This article engages with the bee as a social insect. The description of the hive in Book 4 of the Georgics persistently employs language suggestive of a human political community, but any sense of the autonomy of the bee-state is undermined by the external, controlling presence of the beekeeper. While Pliny the Elder treats the drones as the slave population of the bee community, Columella depicts the entire hive as enslaved to the beekeeper. Columella’s model suggests a division between worker bees and drones: the former equate to the good and willing slave; the latter to those slaves whom slaveholders ancient and modern demonize as growing fat through indolence and a refusal to work. When Vergil “erroneously” attributes the qualities of the drone and the robber-bee to what Aristotle presents as the worse sort of king bee, he holds up a mirror to the slaveholder who grows fat on the labor of the unfree.
A seventeenth-century didactic poem on Brazilian sugar, De sacchari opificio carmen (DSOC), offers a glimpse of the intersection between Atlantic slavery and the reception of the Georgics. This essay considers how Virgil’s poetics of slavery took on new life in the Americas, where it was used to sing about profit, sweetness, and the management of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Reading four representative passages from DSOC against a contemporary manual on plantation management, on the one hand, and against the Georgics, on the other, shows how planter poets can help us tune in to the murmur of ancient slavery in Virgil.
When Tertullian mocked Romans for dressing up criminals as Attis and Hercules to have them executed in the amphitheater, he was referring to the practice that Kathleen Coleman termed a “fatal charade.” The irony missed by Tertullian and his many interpreters lies in his scorning this mimicry while admiring the executed Christians who imitated Jesus. This paper argues that early Christian martyrdom was a reimagined form of a fatal charade. Unlike the Roman practice that was designed to humiliate the victims, Christians desired to become the god that they imitated. Contemporaneous anxieties concerning ontological blending through performance fueled the martyrological fantasy. By placing spectacular execution within the wider sphere of imperial and late antique performance culture, this paper demonstrates how the imitatio Christi in early Christian martyrdom can be understood as the result of the imaginative collation of fatal charades and transformative mimesis.
This article elucidates a disturbing enigma of Plato's thought: the idea that the happiest homoerotic lovers are the ones that do not consummate their love. An analysis of the central speech of the Phaedrus (243e-257b) reveals that Plato expressed that idea in the form of the paradox of "madness restrained." It is a love without sex because the soul of the philosophic lover, upon being reminded of the Form of Beauty by the sight of the beloved, is rationally possessed by the Form of S & ocirc;phrosun & ecirc; ("Self-Restraint"), which induces, instead of bodily pleasure, the divine practice of care. In order to justify such altruistic abstinence, the dialogue disambiguates s & ocirc;phrosun & ecirc; in a series of agonistic speeches, and thus subtly illustrates how this ancient Greek value could be variously co-opted in the field of erotics. I conclude that despite a prominent strand of interpretation, Plato's rhetorical paradox amounts to not much more than a sublimation of repression, and that this view was probably well received by his aristocratic audience because it is opposed to the liberal but decadent sexuality of the Athenian democratic ethos.
This article navigates the development of Hercules’ physical and psychological identity in Seneca’s Hercules Furens through the lens of affect theory (and germane theoretical approaches). By combining this theoretical framework with ancient philosophical and medical conceptions of the human body, Hercules’ fury is reinterpreted as an extreme example of embodied emotional experience. Thus, the borders between abstract and concrete appear blurred; Hercules’ “affective” objects—his weapons—become both prosthetic extensions of his body and hypostases of his emotions. By taking control of Hercules as a mind-body-object continuum, anger not only determines Hercules’ physical agency but also contributes to the reshaping of his identity tout court. The rupture of the distinctions between human affections and their concrete manifestations, between human agency and object agency, which characterizes the Hercules Furens leads us to question traditional (Stoic) notions of the unity of the subject, as well as definitions of (human) personhood.
Oedipus may be “modernity’s favorite ancient subject,” but modern interest in Oedipus has overwhelmingly concentrated on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. In this article, I shift the focus to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus to reveal previously unrecognized politics in both plays. Oedipus’ transformation from a dispossessed, monstrous figure to revered beneficiary of a hero-cult in Colonus highlights an enduring problem in the history of political thought: what is the utility of the singular individual to the political community? Two forms of political authority emerge from this problem of human utility. “Theban utility” presupposes communal needs and determines an individual’s utility in their terms. By contrast, the “Athenian politics of human utility” attends to Oedipus’ singular identity, the fluid nature of communal needs, the expansive and indeterminate nature of human utility, and the kinds of commitment that govern attention to these elements of political association. I then identify the significance of these forms of authority for readers situated in late modernity in two ways: through philosophical analysis and by tracing the manifestations of these modes of authority in the recent history of immigration, refugees, and Indigenous politics. In doing so, I reconceive utility as a resource for the dispossessed to move themselves across boundaries of exclusion. Governing the whole argument is a broadly Nietzschean interpretive strategy that advances the cause of Critical Antiquities.
This paper explores how imperial expansion operates as a vehicle for environmental change in Lucan’s account of Cato’s Libyan desert march in Pharsalia 9. Lucan’s attempts to preserve Cato’s ethical standing in light of his opposition to Caesarian imperialism lead the march to inhabit a colonial paradox: the march has all the markers of a colonial expedition, except for extractable resources or habitable territory. This conditions Lucan’s ostensible presentation of Libya, which, I argue, constructs what Johannes Fabian labels an allochronic discourse to frame Libya as a timeless Golden Age impervious to the Roman army. But the Roman incursion into Libya disrupts this framing, inducting Libya into Roman time. Ultimately, Libya’s winds and snakes repel the army, disrupting Cato’s Stoic worldview and setting a limit to Roman epic imperium. The Libyan desert serves as a test case for the Roman imperial project. Lucan displays a critical awareness of Libya as a place beyond Roman control, while paradoxically attempting to represent that place in his Roman epic.
This article analyzes the didactic method of the first book of Vergil’s Georgics to show that the poem habituates the reader to engage with the world of the farm as a landowner and enslaver. By comparing the Georgics to works of agronomy (Cato, Varro) and agricultural didactic (Hesiod) with which Vergil consciously aligns his poem, I show that Vergil invisibilizes slavery by omitting explicit discussions of enslaved persons or slave management while nevertheless amplifying those discussions’ discursive tendency to instrumentalize enslaved persons as tools or extensions of their enslaver, and thus to elide distinctions between them. I look closely at the modes of instruction Vergil uses in Georgics 1, dividing them broadly into the categories of “command” (active and passive commands; impersonal and gerundive constructions) and “observation” (third-person depictions of labor being performed). Vergil’s commands alternately obscure the agents of agricultural labor, displace the exercise of domination onto nonhumans or abstractions, and model the performances of epistemic mastery expected of a dominus in the agronomic tradition. The observations, though generally further removed from agricultural labor hierarchies, similarly privilege knowledge derived from surveillance or management. Such a poetics naturalizes slavery despite (or even because of) its apparent absence in the text.
On the issue of slave visibility in Latin poetry, it is tempting to see the Moretum—a 122-line hexameter poem about a peasant and his domestic servant making breakfast, tangled up in the Appendix Vergiliana—as the straight-talking, humble antidote to Vergil’s Georgics. On digging deeper, however, the poem’s representation of enslaved labor is hardly straightforward. It is instead a vortex of the “nearly,” “almost,” “not quite,” and “sort of” qualifications that constitute the wider limits of enslaved representation in the hexameter verse of ancient Rome. This article reads the Moretum through this asymptote, using it to think through the thorny problems thrown up by reading slavery in Latin literature: visibility, invisibility, and the modern critic’s censoriousness chief among them.
Although echoes of the Georgics feature prominently in Book 10 of Columella’s De re rustica, the same hesitancy over the representation of laborers is absent. Such mystification is antithetical to the demands of a systematic and comprehensive treatise on agriculture. As such, this paper examines the poetics of slavery in Columella’s Book 10 and explores the reason for the prominence of enslaved laborers. I argue that the poem forms a protreptic to horticulture, part of Columella’s solution to the damaging social, cultural, and economic effects of the dependence upon enslaved labor in Roman agriculture outlined in the preface to the De re rustica. Ultimately, the poem’s emphasis on labor encourages elite participation in the agricultural enterprise. The first part of the essay examines how laborers in the poem, especially the gardener (holitor), implement Columella’s pedagogical program. The second part shows how Columella conceptually unites the garden space and agricultural estate. I argue that Columella’s reflections on the exercise of poetic labor and experimentation are a means of teaching theoretical principles of agriculture: the poem implicates the reader in horticultural labor, showing its importance over pure textualism. Finally, I argue that the pleasure derived from the garden possesses economic benefit: living in accordance with nature encouraged the presence of the master, which in turn promoted sound principles of rational management.
The absence of explicit references to enslaved persons in the Georgics can be explained by its position as a “middle” poem between the Bucolics and the Aeneid: while the former highlights characters of servile status and the latter royalty, the Georgics centers persons who fall in between, excluding representations of figures from both extremes. Even so, the institutions of Roman slavery make their presence felt in the poem through its obsessive focus on themes of masterliness and control. The narrator sees the world as a dominus would and exhorts the reader to exercise dominion over subordinate beings. The one thing ranked higher than control over others is self-control. The Aristaeus epyllion recapitulates in narrative form the lesson of what comes before it.
An unusual Greek helmet at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology has confused scholars for decades. The helmet looks very much like a Corinthian helmet, the most popular helmet type in Archaic Greece, except for the fact that it was constructed in two halves. A seam runs vertically from the tip of the nose to the back of the neck guard, and the helmet is held together by a series of rivets. This paper presents an archaeometallurgical study of this object and explores how it challenges our paradigmatic approach to the material culture of ancient Greek warriorhood by engaging with important concepts from disability studies. The results indicate that construction of the Hearst helmet required less time and technical know-how, but more labor and fuel, than the more common one-piece Corinthian helmet type. Envisioning and mapping this process provides a window into the thought processes and preferences of the metalsmiths, their clients, and the combatants who wore these helmets into battle. In this case, the Hearst helmet was probably used in combat at least twice before a blow, preserved on the upper right side of the helmet, likely incapacitated the hoplite. Through the lens of disability theory, this paper explores how the Hearst helmet both adheres to and transgresses our taxonomic expectations. The helmet is indeed different, but it is far from unusual. Ancient armor had less to do with utility and defensive capabilities than we might think, but it is still a vital window into the ways in which warriors crafted their identities through the objects they bore.
The Vision of Dorotheus (P.Bodmer 29) is a remarkable and underexplored text which offers a fascinating glimpse at an early, experimental style of Christian epic poetry in the fourth-century Greek world. Found near Dishna, Egypt, in 1952 on a codex containing several other poems and hymns composed in a rhetorical style, it is written in the voice of a Christian who names himself Dorotheus, “the son of Quintus the poet,” and recounts his visionary, violent experience as a doorkeeper in God’s heavenly palace. Scholarship on the poem to date has largely focused on issues of dating and historical context. In this article, I use the notion of a relationship between Dorotheus and Quintus Smyrnaeus, author of the third-century epic the Posthomerica, as a prism for a literary analysis of the poem and a means to perceive and appreciate the radical novelty of its poetics.
In this article I examine the Letter of Aristeas, a Hellenistic Jewish text which narrates the events surrounding the translation of the Hebrew Torah into Greek at the command of King Ptolemy Philadelphus. I explore the various Alexandrian and Jewish means for manufacturing the marvelous that are depicted in the text, focusing upon the material, technical, and artistic strategies employed, the specific impact upon audiences, and the relationships constructed between mortals and the divine. I demonstrate that the text engages deeply with—and brings into dialogue—both Greek and Jewish conceptualizations of wonder. Moreover, I argue that this juxtaposition of different modes of wonder production has a cultural-political point. Alexandrian works generate a deceptive form of wonder that has a negative influence on observers, whereas Jewish forms of wonder provide a positive counterpoint that presents Jewish worship as an entirely evident and understandable practice generating an appropriate awe for God. The text critiques Greek wonder and instead promotes Jewish worship and the Jewish liturgy as the most powerful marvel. Such a cultural politics, I conclude, raises questions about the effect the cultural product at the center of this narrative—the Jewish Law in Greek—will have on its users.
This article examines public displays of reluctance during Roman electoral campaigns. It traces an uncommon but observable trend in which certain individuals claimed not to be canvassing for or desirous of the political office to which they were subsequently elected. Using the election of Scipio Aemilianus to the consulship of 147 BCE as a point of departure, the article argues that staged reluctance was employed as a canvassing strategy by several prominent Roman politicians. Reluctance could be feigned to circumvent electoral restrictions, to enhance the reputation of the candidate, or even as a route to victory through reverse psychology. Staged reluctance was therefore an unconventional but effective republican canvassing technique. The Roman people, for their part, were presented as the primary agents in the election. The people were capable of creating a magistrate, even if the latter had not registered as an official candidate, with apparently spontaneous manifestations of popular will. This article examines how the electorate could come to vote for a non-candidate (part I) and why a non-candidate might claim or feign reluctance (part II). It concludes with an afterword on Augustus' employment of this republican phenomenon (part III).
As has often been remarked, writing was vital in Cicero's ambitious project of self-fashioning and the canonization of his oratory. Through writing, Cicero was able to overcome the problems associated with his novitas and to transform his oratory into a paradigm by constructing texts as replacements of his embodied presence. This paper complicates constructionist approaches towards Cicero's self-fashioning by reflecting on Cicero's self-citing from his poetic texts in his theological trilogy. What makes citational practices compelling is how they affect the citing agent's subjectivity through dynamic processes of assimilation and distancing triggered by the replication. Methodologically, the complexity of these processes unsettles the possibility of approaching the citational episode as the expression of a single, self-contained individual. Matters get even more complicated when agents like Cicero cite themselves through other figures and include a variety of remarks and observations along with their citation (see Balbus in the De natura deorum and Quintus in the De divinatione). My analysis reveals that each bit of text cut out from one work and inlaid into another contains manifold links to the original context, to other textual bits, to Cicero's past and present, to other agents, and to the new text, simultaneously. What this means from a subjective point of view is that our textual Cicero does not emerge as a unitary identity but as a key node of transactions constituted by multiple realities and subjectivities. This multiplicity frustrates any attempt to recompose Cicero and his existence into a neat puzzle; however, self-citing creates a space where the subjectivities constituted by their relationship with the citation come to be condensed into textual substances. Ultimately, Cicero's texts are less a straightforward replacement of his embodied presence than an emotionally dense "remnant" of his attempts to salvage a world going under.
This article shows that Thucydides is deliberately enigmatic about the causal effects of his speeches, and that this enigma is central to understanding his account of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. First, it shows that Thucydides was fascinated by the way speeches might not only illuminate events but also contribute to causing them. This ambiguous aspect of the speeches has been underappreciated in recent scholarship, but it is a theme to which the historian frequently returns. Second, the article shows that Thucydides explores this ambiguity in particular detail through the debates in Book 1. Using echoes of the "truest explanation" from 1.23.6 in the speeches, Thucydides suggests that the war might have started through a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than-as some recent scholarship has suggested-self-fulfilling perception. Finally, this article suggests a new reading of 1.23.6, which reflects the ambiguous nature of the speeches in the ambiguous term pi rho omicron phi alpha sigma iota s, again hinting at the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This article therefore challenges not only the idea of the "Thucydides Trap," which continues to dominate conceptions of Thucydides among political scientists, but also the way all readers of his work approach both Book 1 and the role of the speeches in general.
From the sixth through the mid-fourth century BCE, many Greek communities used an eight-year cycle or epsilon nu nu epsilon alpha tau eta rho iota sigma (literally "nine-year," by inclusive Greek reckoning) to intercalate civil calendars, which were lunar in nature. Such calibration kept lunar calendars aligned with the longer solar year. This study, the first article on the enneateris in its own right, has two aims: to assemble evidence from across the Greek world for the enneateris, and to demonstrate how the enneateris helped coordinate local, regional, and Panhellenic calendars through interlocking festival rites. New documentary evidence allows us to understand this more clearly than ever before, and to make sense of an important social, religious, and astronomical mechanism by which individuals and communities reckoned time and ensured that local calendars maintained synchronicity with one another and with the seasons. The study bridges work on early Greek scientific knowledge and socioreligious institutions, while transcending modern distinctions between the two realms of discourse.
