n. 90, 52, 87, 95, 185–6, 202, 210 see also Cloaca Maxima; excrement; urine Shakespeare, W. 34, 39, 273, 286, 290–4 Shanghai 2 Shchusev, A. 342 shouting subject 178 De Sica, V., Ladri di biciclette 366–7 sightseeing, sightseer, see tourist Silius Italicus 27 Silvestre, M. 121 simulacrum 20, 26, 50, 93 n. 70, 99, 154, 174 Situationist movement 4, 9 n. 24, 15, 53 n. 104 slavery, slaves 133, 171, 207, 211–2, 357 and rape 141–4, 148–50 in Soviet stories 323–6, 341, 345–6, 349–52 slippage 2, 42, 93 n. 70, 139, 180 socialist realism 43 Solov’ev, V. 329 Soviet Rome 17, 30, 32–3, 43, 323–52 Spanish Steps 368, 374 Sparta 10, 45, 261 Spartacus 325–6, 341, 348–52 spectacle 11 n. 30, 14, 46, 52–3, 91, 105, 133, 190, 208, 221, 314, 354–63, 369–70, 383–4 see also gaze; voyeur spectator, spectatorship 7–10, 14, 17–18, 23, 52, 95, 104–5, 229, 297, 313, 354–8, 361–3, 374, 383–4 see also eye; perspective Spenser, E. 271, 281 sportula 181, 185

General Index

429

Tiberius 237, 288–9, 294 Tibullus 7, 27, 139, 166 tourist, tourism 19, 31–4, 308–8, 313, 321–2, 360–8, 375–8 see also Grand Tour Trajan, Trajanic 21, 24 n. 66 Trajan’s (Dacian) Column 21, 299, 381 transgression 49, 88, 110, 126–9, 143, 155, 158–9, 161, 209, 231, 262 see also border; permeability transuectio 66, 89–97 Trastevere 367, 383 Trezzini, D. 332 triumph 12, 21, 66–7, 90–2, 93–5, 97, 155, 158, 167, 182, 203, 279, 291, 315, 318, 320, 332, 338, 339, 352 triumphator 90–1, 97, 182, 208 Troy, Trojan 10, 17, 24, 29, 44, 91–2, 102, 122, 195, 278 Turner, J. M. W. 316–17 Turnus 122, 137

spring(s) 19 Theban 42, 104, 106–7, 127 of Egeria, 54, 193, 196–200 see also water de Stae¨l, G. 320 Stalin, J. 341, 344–6, 350 Stasov, V. 337 Statius 21 n. 58, 27, 51–2, 54, 94, 201, 310 see also forest; rus in urbe statue(s) 88–97, 154, 159–60, 171, 181–3, 186, 198, 203, 229–31, 289–92, 308, 310–11, 313, 330, 334, 337–8, 356, 358, 376–7 Stites, R. 343 street(s) in elegy and satire 17–18, 36, 41, 44, 138–210 in Fellini, 359, 367–8, 383 street-corner, crossroads 141, 169, 180 subject, subjectivity, identity 6, 9–15, 17–18, 20, 32, 36–7, 39–45, 47–51, 56–8, 63, 83, 89–94, 97, 99–101, 108, 130–6, 138–40, 162, 175–8, 209, 237, 273–7, 280, 304 Subura 28, 186–7, 207 Suetonius 91, 114, 183, 222–3, 233, 337 Sulla 20, 93, 287 surreal 106, 116, 213 swamp, marsh 19, 47, 54, 63–5, 68, 78, 80–3, 89, 95, 97, 99, 252, 332 synchronicity 3, 10, 44, 58 n. 111, 96 synecdoche 70, 148, 172, 190, 193, 213, 231

Umbricius 41, 55, 60, 142, 162–4, 186, 191–202, 205–7, 209 unconscious 8–9, 12 n. 32, 14, 23, 60, 274–6, 280 Underworld 74, 84–5, 191–2, 195–6, 363–4 urbs aeterna 7, 44, 103, 138, 153, 161, 165, 295, 311–12 urine 175–7, 182–6, 190, 203–5 Utchenko, S. L. 347 utopia 17 n. 43, 23, 265, 346, 372

Tacitus 18, 38–9, 42–3, 122, 211–37, 329 Tarantino, Q., Kill Bill 146 Tarpeian Rock 227, 230–1, 308–10, 312 Tarquinius Priscus 20, 214, 232 Tarquinius Superbus 20, 86, 214 Tatius, Titus 85, 256, 258, 260 Terminus 45, 234, 245–68 Tertullian 357 theme park 10, 48–51 Thebes 10, 17, 24, 42, 46–7, 50–1, 102–37 Thomas, J. 314 Tiber 6, 15, 19, 85, 168, 174, 186, 246–7, 250, 297–8, 300–1

Valadier, G. 320 Varro 50–2, 65, 249, 253, 260, 265, 267 Vatican 174 Venice 18–19, 59, 295, 297, 331 Venturi, R. 5–6 Venus 158–9, 330 Genetrix, Temple of 21, 183 Vergil 33, 50–1, 80, 89, 91–2, 103–4, 118, 122–3, 137, 195, 302, 308–9, 312, 316, 337 Vespasian 181, 218, 304 n. 20 Vesta 234–5 Temple of 377 Via Appia 90, 168, 188, 192, 196, 201, 204, 373, 379

430

General Index

Via Cristoforo Colombo 378 Via dei Fori 377 Via dell’ Impero 365, 368, 376 Via Flaminia 69, 77, 186, 179–80, 187–8, 204, 219, 301, 313 Via Latina 187–8, 190 Via Sacra 222, 377 Via Trionfale 365 Via Veneto 353, 356–7, 381 Victor Emmanuel monument 26 n. 70, 97 Vicus Longus 184 Vidal, G. 19, 59–60, 383–3 Vienna 26 Villani, G. 285 Vitellius, Vitellians 38–9, 217–34 Vitruvius 19, 39 n. 88 void 9, 15, 37–8, 61, 67–8, 70, 84–5, 87–9 see also holes vortex 89, 180 voyeur 145, 374, 229, 237, 378, 382 see also gaze; spectator walker, walking, see flaˆneur walls 23, 32, 35–6, 44–5, 73, 90, 103, 175,

177–80, 185, 212, 216, 224, 226–7, 238, 252–4, 261–2, 265–6, 270, 278, 283, 287–8, 298–9 Washington, DC 26 water 18–19, 42, 46, 54, 64 n.7, 74, 86, 89, 94, 106–7, 124, 129, 186, 192, 194, 197–8, 232, 297, 301–2, 329 wholeness (lost) 18, 130, 134, 177–8, 275–6, 280–3, 293 of Rome 177, 287, 289, 293, 296, 314–16, 320–1 wilderness 17, 42, 52, 55, 102, 249–50 Wiseman, T. P. 62 n. 3, 71 n. 24, 245 World Trade Centre 7 n. 16 Yan(chevetskii), V. 341 Zapponi, B. 380 Zeitlin, F. 104 Zelinsky, F. F. 325 Zhebelev, S. A. 325 Zˇizˇek, S. 146

Index of Passages Discussed Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.14 311–12 Apollodorus Bibliotheca 3.5.4 125 n. 45 2.5.1 301 n. 9 Augustus Res Gestae (RGDA) 4.19–21 141, 153 14 91 n. 64 Cassius dio 52.26.1–2 92 55.14–22 115 n. 31 65.8 230 n. 44 65.16.5 224 66.24.3 237 n. 60 Cato De agri cultura praef. 2 50 Cicero Ad Atticum 2.17.3 182 4.1.5 213 8.11 120–1 De domo sua 100 225 De diuinatione 2.4 92 n. 66 De legibus 2.3 234 n. 57 2.4 29 De officiis 1.138 225 n. 35 De oratore 2.351–3 96 De republica 3.8–11 120 3.22 120

Catilinarians 1.33 76 n. 34 In Pisonem 52 212 Pro Caelio 11 92 n. 66 Claudian Panegyricus de sexto consulatu Honorii Augusti praef. 26 314 39–53 308–9 529–31 303 Corinna fr. 654 [PMG] 310 n. 35 Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.79.5 247 1.85.3 251 3.85.3 260 6.13.1–5 96, 97 n. 79 Euripides Bacchae 1333–9 Helen 68–163 Florus 1.38.21

124–5 n. 45 110 n. 22

214

Hesiod Works and Days 106–201 216 Horace Ars poetica 335 144 Epistles 1.1 27 1.1.1–3 187

432

Index of Passages Discussed

Horace (cont.) 2.1.194–209 261 n. 17 2.1.251 172 n. 6 Satires (Sermones) 1.1 27 1.2 37, 142–50, 161 1.2.1–6 143–4 1.2.24–36 144, 145, 147–50 1.2.41–6 144, 148 1.2.53–63 144–5 1.2.68–72 144, 149 1.2.86–9 147 1.2.116–18 144, 147, 149 1.2.128–33 145 1.4 27 1.5 192 1.6.104–5 192 n. 61 1.9.78 182 2.2.9 92 n. 66 2.6 166 2.6.17 172 n. 6 Epodes 16.1–2 56 Odes 1.8.1 92 n. 66 1.2.28 150 3.2.2 92 n. 66 3.24.51 92 n. 66 Hyginus Fables 6 125 n. 45 Juvenal Satires 1 178–83 1.5–6 197 n. 70 1.19–20 178 1.26–9 182, 183, 185 1.22–31 139, 141, 171–2, 182–3, 189 1.51 182 1.58–64 179–80, 204–5 1.95–126 180–1, 185 1.128 181–2 1.129–31 182–3, 203 1.155–7 167 1.165–71 140, 178, 187–8, 195 2.1–10 176 n. 18, 209–10

2.8 176 2.117–48 189 2.131–2 179 n. 23 2.142–8 188 n. 50 2.153–7 188–9 2.160–70 209–10 3 28, 37, 39, 40–1, 48, 54–5, 60, 141–2 3.8–10 197 n. 68 3.10–20 54–5, 191–201, 204 3.22 202 3.29–41 202 3.58–62 186–7 3.131–2 197 n. 69 3.138 205 3.232–314 162–5, 173 n. 7 4.37–8 211–12 5.55 190 5.104–6 186–7 6 174–5 6.4 198 6.264 170 n. 56 6.286–91 185 n. 43 6.292–3 199 6.306–13 183–5, 190 6.342–5 198 n. 74, 205 6.409–12 185–6 n. 44 6.542–7 200 n. 79 8.19–20 176 n. 18 8.142–52 203–4 8.155–62 202–3, 204–6 8.169–72 206, 209 8.173–84 206–7 8.199–210 189 n. 54 8.233 204 9.22–4 208 10.56–113 166 10.223–4 190 11.1–20 201 n. 80 11.116 198–9 11.154 197 n. 69 11.173–4 205 11.197 180 14.89–90 198 14.96–106 201 n. 79 14.256–64 208 16.47 188 n. 50

Index of Passages Discussed Lactantius Diu. Inst. 7.15.14–16

215–16

Livy 1.4.4 247 1.4.5 249 n. 28 1.5.7 109 n. 21 1.6.4 251 1.7.3–4 70–71, 73 1.8.1–2 71 n. 23 1.8.4–6 70–71, 73, 231 1.9.6–9 73–4 1.10.5–7 71 1.11.6–9 231 n. 46 1.12.1–13.5 37–8, 47–8, 63–4, 65, 68, 75–84, 88, 89, 93–5, 97, 99–100 1.12.1, 3–8 75–9, 80, 81, 82 1.12.8–10 82–3, 84 1.13.5 83–4 1.16.2 255 n. 39 1.19.4–21.3 195, 199–200 1.24–6 194–5 1.55.2–4 261 2.5.2 97 n. 79 2.7.11 225 n. 34 2.13 93 n. 67 2.20.12 95–6 2.42.5 95–6 4.20 73 n. 25 5.32–55 233 5.39.10 235 5.40.9–10 235 5.46.1–3 234–5 5.47 233 5.47.4 235 5.49.3 226 5.49.7 233 5.51.1–54.7 234 5.54.3 29 5.54.7 234 6.11–20 214 n. 7 6.16.2 227 n. 39 7.1.1–10 86 7.4.2–3 86 n. 53 7.6.1–6 37–8, 47–8, 64–5, 68, 80, 84–7, 88–9, 94–5, 97, 99–100, 227 8.13.9 93

433

Lucan 1.190–2 212 1.195–6 226–7, 303 n. 14, 310 3.245 186 n. 44 5.26–7 213 n. Martial 4.64 300–01 4.64.11–12 295 12.18 28 12.57 28 Nonnus Dionysiaca 37.56–60

246 n. 21

Ovid Amores 1.2 166–7 3.15.2–18 179 Ars amatoria 1.61–228 151–6, 158 1.61–6 151–2 1.67–74 152–5 1.75–134 155 1.119–25 155–6 Metamorphoses 1.89–93 119 n. 37 1.497–501 132 n. 59 1.181–245 113–16 1.199–205 111–13, 116 1.220–43 112–13 3.1–4.603 102–37 3.3–5, 7 46–7, 110–11, 116–19, 123, 127 3.6–162 42, 46–7, 49–50, 51, 106–8, 123–5, 127–9 3.141–2 125–6, 129 n. 52 3.157–62 107, 128 3.164–72 129 3.166–85 128 n. 51 3.175–6 125–6 3.178–93 128–9, 131–2 3.230 134 3.253–5 129 n. 52, 134–6 3.256–9 135–6 3.287–8 125–6 3.323–31 125–6 3.407–12 107–8

434

Index of Passages Discussed

Ovid (Cont.) 3.531 104 3.577–733 112–13 3.664–71 108 6.473–4 110 n. 23 6.635 110 n. 23 7.339–40 110 n. 23 8.477 110 n. 23 10.366–7 110 n. 23 13.409–10 232 n. 48 13.632–74 102 13.740–897 102 13.898–14.74 102 14.773–5 103, 109 n. 21 15.434–5 216 15.829–35 105 15.843–60 105 Tristia 1.5.69–70 303 n. 14 2 156–60, 162 2.105 136 2.121–38 136–7 2.207 156 2.279–96 158–60 4.10.89–90 126 Epistles from Pontus 2.8.19 136 Fasti 1.85–6 227 n. 39 2.47–50 267 2.411–13 249 n. 28 2.657–62 261–2 6.366 235 n. 58 Petronius Satyricon 119.58 216 n. 15 Plato Lysis 214c 142 Symposium 189c–93d 130 n. 56 201d–12a 130 n. 56 Pliny the Elder Natural History 3.67 312 28.15–18 214 n. 7

Plutarch Numa 42, 44–5 1.2 254 n. 37 2.3 257 n. 43 3.4 256 3.4–5 254 4.1 257 n. 41 7.1 258 15.6 259 n. 46 16.1–2 258–60, 266 n. 51 16.3–4 263–4 18–19 263 20.1 264 20.3–4 257 20.3–5 265 Publicola 10.2–4 225 n. 34 15.2 237 n. 60 Romulus 44–5 1.1 269–70 3.4–5 246, 258 n. 41 4.1 247 6.2 250 n. 29 7.2 250 n. 29 9.4 251 9.5 258 n. 44 10.1 259 11.1 251 12.1 253 n. 34 12.2–6 253 n. 35 12.3 253 12.6 253 14.1 265 n. 50 14.2 256 18 231 n. 46 18.6–7 255 23.5 262 27.2 259 29.1 256 n. 40 Theseus 1.1 42, 242–3, 252 1.2 243 1.3 253 n. 35, 254 n. 36 Thes.-Rom. Synkr. 1.1 266 Roman Questions 15 261, 266 n. 51 19 45, 263–4

Index of Passages Discussed 22 27 41 42 57

45, 263–4 265–6 45 263 n. 49 248–9

Propertius 4.1.1–4 305 n. 21 4.1.37 178 n. 22 Quintilian Inst. Or. 5.10.40 228 6.1.25–7 212 n. 2 10.93 26 Rutilius Namatianus De reditu suo 1.47–52, 66 1 1.197–8 303 Seneca De clementia 1.9 115 n. 31 Epistles 70 190 n. 56 Statius Siluae 51, 54 1.1 94 3.1.29–30 301 n. 9 4.2.20–2 310 Suetonius Augustus 31.5 183 Caligula 22 304 n. 20 Nero 31 304 n. 20 Vespasian 8 304 n. 20 8.5 233 Vitellius 15.4 223 Tacitus Annals 1.3 91 n. 64 1.8–10 122

1.65.7 212 n. 3 3.6.3 237 3.9.3 226 Histories 1.40.2 228 1.84.4 213 n., 235–6 3.34.1 232 3.38.1 226 n. 36 3.50 219 3.60 219 3.63 219 3.67.2–68 220–2 3.70.1 38, 223–4 3.71 229–32 3.71.1 226 3.72 38–9 3.72.1 233 3.72.2–3 231–2 3.74.2 234 3.75.1 232 3.78.1 219 3.79.1 234 3.82.2 219 3.83.2 233 3.84.4 224 4.53 235 4.54 38, 235 Tibullus 1.2.1–6 139 2.5.23 7 3.7.12–13 301 n. 9 Varro De re rustica 2.11.4–5 249 n. 27 3 51–2 3.13.1–3 52 De lingua Latina 5.8 247 n. 22 5.41 214 n. 7 5.148–50 88 n. 58 6.13 267 6.20 74 n. 30 Vergil Eclogues 50–1 Georgics 50–1

435

436 Aeneid 4.384–6 118 4.544–6 118 4.604–29 118 5.551–2 91 5.596–602 91 5.667–9 91 5.674 91 6.756–88 79–80 6.773–6 216 n. 14

Index of Passages Discussed 8.306–69 302–3 8.347–8 309 10.810–32 122 12.930–52 122 Vitruvius De architectura 19, 39 n. 88 6.41.1–2 227