Roman Literature, Gender and Reception

Domina Illustris

Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, Judith Perkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135948139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This cutting-edge collection of essays offers provocative studies of ancient history, literature, gender identifications and roles, and subsequent interpretations of the republican and imperial Roman past. The prose and poetry of Cicero and Petronius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid receive fresh interpretations; pagan and Christian texts are re-examined from feminist and imaginative perspectives; genres of epic, didactic, and tragedy are re-examined; and subsequent uses and re-uses of the ancient heritage are probed with new attention: Shakespeare, Nineteenth Century American theater, and contemporary productions involving prisoners and veterans.

Comprising nineteen essays collectively honoring the feminist Classical scholar Judith Hallett, this book will interest the Classical scholar, the ancient historian, the student of Reception Studies, and feminists interested in all periods. The authors from the United States, Britain, France and Switzerland are authorities in one or more of these fields and chapters range from the late Republic to the late Empire to the present.

Part I
Roman Literature

1
Cicero and the Alien

Erich S. Gruen

Abstract. Cicero’s comments about foreigners are notoriously disparaging. They are regularly cited as exemplary of Roman attitudes toward Asian peoples like Phoenicians, Syrians, Jews, Phrygians, Carians, Cappadocians, Egyptians, Carthaginians, Gauls, Spaniards and Africans. Did Cicero regularly denigrate non-Romans, find foreigners offensive and degenerate, or, worse, construct them as barbaric aliens in order to call attention to the Romans’ own identity and their superiority? This paper scrutinizes the circumstances of Cicero’s pronouncements on “barbarians” and discloses a more shifting, ambiguous and variable quality, often dictated by requirements in the speeches and philosophical treatises. Cicero believes in the superiority of Rome over other nations, but not a superiority founded on ethnic difference. Cicero argues that the Romans excel rather in piety and acquiescence in divine governance.

The Romans had a confident sense of their own distinctiveness, their superiority over other nations and their place in the world. The articulation of that self-confidence could take a variety of forms. One in particular has gained considerable attention: the framing of national character by contrast with the practices, behavior and qualities of other nations and peoples. The collective sense of Romanness, the values that defined Romans, should, in principle, emerge most sharply by setting them in opposition to non-Romans, by demonstrating the deficiencies and drawbacks of those who did not share Roman aspirations and ideals, by isolating the alien and insulating the integrity of Romanitas.

On that score, Cicero has served as prime witness, his remarks on the topic of the outsider frequent, pointed and potent. Indeed, one can readily collect the sneers, stereotypes, calumnies, caustic comments and disparaging assessments that spook about in the Ciceronian corpus.

Greeks might be deployed as the most convenient foils. Cato Maior had long before voiced a celebrated antithesis: “the words of the Greeks issue from their lips; those of the Romans come from the heart” (Plut. Cato Mai. 12.5). Cicero carried the contrast a step further, juxtaposing Greek levitas with Roman gravitas.¹ But how representative is that statement? In fact, it flags a problem right away. The lines of differentiation are hardly clear-cut. As we know, Cicero’s own attitude (and Cato’s) toward Greek culture and Greeks was ambiguous, fraught with tortured efforts both to embrace and to distance Hellenism. Fluctuation and vacillation hold sway. That subject has already received extensive discussion and can be set aside.²

A sharper and cleaner contrast suggests itself—outside the Hellenic world and in the realm of the “barbarian.” The defining characteristics of the Romans that give them genuine distinctiveness should, one might expect, emerge unmistakably when pitted against the barbarous “Other.” And indeed the bulk of Cicero’s carping cavils disparage distant easterners and westerners.

Asians fall frequently under his strictures. The best way to improve a Phrygian, he says, is to whip him. The ultimate insult one could deliver was to label an individual the worst of Mysians. Carians are so worthless that they are suited only to be subjects of human experiments (Cic. Flacc. 65). Cappadocians are emblematic for stupidity, tastelessness and a low form of humanity (Cic. Red Sen. 14). Syrians and Jews are peoples born for servitude (Cic. Prov. Cons. 10). Cicero targets Jews directly as addicted to “barbarian superstition” (Cic. Flacc. 67). Sardinians come from Phoenician stock, which is bad enough. But worse still, Phoenicians themselves rejected them and abandoned them on that disagreeable island (Cic. Scaur. 42). Elsewhere Cicero lumps Gauls, Spaniards and Africans together: they are all monstrous and barbaric nations (Cic. Q. Fr. 1.1.17). Egyptians were altogether beyond the pale. Their beliefs amounted to dementia, hopelessly irresolute and ignorant of the truth (Cic. Nat. Deor. 1.43). How else to describe religious convictions that hold animals and monsters to be sacred or a people so depraved that they worship ibises, cats, dogs and crocodiles? (Cic. De Rep. 3.14). Carthaginians carry the reputation of faithlessness and treachery—not to mention cruelty and savagery.³ Gauls are no better, possibly worse. Not only are they inveterate enemies of Rome, but they wage war against all shrines and everything sacred and holy (Cic. Font. 30, 43–44, 49). The people are a despicable lot. Even the noblest of the Gauls does not rise to the level of the meanest Roman (Cic. Font. 26–27). The list of libels is long.

What is to be inferred from this cascade of calumnies? Did Roman intellectuals, Cicero foremost among them, regularly disparage non-Romans, find foreigners offensive or degenerate, or, worse, construct them as barbaric aliens in order to call attention to those qualities that defined the Romans’ own identity and their superiority over other peoples of the Mediterranean?⁴ Did Cicero strive to secure civic unity by separating the outsider from the constructed value-system of the insider? As one eminent scholar puts it, “if there is any group of provincials Cicero admired, I am not aware of it.”⁵

Scholarship has gone too far in that direction. To fasten upon Cicero the label of bigotry or contemptuous chauvinism is simplistic and misguided. Ciceronian expressions move in more than one direction, and the attitudes communicated cannot be reduced to blind prejudice.

A methodological issue requires emphasis. Purple passages from Cicero are frequently cited in works on Roman perceptions of the alien, but the gathering of such testimonia is invariably piecemeal and fragmented. Cicero devoted no treatise to this subject, neither in general nor in regard to any ethnic group. Hence citations from his work are invariably fragments, often torn from context, and quoted as if they were considered judgments, even illustrative of broader Roman conceptualization. To treat this miscellany as if it were a systematic assessment misleads more than enlightens. Ciceronian remarks need to be treated with wariness and circumspection. They can only be confidently judged when seen in their specific setting.

One particular note of caution has to be sounded. A substantial majority of the remarks come in heated forensic contests. That raises an immediate warning signal. The orator’s intensity in making a case for his client and his ferocity in maligning hostile witnesses produce excess and distortion that are readily discerned by modern readers—and were undoubtedly recognized by contemporary audiences. Not that we can discount these rhetorical flourishes altogether as transparent embellishment and empty of serious content. But one must take into account the conventions of a genre that were as fully familiar to Cicero’s listeners as to us.

The orator’s depiction of Gauls supplies a revealing instance. Almost all of the references to that people in his corpus come in a single speech, the Pro Fonteio. Cicero, as often, pulls out all the stops in defense of his client, M. Fonteius, accused of res repetundae during his pro-praetorship in Gallia Transalpina during the 70s BCE. A large part of the defense consisted of discrediting the testimony of Gallic witnesses, chiefly Allobroges and Volcae, tribesmen who brought evidence of Fonteius’ depredations. Cicero makes the most of ancient history, reminding the jurors of wars fought by the ferocious Gauls in the past. He reaches all the way back to the Gallic assault on Delphi and the oracle of Pythian Apollo two centuries earlier, an episode that did not involve the Romans at all. And, of course, he recalls the terrifying Celtic attack on the capitol itself and the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, fixed in Roman tradition or legend, of more than three centuries before (Cic. Font. 30). More recent Gallic wars come in for mention as well, in vaguer terms, the people characterized as inveterate foes of Rome, harboring an innate enmity, needing to be subjugated again and again, constant threats to the populus Romanus.⁶ Fonteius indeed is portrayed as a tower of strength protecting the homeland from the savage onslaughts of the Gauls.⁷ It is not easy to imagine a jury of senators and equites buying this notion of barbarians at the gates. The Transalpina had been under Roman authority—albeit with some restiveness—for more than a generation.⁸ The excessive language could be indulged not so much because jurors credited it but because they took it as part of forensic convention. There is no greater reason to presume deep-rooted prejudice in Cicero’s comments about Gauls as waging war against all religions, even against the immortal gods themselves.⁹ The hyperbole is patent.

Cicero’s famous pronouncement that the most prestigious person in Gaul does not bear comparison with the lowliest of Romans is often cited as a sweeping judgment on the nation.¹⁰ In fact, however, that conclusion provides an instructive example of questionable methodology. Cicero’s remark speaks only to a specific and narrow point: the trustworthiness of the witnesses’ testimony. The Gauls, in his presentation, have a special bias against Fonteius and a compelling self-interest in his conviction, so that they carry no credit in giving evidence (Cic. Font. 26–27). That is a far from wholesale condemnation of Celtic character. The discrediting of the witnesses takes priority for Cicero in the Pro Fonteio, a theme that runs throughout the speech. And even on that issue, Cicero’s convictions prompt doubts. The Gallic tribes singled out for opprobrium as prejudiced witnesses are the Allobroges and the Volcae (Cic. Font. 26; cf. 36, 46). As it happens, Cicero had occasion to speak about the Allobroges as witnesses again just a few years later, in 63 BCE, the year of his consulship. This time, however, Cicero’s depiction was drastically different. Envoys of the Allobroges had brought damaging and decisive evidence to the consul about the Catilinarian conspirators. In his Fourth Catilinarian Cicero notes with pleasure the rewards bestowed upon them by the senate for their testimony (Cic. Cat. 4.5, 4.10). And in another case in 62 BCE, growing out of the Catilinarian uprising, he goes so far as to characterize the Allobro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Photos
• Judith Peller Hallett An Introduction to a Force of Nature
• Part I Roman Literature
• Part II Gender
• Part III Reception
• Contributors
• Judith Peller Hallett: Bibliography (1970–2012)
• Index Nominum et Rerum
• Index Locorum