After 69 CE - Writing Civil War in Flavian Rome

Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, Darcy Anne Krasne, Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, Darcy A. Krasne

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110584745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The fall of Nero and the civil wars of 69 CE ushered in an era scarred by the recent conflicts; Flavian literature also inherited a rich tradition of narrating nefas from its predecessors who had confronted and commemorated the traumas of Pharsalus and Actium. Despite the present surge of scholarly interest in both Flavian literary studies and Roman civil war literature, however, the Flavian contribution to Rome's literature of bellum ciuile remains understudied. This volume shines a spotlight on these neglected voices. In the wake of 69 CE, writing civil war became an inescapable project for Flavian Rome: from Statius's fraternas acies and Silius's suicidal Saguntines to the internecine narratives detailed in Josephus's Bellum Iudaicum and woven into Frontinus's exempla, Flavian authors' preoccupation with civil war transcends genre and subject matter. This book provides an important new chapter in the study of Roman civil war literature by investigating the multi-faceted Flavian response to this persistent and prominent theme.

Part I:Lucanean Lenses

Marco Fucecchi

Flavian Epic: Roman Ways of Metabolizing a Cultural Nightmare?

This article develops and enhances some ideas in the paper I delivered at the conference Letture e lettori di Lucano (University of Salerno, 27–29 March 2012), now published as Fucecchi 2015. Together with the analysis of new passages, I intend to give a more balanced as well as nuanced assessment of complex issues which my current research focuses on.

The nightmare alluded to in the title is obviously civil war: the original sin, the curse, the ancestral crime (scelus) of the Roman people, as it is represented by some of the most important voices of Augustan literature.45 In fact, when recalling the horrors and tragedies of the recent past, Horace and Vergil mostly display gratitude towards the Princeps who restored peace and morality. Some decades later, under Nero, Lucan’s Pharsalia brings again to the fore the internecine strife that sanctioned the end of the Republican age, thus reopening deep wounds that the Aeneid had left unhealed. Moreover, after the so-called “year of the four Emperors” (69 CE), civil war still proves to be a crucial and topical issue: the Flavian epic revival highlights the pervasiveness of such an archetypal theme of the Roman culture, but it also tries to settle accounts with it.

Vergil’s Aeneid starts well before Rome’s foundation myth (i.e., Romulus’s fratricide) and traces the nightmare back to the time of the Trojans and Latins. The notion of civil war is deeply rooted in the conflict between these two seeds from which the Romans will spring (Books 7–12). However it also has a broader reach, such that it even affects the poem’s first half. During Troy’s final night, Aeneas and his comrades take the shields of their Greek victims and, soon after, become the target of the Trojan defenders: hic primum ex alto delubri culmine telis | nostrorum obruimur oriturque miserrima caedes | armorum facie et Graiarum errore iubarum (“Now’s the first time we are crushed by our own side’s volleys of missiles launched from the shrine’s high roof. It’s the start of a pitiful slaughter caused by the misjudged look of our arms, by our helmets with Greek crests,”

Verg. A. 2.410–12).46 The same pathetic phrase (miserrima caedes) occurs only once again in the poem, during the account of the war in Latium when, after Camilla’s death, the Italic cavalry is forced to withdraw hastily (Verg. A. 11.879–86):

qui cursu portas primi inrupere patentis,

hos inimica super mixto premit agmine turba, [880]

nec miseram effugiunt mortem, sed limine in ipso

moenibus in patriis atque inter tuta domorum

confixi exspirant animas. pars claudere portas,

nec sociis aperire uiam nec moenibus audent

accipere orantis, oriturque miserrima caedes [885]

defendentum armis aditus inque arma ruentum.

Gates have been opened. The first wave of fugitives bursts within, sprinting, pressed by a raging mob of the foe, mixed in with their own lines. Failing to flee a pathetic death on their very own thresholds: on their homeland’s walls or in safe rooms within their own houses. Skewered by spear-thrusts, they gasp out their souls. Some rash individuals slam the gates shut. They don’t dare keep escape within city defences open to comrades who plead for admittance. A hideous slaughter follows. The swords that the fugitives rush on are swords of defenders blocking their access.

In both cases, amid the blinding frenzy of war, the defenders of a besieged city are led to desperately engage in battle with their own comrades and, unconsciously, end up helping their enemies: the Trojans wrongly believe that they are fighting against a platoon of the Greek invaders, while the citizens of Laurentum deliberately prevent their own troops from entering the gates of the city, striking them as if they and their pursuers were one and the same thing.

Obviously, Vergil also engages in the Aeneid with the implications of the civil war theme for his own time. The ecphrasis of the battle of Actium on Aeneas’s shield (A. 8.675–728), being the most conspicuous foray into the future of the whole poem, finds itself at odds with the two previous examples. Thanks to the ostentatious appropriation of a leitmotif in Augustan propaganda, the internecine struggle for power between Mark Antony and Octavian becomes the final act of a bellum externum: next to Romans dressed like Egyptians (Verg. A. 8.685), true foreign enemies like Cleopatra now begin to appear, as well as monstrous divinities like Anubis, who fight against the Olympian gods (Verg. A. 8.698–708).

The above passages are representative of the Aeneid’s different ways of indirectly approaching and foreshadowing a delicate issue such as civil war, an issue that it almost never tackles explicitly but that constantly flows under its surface.47 In fact, the way such implications sporadically emerge within the text reveals a twofold strategy. On the one hand, the poet’s attempt to exorcize this nightmare seeks to reassure readers, leading them to appreciate the world peace finally achieved by Augustus. At the same time, however, mostly when representing characters as being unaware of the consequences of their actions, Vergil hints at the risk that any war might restlessly shimmer into a civil conflict, leading to a sudden, undesirable setback in the difficult recovery from the disease contracted by Roman society. Intentional or not, the final effect of these suggestions could be considered an ancient acknowledgment of the return of the repressed.48

By contrast, Lucan is anything but reticent and indirect. He rewinds the tape and the nightmare happens again in all its cruel reality: his empathic narrative technique erases any epic distance. Making readers relive the “collective suicide,” i.e., the collapse of the Roman Republic, is a paradoxical way to problematize the topicality of civil war, which is controversially presented as the hard but necessary premise of political change and the inevitable step towards the instauration of monarchy. Civil war led to the birth of the Empire, just as Jupiter’s power was the result of his victory over the Giants.49 But what do these words imply? Perhaps a poem at war with itself. The traumatic process of constructing an empire inevitably contrasts with the final result, which, despite its magnificence, cannot completely obliterate its origin: the perception of this result will be inevitably influenced by the process itself.

Moreover, Lucan’s Pharsalia also seems to display a prophetic quality, as an involuntary anticipation of the events of 69 CE: in this sense, it represents a modern, provocative interlocutor for the Flavian epic poems, which constantly deal with this topic at various levels. In fact, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius draw largely upon this new classic of the epic genre (along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses) in order to mark their own position within the canon and forestall the reductive label of Vergilian imitators. Unlike Lucan, however, they prefer to look at civil war from a relatively more distant viewpoint, i.e., through the filter of myth or ancient Roman history (earlier than the 1st c. BCE),50 and tend to embed civil war within a larger context. Such a twofold strategy, which I suggest ultimately aims to neutralize (or even exorcize) the negative force originating from the Pharsalia and its explicit provocation, enables these post-Vergilian epicists to position themselves as post-Lucanean voices as well.

In Flavian epic poetry, civil war is still represented as a tragic phenomenon constantly affecting human societies in different ages and contexts, an almost inevitable step in the process of their socio-political growth.51 However, it always looks framed, almost relativized, by other events; it is, in effect, finally overcome so as to prevent readers from thinking that it is a definitive and inescapable end, after which there is no tomorrow. This seems to apply to the Thebaid in particular, where—after eleven books dominated by the forces of evil (with only rare, though illuminating, examples of humanity and virtue)—the epilogue stages Theseus’s restoration of moral order (pietas, fides, etc.) in Thebes, dramatizing the final victory of epic over tragedy. But the same could be probably said of Silius’s and Valerius’s epic narratives, where civil war is not expected to have a programmatic function. Scipio’s final triumph in the Punica sanctions Carthage’s defeat as well as the (only temporary) end of the internal discord that is already emerging in Rome. The seed of future internecine strife, displayed by the rivalry between the consuls, has also caused the disaster of Cannae, i.e., the worst defeat suffered by Rome during the Second Punic War. However, this tragic event, situated at the very center of Silius’s poem, is endowed with the underlying meaning of a collective deuotio, a sacrifice that paves the way to the final victory.

For his part, Valerius Flaccus’s Jason, a young apprentice-leader, chooses not to stir up an internal revolt against his uncle Pelias and instead accepts the mission imposed by the Thessalian tyrant. Once arrived in Colchis, he is involved in a fratricidal contest between the king Aeetes and his brother Perses. Without actually affecting the traditional plot,52 this unprecedented war provides a new setting for Medea’s falling in love with the Greek hero. The latter accomplishes his task (the conquest of the Golden Fleece) by taking advantage of the gods’ support, as is usually the case in epic poetry. Nonetheless, Jason also relies upon his own human qualities: strength and heroic prowess, but also firmness, self-sacrifice, sagacity, and diplomatic wisdom.

To sum up: after Lucan (and after the crisis of 69 CE leading to the advent of the Flavian dynasty), civil war positions itself as a constant presence in epic poetry, which is also symptomatic of the need to “metabolize,” in my terminology, this nightmare of Roman history and culture.

Even so, Flavian epic’s revival is not characterized by nostalgia, nor is it only interested in rediscovering the “better past.” The act itself of distancing civil war from the immediate present does not imply neutralizing the apocalyptic consequences of the Pharsalia nor envisaging a totally unproblematic future. On the contrary, the Flavian epicists take into due account Lucan’s delegitimization of the Augustan myths as well as his way of giving v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Lucanean Lenses
• Part II: Narrating Nefas in Statius’s Thebaid
• Part III: Leadership and Exemplarity
• Part IV: Family, Society, and Self
• Part V: Ruination, Restoration, and Empire
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Thematic Index
• Index of Passages