Holoka, 'Roman Literature and Ideology: Ramus Essays for J.P. Sullivan', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9511
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9511-holoka-roman
@@@@95.11.4, Boyle, ed., Roman Literature and Ideology
A.J. Boyle, ed., Roman Literature and Ideology: Ramus Essays
for J.P. Sullivan. Bendigo, Australia: Aureal Publications,
1995. Pp. 269. ISBN 0-949916-12-9.
Reviewed by James P. Holoka, Foreign Language Department
-- Eastern Michigan University
fla_holoka@emuvax.emich.edu
This Festschrift for J.P. Sullivan, who died in 1993, opens
with an interesting personal memoir of the man, his career, and
his personality by Boyle (pp. 6-11). Appended to this is an
exhaustive and very welcome list of Sullivan's publications and
broadcasts (pp. 11-23). Eleven essays follow.
John Henderson, "Hanno's Punic Heirs: Der Poenulusneid des
Plautus" (pp. 24-54). This is a clever (and intentionally messy)
treatment of an unpromising subject, the Poenulus ("when
it is not being slatered, it is konstanly passed by"). It casts
on Plautus's least beloved play the light of a verbal pyrotechnic
display: the specific density of its polyglot puns, embedded in
tortuous sentences, is Joycean. This style of presentation is
delectable for ten pages, cloying by the twentieth, and
nauseating by the thirtieth. Style aside, Henderson makes
valuable points about the subversive character of Plautus's play,
something unnoticed by critics preoccupied with exposing flaws in
its plot structure and signs of maladroit use of sources. He
contends that Plautus deliberately makes a mess of things (viz.,
plot and character conventions of New Comedy) to shake up his
audience by challenging its expectations of the genre qua art
form and qua social criticism. In particular, the automatic
privileging of the father, patria potestas--the social
reality that so dependably underlay the action of most Roman
comedies--is here manifested in unexpected and subversive ways:
"For once, 'Dad' plays the Handydandy messing about in the local
knocking-shop, he helps a son who breaks and enters a brothel to
steal one tart from a Jack of--Clubs, and a second from
some loopy dealer. All so that pater can have for pay-off
a well-stacked pair of bimbos and a toy-boy clambering all over
him .... Testing the limits of the patriarchal family-structure
and its halo of sanctimony, every home a harem of incest and
emporium of sex, every father a Sheikh short of a ship of the
desert" (p. 53). All in all, a daring interpretation, daringly
expressed, of a neglected play.
Thomas N. Habinek, "Ideology for an Empire in the Prefaces of
Cicero's Dialogues" (pp. 55-67). Habinek examines the prefaces
of De Oratore, Tusculan Disputations, De
Finibus, and De Officiis to disclose a consistent and
novel ideological agenda in Cicero's musings on the function of
rhetoric in Roman society. He offers an incisive demonstration
that Cicero seeks to ensure the authority of a specific segment
of the aristocracy by "the expropriation of the cultural capital
of a conquered people, namely the Greeks" (p. 55), and that, in
so seeking, he deprecates the practical political aspects
(utilitas) of rhetoric in favor of its grandeur
(magnitudo) as the true mark of distinction in Roman
society. Cicero even flirts with the notion that eloquence
per se confers authority beyond that derived from the
rival field of military achievement. Furthermore, he "takes it
for granted that Rome has supplanted Greece as the locus of
authorisation in matters cultural" (p. 58). In co-opting the
heritage of Greek rhetoric and philosophy, the Roman
literati assume the role of beneficent guardians, assuring
the safe transmittal of culture through succeeding generations.
The cultivated language of the educated, right-minded
intelligentsia that Cicero addresses lends it solidarity and
empowers it "to formulate the unifying myths and protocols for
society as a whole" (p. 65). Cicero in his rhetorical treatises
invited readers, in both his own time and the subsequent imperial
era, to countenance and support an ideology of culture as the
preeminent means to social control and domination.
J.L. Penwill, "Image, Ideology and Action in Cicero and
Lucretius" (pp. 68-91). "Images abound," begins Penwill, in this
astute counterpoising of image-as-ideological-icon (Cicero) and
image-as-physical-emanation (Lucretius). Penwill argues that
this is not just a matter of discrete semantic fields. Cicero in
the De Re Publica, as elsewhere in his writing, holds up
idealized figures from the glorious Roman past as (obvious)
examples for contemporary politicians to emulate, but "he also
invites us to see in them a reflection of himself as the author
... applying his Greek philosophical learning to present an
imago of Rome as the ideal state" (p. 72). Such an
enterprise was foredoomed by the glaring disparity between
idealized past and corrupt and debased present political
realities. Lucretius, Penwill contends, applied a powerful
philosophical solvent to the ideologically charged images
fashioned by Cicero. For Lucretius's elaborate presentation of
the Epicurean theory of visual perception unveiled the true
nature of things: images are mere physical emanations,
indispensable of course to visual sensation, but, like all
existent objects (sc. composed of atoms), undirected by any
princeps deus or other controlling moral force. To see an
ethical or political imperative in the images of past patriots is
merely to engage in self-delusion: "We perceive the
imagines of our ancestors (historical or literary) because
our minds are 'prepared' to receive them .... The mind is
creating its own home video show .... The dead tell us nothing
apart from what we choose to put in their mouths" (p. 80).
Patrick Sinclair, "Political Declensions in Latin Grammar and
Oratory, 55 BCE-CE 39" (pp. 92-109). Sinclair traces a sequence
of change in rhetorical theory in works of Cicero (De
Oratore), Caesar (De Analogia), and Seneca the Elder
(Controversiae, Suasoriae) that paralleled change
in the rules of competition for social and political prestige in
the transition from Republic to Empire. Cicero emerges as "an
outspoken proponent of unfettered individual liberty for members
of the ruling elite" (p. 92). The right sort of education
secured what was an (eventually) almost automatic mastery
(consuetudo) of diction--elegantia--and thereby
admission to political privilege and high social standing.
Caesar, for his own political motives, espoused in his
theoretical work, De Analogia, and actually displayed in
his Commentaries, a plain style, "in which--unlike
Cicero--an individual orator does not call attention to himself
in order to increase his political power--which is to say, an
orator's ambitions and abilities should not challenge Caesar's
predominance" (p. 94). Such a program additionally gained Caesar
the goodwill and support of provincials "by relieving their
anxieties about 'fitting in' on the level of language skills" (p.
95). Augustus inherited and perpetuated these attitudes and
policies, so that, already in Seneca, we see the new presumptions
and prescriptions firmly entrenched and oratory institutionalized
within the limits imposed by conditions of political life under
the principate. The competition now is for approval and
laudatory epithets (primus, pulcherrimus) in an
arena--formalized rhetorical debate--that posed no threat to the
political authorities. From this vantage point, Cicero's
eloquence was an unattainable archetype, his spirit of
libertas a cautionary model.
Maria Wyke, "Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love
Elegy" (pp. 110-128). Wyke well achieves two goals: (1) a review
of the influence of feminist gender theory on currently evolving
critical views of Roman elegy, and (2) significant refinement of
prevailing gender-oriented criticism of the genre. Wyke
considers especially the meaning of the presence of the poetry of
Sulpicia in the Tibullan corpus and the constitution of the
narrative voice in Propertian elegy as effeminate in character.
In a genre formerly (naively) thought to be "obstinately male,"
Wyke sees the political or ideological implications of narrative
feminization as proceeding from "the delineation of male sexual
submission rather than female sexual dominance" (p. 119). In
this, she differs Judith Hallett, whose essay "The Role of Women
in Roman Elegy: Counter-culture Feminism," Arethusa 6
(1973) 103-24, inaugurated the explication of gender play in
Latin love elegy. Wyke concludes with reflections on the
function of elegy as a social technology, an "institutionalised
system of representation" that served to construct but also to
defy ("interrogate") traditional gender differentiation in a
particular segment of Roman society.
Carole Newlands, "The Ending of Ovid's Fasti" (pp. 129-143).
Newlands begins by pointing out that the truth about political
and cultural ideology in the Augustan era is complicated.
Pace Syme and more recently (and more subtly) Zanker,
Augustus should not be seen as "the autocratic controller of an
essentially monologic ideology" (p. 129). Newlands backs up this
contention by a careful, highly suggestive examination of the
ending of Ovid's Fasti, stressing the ambiguities of the
reference to the Temple of Hercules Musarum. She shows that
Ovid's allusions to the restorer of the Temple, L. Marcius
Philippus, his wife Atia, his daughter Marcia (wife of Paullus
Fabius Maximus, Ovid's great friend and Tiberius's bitter enemy)
problematize the passage by involving it in the dynastic
complexities and perils of the time. We do not in fact have to
do with bald praise for the imperial program of political,
cultural, and religious renewal along approved ideological lines.
Newlands also discloses uncertainties implied by Ovid's
intertextual resonance of closing passages in the Amores,
Horace's fourth book of Odes, Propertius's fourth book of
Elegies, and Ennius's Annales (in their
fifteen-book first edition). These lend a distinctly
self-reflexive aspect to a passage that "provides a final
demonstration of Ovid's deep-seated ambivalence towards an
ideological system that his poem both appropriates and resists"
(p. 141). Newlands discerns unsettling intricacies in Ovid's
response to ideological pressures in the coy and cryptic ending
of the Fasti.
Gareth Schmeling, "Quid Attinet Veritatem per Interpretem
Quaerere? Interpretes and the Satyricon" (pp.
144-168). Schmeling begins by remarking on the power of the
Satyricon to hold the reader, a function of Petronius's
"complete control of its language: the coercive strength of his
rhetoric encourages the adventurous reader to carry though to the
end, even if some of the subject matter is disturbing" (p. 144).
Also coercive is the impulse to interpret (and to evaluate) that
the work provokes. Schmeling presents a nifty historical sketch
of critical response to the Satyricon from ancient times
to the twentieth century, "a chronology of changing attitudes in
[its] readers" (p. 151), attitudes typically both moralistic and
highly subjective. More objective critics (he names Sullivan,
Zeitlin, and Slater) have argued that the Satyricon is in
fact very difficult to interpret and that "that difficulty is
probably intentional" (probably is nice). Schmeling
elaborates on reasons for this circumstance and asks whether "the
text of the Satyricon say[s] anything about interpretation
or ... interpreters" (p. 156). In the most original part of the
essay, he examines scenes in which characters interpret language,
signs, sounds, images, etc., through the exercise of one or more
of their five senses. Though he provides many interesting
explications here, Schmeling rather anticlimactically concedes
that "examples of interpretation within the Satyricon do
not seem to shed much light on interpretation of the
Satyricon" (p. 164). He concludes with the good news that
"partially successful approaches to interpretation" (p. 165)--all
we can hope for--are no obstacle to an audience's enjoyment of
the work.
Martha A. Malamud, "Happy Birthday, Dead Lucan: (P)raising the
Dead in Silvae 2.7" (pp. 169-198). Malamud argues that
Silvae 2.7, which merges "aspects of a consolatory poem
and a birthday ode" (p. 170), engages in a profound intertextual
dialogue about literary and ideological issues. Statius is not
simply praising "his young, Roman, aristocratic, idealistic and
manly predecessor" (p. 171). By her discriminating scrutiny of
passages evoked from the Bellum Civile, Malamud shows
again and again that Statius is preoccupied with Lucan's text and
particularly with Lucan's own ambivalence about his goals and
motivations in writing poetry. Allusions in Silv. 2.7
that might seem to be straightforward homage to Lucan are
actually deliberately skewed to convey criticism and
qualification. Statius is shown to be mindful of Lucan's
disturbing awareness that "writing about Caesar makes him somehow
complicit with and analogous to Caesar" (p. 182). Ideology--even
ideology eschewed--persists like a virus. Such is the dilemma
faced by authors (Ennius, Vergil, Lucan, Silius Italicus) who set
out to write history through epic. Malamud concludes with a
judicious discussion of how Statius in the Thebaid is and
is not able to write a different sort of epic; she focuses on the
recusatio at Theb. 1.15-40 and the epilogue of the
epic in Book 12--the latter neatly correlated with passages in
Horace and Lucretius shown to be germane in unexpected ways.
D.P. Fowler, "Martial and the Book" (pp. 199-226). Fowler
challenges the majority view among critics that, to be properly
appreciated, Martial's poems must understood to have appeared
first in small collections or "brochures." Peter White, a
leading proponent of this libellus theory, has argued that
only thus can we make sense of dedications and other allusions to
the circumstances of presentation or publication that are odd or
illogical in the context of the conventional published books of
Martial's corpus. Fowler devotes the bulk of the article (pp.
204-218) to a case-by-case rebuttal of White's interpretations of
individual poems. The persuasiveness of these counterarguments
depends on the cogency of many discrete alternative
interpretations (too detailed to rehearse here). Throughout,
Fowler cautions against reducing the scope of the poems' meaning
to dimensions consistent with misguided assumptions about modes
and motives of publication: "the poems are not logs of social
relations, but texts which simulate and construct a social world
whose textual evidence is brought before the reader at every
turn" (p. 219). Taking the books of Martial to have been
published in their present form, the reader will be better able
to grasp and evaluate the poems' textual richness and
sophistication. Fowler concludes with interesting specific
examples of how Martial fashions rather than simply reflects his
world.
Martin M. Winkler, "Alogia and Emphasis in Juvenal's
Fourth Satire" (pp. 227-249). Alogia as in chapters 24-25
of the Poetics, where Aristotle discusses the importance
of the irrational to the effectiveness of tragedy.
Emphasis as in Book 9 of the Institutio Oratoria,
where Quintilian discusses the rhetorical tactic of "inverting
the surface meaning of what is being said toward its underlying
hidden meaning" (p. 235). Winkler shows how Juvenal in his
fourth Satire, on the ceremonial delivery of a fantastic
gift-fish to Domitian, ingeniously sustains a protracted and
intricate exhibition of the topos of the mundus inversus.
He is especially good on language and imagery. Thus the
adjective privatis at line 66 means both (on the surface)
"private" or "personal" and (by rhetorical emphasis)
"deprived" or "despoiled." The fisherman who surrenders his
marvelous catch thus simulates humility while insinuating
disgruntlement. Domitian himself comes in for special
(mis)treatment in the satire: he will devour the fish and in so
doing take the bait; he must hurry lest the fish suffer literal
rot (and his administration further, fatal, moral decay). "Even
the manner of Domitian's death is analogous to the eventual fate
of his fish.... Domitian's body was cut to pieces [Procopius,
Anec. 8.13-20] .... Similarly the turbot ... will
eventually have been carved for dinner" (244). Winkler's
reliance on Aristotle and Quintilian for theoretical entree into
the environment of purposeful double signification in Juvenal 4
is shrewd and productive.
A.J. Boyle, "Martialis Redivivus: Evaluating the
Unexpected Classic" (pp. 250-269). This is "The First J.P.
Sullivan Annual Lecture in Classics," delivered in March 1994 at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Sullivan was
Professor for the last fifteen years of his life (1978-1993). In
it, Boyle pays tribute to Sullivan for the success of his
Martial: The Unexpected Classic (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1991) in restoring Martial to the canon of classics
that reward serious scholarly study and literary critical
attention. He traces the evolution of Sullivan's interest in
Martial and identifies distinctive strengths of his revolutionary
study: Sullivan provides penetrating accounts of "the sociology
of Martial's life and times" (p. 252); Martial's place in the
traditions of epigram and satire in antiquity; "his poetry's
thematic complexity and ... coherence"; his "sexual attitudes ...
his humanity, humour, imagery, wit, language, form, metre and
poetic ambivalence"; and 1900 years of Nachleben. Boyle
goes beyond (very perceptive and pithy) rehearsal of the merits
of Sullivan's work to map areas that "present Martial scholars
may wish to investigate further in collaborative disagreement
with this 'landmark' study" (p. 253). Specifically, he calls for
more attention to intertextuality--the exploration of dynamic
relations between Martial's poetry and that of certain literary
antecedents: among other examples, Epigram 1.1 is shown to
gain meaning by comparison with Catullus 1 and Ovid,
Tristia 4.10. Boyle also (oh so respectfully) detects a
failing in Sullivan's lack of concern with "intratextuality" or
"the semiotics of poem juxtaposition and of a book's entire
structure" (p. 264). Alertness to the effect of the order of
poems ensures a better appreciation of, for example, ironic
undercutting, as in Epigrams 6.2 and 6.4, where the
seeming praise for Domitian's renewal of the lex Julia de
adulteriis coercendis complicates the reader's understanding
of the intent behind 6.3 on the expected birth of a child to
Domitia Longina, Domitian's wife. Boyle's essay adds to the
luster of Sullivan's work--already recognized as epochal in its
transformation of our assessment of Martial--by indicating
avenues it opens to constructive critical reaction and further
interpretive refinements.
More than most Festschriften, this one evinces a definite
consistency, not so much in subject matter ("ideology" is a
usefully elastic thematic envelope) as in critical tenor and
theoretical outlook. Its contributors have paid fitting homage
to Sullivan, whose lively mind, scholarly acumen, and
exhilarating prose will be sorely missed by all who love Roman
literature.