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