The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: Martial's Epigrams, Statius' Silvae, and Domitianic Rome 0192898116, 9780192898111

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CL A SS ICS IN T HEORY General Editors

Brooke A. Holmes Miriam Leonard Tim Whitmarsh

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CL A SS ICS IN T HEORY Classics in Theory explores the new directions for classical scholarship opened up by critical theory. Inherently interdisciplinary, the series creates a forum for the exchange of ideas between classics, anthropology, modern literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and other related fields. Invigorating and agenda-setting volumes analyse the cross-fertilizations between theory and classical scholarship and set out a vision for future work on the productive intersections between the ancient world and contemporary thought.

 

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The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius The Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome Erik Gunderson

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Erik Gunderson 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940828 ISBN 978–0–19–289811–1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Tom

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

1. Introduction

1

2. Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature A. “But now I know that you really are going to Rome” B. Welcome to the show: Epigrams 1 i. ii. iii. iv.

Run, rabbit, run Power and play in the hare and now Stage-­managing the passions It’s not just about rabbits, you see

C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J.

To whom it may concern: Epigrams 2+ Trust and truth: a confidence game in Book 5 Bigger, better . . . and badder: Book 6 High and mighty; near and far: Book 7 Turning things outside-­in: Book 8 A poet’s will to power: Epigrams 9.pr Agony, ecstasy, and emperor: Epigrams 9.1–4 Managing to both hit and miss the mark: anxiety and Epigrams 9.5 K. Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not i. Unspeakably something: the Earinus cycle begins (Epigrams 9.11–13) ii. Everybody loves the Ausonian Father. But why? (Epigrams 9.7) iii. The kindest cut: Epigrams 9.16–17 iv. The poetry of (ir)reverence: Epigrams 9.36 and its environs v. The poetry of reverence: Epigrams 9.79 and its affines

L. Oops: Book 10 i. Forgetting how to count in Epigrams 10.1–2 ii. Dichtung und Wahrheit: further autobiographical fictions (Epigrams 10.3–5) iii. The (new) new start ends: Trajan (Epigrams 10.6) iv. I am not going to say, “Master and God”: Epigrams 10.72

M. The new beginning as the end: Books 11 and 12 i. Approaching the palace, or not (Epigrams 11.1) ii. Epigram is the poetry of private life and festal time (Epigrams 11.2–3)

29 29 40 40 50 60 65

66 68 76 84 92 100 107 115 119 119 129 133 139 148

150 150 157 163 164

168 168 172

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viii Contents iii. Nerva dials back the principate (Epigrams 11.4–5) iv. Martial’s (confused) preface to his (wretched) postscript: Book 12.pr and 12.1–5 v. Now one is free to enjoy all of Helicon, or not (Epigrams 12.6 and 12.8)

3. Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity

176 178 183

189

A. An introduction to Statius’ Domitianic literature 189 B. Says this poetry, “This is how you are supposed to read this poetry”192 C. All that glitters makes for a golden verse 201 D. The high and the low in the here and now 204 E. The ecstatic present (and the mundanity of the traditional sublime)210 F. An introduction to Domitianic grammar and syntax: the psychic life of subjection 218 i. Marveling at modernity in Siluae 1.1 and 1.2 ii. Make way for the present iii. Shut up and be happy: Siluae 4.pr iv. Everything and everyone wears a happy face: Siluae 4.1 v. The bold have nothing to fear: Siluae 3.2 vi. There is nothing to complain about in this best of worlds vii. True confessions of undeniable attachment to the present

219 225 229 234 238 239 242

G. Select nouns from the Domitianic lexicon

245

i. Freedom (but not that kind of freedom) ii. Faith (for those naive enough to believe) iii. Masters (so many, so marvelous)

246 254 259

H. Domitianic time all the time I. Mastering the submission game: six case studies i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

Parroting and the mastery of affect (Siluae 2.4) The lion that was tamed (Siluae 2.5) As free as a freedman (Siluae 3.3) Dead boy: poor master, says the poet (Siluae 2.6) Dead boy: poor master-­dad, said the master-­poet (Siluae 2.1) Castrated boy: lucky master, says the poet (Siluae 3.4)

267 270 271 277 283 301 313 323

4. Conclusion

345

Appendix: From Nero to Trajan: Lives and Times

377

Bibliography Index of Passages General Index

379 391 397

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Acknowledgements The students in my over-­broad Complicity seminar put up with a lot. From their suffering came my wisdom. They helped me to see how everything could be put far more clearly and succinctly. If the book is neither clear nor succinct, know at least that things were once much, much worse. Charlotte Loveridge and Karen Raith were a pleasure to deal with at the press, both helped move the project forward swiftly and painlessly despite the fact that the world and everything in it was a mess. John Henderson of erstwhile anonymity was wonderful, as ever: so painfully generous with time and genius. I need to write another book, if only to get a chance to acknowledge more of the support and inspiration he has provided over the years. The press’s other reader I cannot name, but I nevertheless owe him or her a debt of gratitude for, among other things, making me worry about my own tyranny and so perhaps saving others from it, at least in some measure.

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1 Introduction Consider the gap between the Domitianic discourse of the Domitianic age and the next era’s discourse of the Domitianic age. What had been the best of times was presently denounced as the worst of times.1 Furthermore it is not at all clear that this distance between these two versions of “the Domitianic” measures a shared conceptual unit. That is, the Domitianic discourse of power, even if distorted, does not seem to be structured along quite the same logic as is the Antonine discourse of Domitianic power. And the latter is a distorted discourse as well. If one elects to follow up on Foucault’s insight and to deprecate the repressive model of power, then an agenda presents itself. If power is fertile and productive, rather than negative and constraining, then when it comes to the case of “imperial power” viewed as a discourse more broadly and not just as the concrete institutional capacity for an emperor to give an order and see it executed, who stood to gain? A naive, direct answer is incomplete. The advantaged party is not simply a partisan of a cause or an individual emperor. Imperial power was a modality of sovereignty, legitimacy, and participation. In the discourse of power that surrounds the Domitianic age, what sorts of Romanness were enabled, solicited, and fostered? How? On what occasions? By whom? Who, then, is the imperial subject, and what makes him tick? In the case of the Antonines, the need for an appraisal of their claims about the past is glaring. The men denouncing the Domitianic era had themselves been politically active during that same period.2 A discourse of 1  Boyle, 1995:83: “It was a period of blood, terror, opulence, spectacle, poetry, theatre, and display; it was a period of social convolution, conformity and reordering, of sexual licence and puritanical legislation, of rebellion and subversion, of loyalty, concealment, executions and friendship; it was a period of cultural renewal and of immense creativity in the visual arts, in architecture, in sculpture; a period of military adventurism, bureaucracy and careerism, political and social patronage and favour, corrupting power, servility and selfabasement—and of satisfied life.” 2  Griffin, 2000:55: “Like Nero, to whom Juvenal compared him, Domitian was the last of his dynasty, and he was removed and disgraced. The rulers that followed justified their usurpation by treating his reign as a tyrannical aberration after which the tradition set by good The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Erik Gunderson, Oxford University Press. © Erik Gunderson 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.003.0001

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2 Introduction hypocrisy springs to their lips: “The devil made us do it.3 Throughout that period we had our fingers crossed behind our backs.4 None of it meant all  that much. But today let me assure you that, though you cannot see them, behind my back my fingers are assuredly not crossed.”5 Words like adulatio—a word evoking cringing, fawning flattery, a word better suited to a dog than a man and yet so often used of men .  .  . —became very important in the post-­Domitianic age.6 Words like this offer a label as well as a cloak.7 They qualify even as they also conceal the details of the contents of the object so signed, sealed, and delivered to the contemporary principes would be resumed. Writers under Nerva and Trajan were only too happy to elaborate on the theme, especially those who had flattered and prospered under the old regime. How can we trust any of them?” Compare Leberl, 2004:12–14; Syme, 1997:3: “When a despot is killed or a dynasty destroyed less is achieved than some expect. After the initial transports of newly won liberation men look around and discover that the system abides—and most of the people.” Waters,  1969:390: “We must conclude then that at no time was there greater continuity in the sphere of imperial advisers and other prominent administrators than in the transition from Domitian to Trajan.” 3  Bartsch, 1994 shows just how sinister and involuted the question of acting can get for political agents. 4  But the emperor knew that your fingers were crossed behind your backs . . . Absolutely everybody, emperor included, knows the score. Contemporary testimony is provided by Dio Chrysostomus 6.58: “The tyrant is not pleased when praised. For he does not think that people are speaking their minds ([ὁ τύραννοϲ] ἐπαινούμενοϲ δὲ οὐχ ἥδεται· οὐ γὰρ φρονοῦνταϲ οὕτωϲ οἴεται λέγειν).” Similarly, the flatterer fools only himself: “The flatterer outstrips all in his folly. Of those who conceal the truth, he alone confidently disseminates his falsehoods despite the fact that his audience is perfectly aware that he lies (τῷ δὲ ἄφρονι πάνταϲ ὑπερβέβληκεν ὁ κόλαξ. μόνοϲ γὰρ τῶν ἀφανιζόντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν πρὸϲ ἐκείνουϲ θαρρεῖ τὰ ψευδῆ λέγειν τοὺϲ μάλιϲτα εἰδόταϲ ὅτι ψεύδεται; 3.19).” 5  Leberl,  2004:16 on readings that let self-­interested Romans get away with this line of argument: “Sie setz, auf die flavische Literatur bezogen, voraus, dass kein Untertan einen ‘Tyrannen’ freiwillig und ohne Not preise, und dass Domitian seine gesamte Regierungszeit hindurch ein Tyrann gewesen sein muss.” When it comes to “resistance” via double-­speak, Leberl raises the most devastating question of all: how is it that only Caesar was too stupid to understand that he was being double-­spoken to? As Geyssen,  1996:7 notes, he had been trained to read this sort of thing. And, even if he was obtuse, did he have no self-­interested delator to help him get up to speed? 6  Keitel, 2006:223: “Tacitus repeatedly alludes to fides, amicitia, adulatio, and self-­interest in the narrative of 1.12–49 and shows the breakdown of traditional values among all groups involved in the struggle for power at Rome.” And Histories 1.15.3–4 can be compared to Pliny, Panegyricus 85.1 (Keitel, 2006:221). 7  Gallia, 2012:89: “If anything, it seems that Trajan did more to consolidate the power of the princeps, expanding many of the authoritarian policies for which Domitian is supposed to have been reviled.” Antonine positions are highly compromised. It is polite to avoid looking too closely. See Syme, 1997:25: “Tacitus proclaims his scorn for the brave enemies of dead tyrants, the noisy advocates of the heroes and martyrs. They had not confined their reprobation to evil men, the willing agents of despotism, but had gone much further. The rule of the Caesars depended not only on political managers or venal prosecutors. It had the support of administrators; and the whole senatorial order was acquiescent. Tacitus goes out of his way to make a passionate confession of collective guilt.” Gallia, 2012:91: “Pliny’s embarrassment is understandable, given that every step of his career save the very first and the most recent had been obtained with the endorsement of a ruler he repeatedly condemns as a despot.”

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Introduction  3

moment.8 What more does one need to know other than that the situation was revolting? The cynical appraisal of imperial life is important and compelling. But the portrait of a world full of mere actors who mouthed empty lines itself comes to feel two-­dimensional. The discourse of the subject and power produced within the Domitianic age unfolds a rich constellation of problems. The Antonines denounce something that is both too simple and to one side of this discourse. And so I have opted to offer a reading of the Domitianic portrait of Domitianic literature. Such an agenda potentially entails a species of meta-­complicity: if the authors get to set the terms of the debate, then one is all too likely to end up on one side of it in the end. Similarly, one may well overlook key issues that have been pointedly suppressed by the authors of the hour. Nevertheless, the converse failing is, at least in the case of Domitianic literature, familiar enough: disgusted, one fails to give ear to these self-­serving, boot-­licking flatterers of power. Their praise turns into self-­indictment. One denounces and moves on. A new age conveniently dispenses with an old one without asking too many inconvenient questions. But if we linger, one’s relationship to the material on hand becomes a somewhat fraught affair. And this is one of the points of the whole study: can politics and art be tidily separated at any layer of analysis? The poems are never merely political, nor are they simply art, and this is true even— especially?—when we are invited by the verse itself to draw distinctions and to set down lines of demarcation. Even if the contents of a poem were somehow purely apolitical, does not the apolitical posture itself reek of politics? Even when speaking most directly to power, is the speech ever just political without also itself constituting an aestheticized political object? And the lovely speech-­object so produced is itself objectifying contemporary politics as a thing of wonder and beauty. The pseudo-­antinomy of art as set against politics cannot be sustained. Any desire to say that we are dealing with “either . . . or . . . ” must yield to a story of “both . . . and . . . ”. Our reluctance to engage in a discourse of guilt and innocence is almost reflexive, especially in the wake of the over-­hasty denunciations of the Antonines who seem all too eager to cast judgements. But it is, in its own way, perverse for us to maintain neutrality given the loud shouting of all parties that the affair at hand is indeed politically and 8  Henderson, 2001:76 on Book 3 of Pliny’s Epistles: “Altogether, these in-­brief profiles of individuals map out an embryonic political review, from a Trajanic perspective, of the first two dynasties of Caesars. The half-­light of another Panegyricus, in fact.”

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4 Introduction socially charged. The critic who decides that what confronts him or her is merely a question of artistry has in practice taken a side both relative to the past and relative to the present. And so one has no choice but to decide what to do about all of the sticky questions before us. And they are sticky because they stick to us as well. Other polarities will likewise need to be dismantled. Freedom and constraint work as a useful conjunctive pair. The disjunction that posits either freedom or constraint proves too simplistic. Poetry and power need to be allowed to unfold themselves, to interact, to intersect, to interpenetrate. The mutual implication of the two terms can help to steer us away from a static portrait of anyone or anything: we need to capture the dialog and dynamism. Conversely, even the most reductive approach to the interpretation of Domitianic poetry founders at once in its own terms. Did the historical individual named Martial think that Domitian was a good emperor? Well, the poems of 86 and the poems of 90 and the poems of 94 differ in their presentation of the issue. They are always positive on the one hand, but they are differently positive on the other. Maybe he thought Domitian was satisfactory at first but not so good in the end. Maybe the praise starts as sincere but then becomes insincere. Maybe it was never sincere to begin with, but then it becomes bitingly critical in the end. There is no obvious way to talk about the relationship between poetry and power in this age that does not at once get complicated and then more complicated still: the question of power is protean. As for the poets themselves, they are all too happy to sing about how someone once sang a song about Orpheus who was singing about the children of Poseidon. And such songs comprise their pointedly shape-­shifting answer to the question of the nature of the interaction between poet and prince. And so we will be exploring power-­and-­poetry. This project entails something more than just reading poems about power. It may well indeed be most keenly interested in those places where the narrative voice speaks most directly to or about power. But it is also more generally interested in the poetic corpora in question. And, in practice, this project will be skeptical of poems about poetry as somehow revelatory of the “real” project while the poems about power are the “specious, throwaway” elements of the enterprise.9 Instead the fertility of power, its expressiveness, and its ubiquity will be put into dialog with the making, doing, and omnipotence of ποίηϲιϲ. Poet and prince are nodal points in the same network, moments 9  Compare Foucault, 1990:82–83 on the impasses that arise when one examines power-­ and-­pleasure from a “juridico-­discursive” perspective.

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Introduction  5

where structural features of the system itself meet up and confront one another. The oil-­and-­water immiscibility of the pair is more a pretense than a reality. Poet and prince are masters, masters of metaphors, and master metaphors. The exchanges between their domains and the transfers effected within their own zones attest a commonality. One is the duck, the other the rabbit. One the vase, the other the face; one the fair maid, the other the hag. But as in the case of these famous optical illusions, the two are part of the same image, and neither is the truer subject of the scene. Accounts of how Statius and Martial “reflect on” or “comment on” power will not be avoided. But such stories-­of-­power come as preludes to an investigation both of the nature of this commentary and the place from which it is articulated. This means exploring the conflicting, contradictory, atomized, partial, now-­hesitant, now-­enthusiastic portraits of the emperor within “Domitianic poetry.” When one bears in mind how little of what we see can in any sense be said to have been “dictated” by a specific man who held an office, it becomes easier to appreciate that we are in the presence of a discourse of power that springs up as a fantasy of things that one might say to and about and for power. We see collections of masterful performances that proffer meditations on mastery that the master may—or may not .  .  . —deign to observe.10 Master-­ Poet names the split center of the discursive field where the trope  of freedom-­and-­constraint plays itself out. The concrete historical individual poet is producer and product of this free—but not totally free . . . —play of the signifier.11 The poet both is and is not the master. The poet both loves and loathes the figure of mastery. What does anyone mean when they talk about “Domitianic literature” or the “Domitianic age”? Such notions are convenient fictions: a whole race of men was not born the day that Domitian came to office; another did not replace these people on the day he died.12 But the fiction that the age might have as its cause the Prince is not merely the product of a lazy historicism that is unduly reliant on metonyms that substitute for analysis.

10  Foucault, 2000b:341: “[Power] operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself.” 11  Foucault, 2000b:341 on the key structural equivocation of the term “conduct”: “To ‘conduct’ is at the same time to ‘lead’ others . . . and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities.” 12  Freudenburg, 2001:130: “For cultural, epochal identities, such as those suggested by the terms ‘Augustan’ and ‘Neronian,’ are never simply synonymous with ‘the facts’ of an emperor’s rule . . . They emerge as identities only when those facts are rendered into stories, told as tales that ‘make sense’ inside themselves.”

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6 Introduction On the one hand, Domitian is not the cause of the Domitianic age.13 He had help, and lots of it. In fact he had so much help from so many helpers that he seldom needed to spell things out and to give specific instructions. People are anticipating, intervening, adding their twist, making their mark. Poets, sculptors, men toiling at the mint: there is plenty of work to go around. How many of their efforts did they really expect the princeps himself would take note of? How much of the activity was aimed at a broader contemporary audience of fellow travelers along the Via Domitiana? What in here is the spontaneous, unbidden, jubilant outpouring of bottom-­up efforts to go along, get along, and even get ahead in Today’s Rome? But, on the other hand, even if so many are lending their aid and acting as the efficient causes of the Domitianic era, Domitian is routinely figured as the one true cause of his own age. Domitian names matter, form, agent, and end. Ask anyone. “There is no Domitianic age without Domitian,” they will aver. That is, the metonym is “real” and “truly powerful” precisely to the extent that there is a wide-­spread mobilization of this figure of speech as if it were indeed the figure that legitimately names the moment. And the moment assuredly has been/will have been named, at least temporarily: Domitian eventually renames September and October after himself.14 And yet, at the very same time, there is a smirking quality to this deployment of the figural on the part of the members of this (so-­called) age: it is always also a mere figure. The poets “conduct themselves” as if there were a ruler ruling, but their own conduct also betrays the simultaneous presence of a second order of relationships to power, specifically that power is nothing more—while also being nothing less .  .  . —than something figural. If, as Foucault would have it, genealogy is “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary,” then patience will indeed be required.15 For we are not looking into the pedigree of any given poet, his birth, his wealth, his education, the books he read, his preferred allusions, his aesthetic affiliations, and so forth. In the case of Statius in particular one can write volumes about these things. And they have indeed been written. But we 13 Leberl,  2004:27: “Der Princeps war nicht der auctor aller Instrumente und Medien seiner Herrshaftsdarstellung.” 14 Suetonius, Domitian 13.3. It doesn’t stick. But one could always dream, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully. See Suetonius, Julius 76 and Augustus 31 on the origin of the month-­names of July and August. And see Caligula 15 on an earlier attempt at renaming September as the month of Germanicus. Nero named April after himself (Nero 55). 15 Foucault, 2000a:369.

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Introduction  7

are exploring instead the emergence of politico-­aesthetic objects positioned at the intersection of a constellation of forces. Domitianic poetry books both embody and body forth a swirl of forces and power relations that are all in play. And the work effected by these forces comes with the label “play” set upon it. Lusus is the name one frequently assigns to this “playful” constellation of power. But that is a self-­serving pedigree that poetry bestows upon itself, and, as such, it should be immediately suspect. Playful splashing in learned waters is not mere play as soon as one asserts that power-­and-­poetry is the real name for the game afoot.16 Helicon’s font is not the only source of all of this. Instead, a founding disparity lies at the bottom of it all. The essential thing to observe is that there is no essence to begin with.17 There is only a “current episode in a series of subjugations.”18 The list of elements that should attract the critic’s eye might not include only allusions, intertexts, master-­poets, and master-­ texts. In such a flowery figuration, the question of power has been displaced. It has been hidden away under a purple cloak woven of the finest cloth, a vestment crafted by Pierian maidens, by the looks of it. Scandalous, base-­born forces might be detected tussling lustily ’neath that mantle: social obligation, economic ties, political submission, proud self-­display, social ambition, political resistance, artistic independence, other-­loathing, self-­loathing, fear of failure, fear of success. And this is only the list of forces that one might describe as semi-­subjective, as sites where an ego might assert itself, where someone might affirm or deny or somehow argue the point. The impersonal system as such, the forces for which there is no personal agent have not been entertained in such a list. Not yet of interest are ideology in the abstract, the sign system in general, power at its most fertile, the dominant fiction at its most elusive. Presently and below we will linger with a hermeneutics of the ­subject, not because getting to the bottom of Martial—who is always also “Martial”—or of Statius—who is always also “Statius”—is somehow possible. But we will spend time thinking about subject positions and the rhetoric of the self precisely because this is where the poetry itself spends its time. Even if they are not real people, these vividly drawn characters and their fictional psychic lives need to be explored and to be taken seriously precisely because one needs to be sensitive to the politics of pseudo-­interiority. 16  Habinek, 2005:5: “Play turns out to be a crucial element of hegemonic Roman culture, not as a release from the labor of the everyday but as a proving ground for mastery.” 17 Foucault, 2000a:371–372. 18 Foucault, 2000a:376.

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8 Introduction We will be complicit with the agenda handed to us by the text, an agenda that insists that we pay attention to how “I” feel about “you” and “this wondrous Rome we live in.” We will be complicit in this agenda in the name of making some headway on the question of complicity itself, for that too is very much on the agenda. The issue of the subject and power has been articulated as a species of cynical knowledge. The knowing know more and know better than they let on. Deep down, say the savvy, there is “something more.” But what if there were not really a “deep down”? What if there was only a surface that conjured depth? Cynical knowledge would be nothing more than a name one gives to “a practical assemblage, a ‘mechanism’ of statements and visibilities.”19 Cynical knowing would describe practices, comportments, and displays. The knower emerges as an implicit function of the praxis, as the implied and privileged subject of the act.20 I am describing an epistemic regime of bad faith. Even in the best of cases the authentic self is a self-­serving fiction on the part of a je who refuses to imagine itself as anything other than the first person singular subject of the act—“I am my ego, there is no such thing as id, not in my case, at least . . .” The twist in this instance is that the self-­service occurs by way of self-­assertion in the course of an inauthentic act. The ineffable surplus of the self is presented as the visible gap between what is said and what is meant. The subject of the statement is not the subject of the enunciation. And, ironically, the ironist believes that he or she is a master of this “gap.” The ironist is in love with his own symptom—as are we all—but, ironically, he sees in this love a moment of mastery when the actual logic of the symptom exposes the presence of something more, something unmastered.21 An alternate mode of approaching the issue of cynical knowledge is via ideology, or rather, via the manner in which the self is an ideological construct.22 “The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the 19 Deleuze, 1988:51. 20  Sloterdijk,  1987:60–61: “The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counterenlightenment . . . The establishment of inwardness comprises the ego as the bearer of ethics, the erotic, aesthetics, and politics . . . Precisely the analysis of [the] narcissism [of the ego] can show how the other has already got the better of the ego.” 21  Žižek, 1989:21 on the definition of the symptom: “ ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-­knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only so far as its logic escapes him.” 22  Before we get off on the wrong foot and think of ideology as a way of speaking about the illusions of an ego that need to be dispelled via a process of enlightenment, see Žižek,  1989:21: “ ‘Ideological’ is not ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. ” [emphasis removed]

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Introduction  9

ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less insists upon the mask.”23 And this yields the formula, “They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”24 The poetry performs a thesis of artistic freedom in theory, but, in practice, these verses perform, reproduce, and body forth an ideology of freedom-­and-­constraint that presupposes imperial domination as the condition of possibility for their own precious cynicism. A specifically imperial poetics becomes the condition of possibility for the poetic self as such, whether one is speaking of either the narrator or the author. But the very split between the author and the narrator—is he? isn’t he? surely he is . . . of course he is not . . . —is sustained by this same cynical structure that loves-­and-­hates and loves-­to-­ hate power. We are going to jump into the lion’s jaws of poetic practice and see what becomes of us there. There is every reason to feel a bit the fool when rushing in like this since this very same act can be described as a deep dive into the glittering surface of the world. In fact, it turns out that the affective valences of a dangerous moment like this have already been adumbrated by the poetry itself. The image of the lion’s maw was not accidentally chosen. It is instead on loan from Martial. How much boldness does the poet or critic really evince? How much danger is really to-­hand? Are we really in the presence of repressive power or just articulating our self-­serving speciously radical theses via a fantasy of repression? Meanwhile power in its concrete fertility is giving birth to any number of ludic poetic fancies that execute a festal dance around a variety of poles, one of which is the convenient fiction that hypothesizes that “power says not to, but . . .” How could one possibly speak of Martial and his feelings? How could one not? Only a determined cretin would succumb to the temptation to indulge in the biographical fallacy. And yet the poetry itself is constantly inviting the reader to mistake author for narrator. This is part of the game. On the one hand, none of it is real or can be real, but, on the other, is it really the case that none of it is in fact real?25 Sincerity resides at the level of the corpus itself.26 Whatever reluctance or reservations on the part of

23 Žižek, 1989:29. 24 Žižek, 1989:29. 25  Sullivan,  1991:xxii–xxiii: “Are we to declare that there is no connection between the man and the work or between the work and society for which it was written? Is all the material purely conventional so that the poems can best be understood by comparing them to their models or even in vacuo?” 26  See Bartsch on Pliny on the (alleged) disaster for an Antonine author produced in the wake of Domitianic discourse: “[I]n large part the Panegyricus is an obsessive attempt to prove its own sincerity.” (Bartsch, 1994:149)

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10 Introduction the author one might ultimately decide to discuss, the fact of the poetry remains a fact. That is, the specter of beliefs that lie “behind” the text—and think especially of those moments that are written into the text as bait for the critic who will see in them beliefs and especially those beliefs that conjure the sense of a “behind”—do nothing to eliminate the fact that words accumulated and that, as a simple surface, they can be read and interpreted quite independently of a conjured “interiority.” Simply put, whether or not the poet “believes in” the praise of the emperor, the poetry praises him. Sincere or not, the corpus believes in playing the game that it is playing. For if it did not, it would be playing some other game. Pascal may have wagered that kneeling would yield belief, but we are in the presence of something that believes in being seen kneeling. This is not quite the same thing as piety, this “meta-­fidelity,” but it is nevertheless a phenomenon worth pondering.27 Says Cassity, “[Martial] flatters the Emperor Domitian in the exact spirit and in the exact degree of honesty with which present day academics fill out grant applications.”28 The point is cleverly made. One could add that the people who read grant applications are themselves individuals who have written their fair share of them. And, naturally, they are reading scores of them at a go. Everyone knows that it is all something of a game, but none of this stops any of them from playing it. Indeed, their insincerity and alienation is itself one of the most interesting features of the game, a game that has decidedly real consequences. “Reservations” do quite little to change the nature of the power-­game. Instead, they are one of the places where the undeceived engage in a species of self-­deception.29 In fact, the “self ” emerges precisely as the thing that has been held back, as the too precious reserve that is too smart to fall for all of the empty bullshit that it hears coming from its own mouth.30 Self, confidence, self-­confidence: these are all part of the (confidence) game that is being played. By not staking everything, one wins the precious notion of reserve and that surfeit of genius meaning that comes

27  Žižek on the “active” fetishism of the capitalist subject: “They are fetishists in practice, not in theory. What they ‘do not know,’ what they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity—in the act of commodity exchange—they are guided by the fetishistic illusion.” (Žižek,  1989:31) 28 Cassity, 1990:42. 29  Hence the punning truth of “les non-­dupes errent.” Compare de La Rochefoucauld: “Le vrai moyen d’être trompé, c’est de se croire plus fin que les autres.” (cxxvi) 30  Frankfurt, 2005:34–35: “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

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Introduction  11

along with the being of the “me,” a “me” that has been so cleverly hidden behind all of the hollow ego-­speech circulating at the textual surface. One never really dives into the lion’s mouth, then. One only writes up the gesture: a mouth, a dive, an “anxious” moment that is not so anxious after all. An allegorical rabbit is sent down in there. We remain up here, wherever “here” might be. But the practical situation is not quite so easy as that. Everything could get really real at any moment, after all. The music might stop. The bard might fall silent. A scramble for chairs would ensue. Somebody might get caught standing in the middle of somewhere rather than floating about in a semiotic nowhere of as-­ifs. That is, it is entirely possible for the Domitian game to turn into a game with high stakes indeed. It can turn into a life-­and-­death affair. But it assuredly tends not to. That too is part of the game. For the thousand that ride the roller-­ coaster this year, the death of that one guy last year perhaps only adds to the thrill: “I am staking everything in theory, but, in practice, I do not expect to be asked to pay up. I am different. He was a fool, and he made a fool’s mistake. I am so clever that nothing truly bad will happen to me.” The contrived pseudo-­anxiety of the poetry bodies forth the ironic ­double and mirror image of the structure of anxiety as such for a neurotic. The neurotic “only gets to his desire by always substituting himself for one of his doubles.”31 The authorial subject finds its satisfaction playing the it’s-­not-­me game. A poet is not his verses, said the poet quoting the other poet who said the same. We will explore this below. And, in practice, the cunning reader finds a not unrelated satisfaction: it’s-­not-­him, but I have the sense that I nevertheless have got a hold of his “him-­ness,” that precious something(-more) that the façade conjures as its own plenitude held in reserve. The anxious moment for both poet and critic coincides with the potential arrival of the Master Signifier at the site of the exchange of (mere) signs: it would be such a shame if this were about an imperial something in the end instead of so much lovely nothing.32 Or maybe it would not be entirely a shame if an on-­sais-­quoi arrived at the site of the lovely je ne sais quoi of poetic sublimity. The arrival of this abstract, impersonal Knowledge would be not unlike the very thing one had always longed for 31 Lacan, 2014:48. 32  Lacan, 2014:89: “The phallus mustn’t be seen to be involved. If it gets seen, then there’s anxiety.” Lacan, 2014:171 on je crains qu’il ne vienne: “It is not enough to qualify the ne as discordantiel, because it marks the discordance that lies between my fear, because I fear he may come, and my hope, since I hope he won’t. For my part, I see it as nothing less that the signifying trace of what I call the subject of the enunciation, distinct from the subject of the statement.”

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12 Introduction but never put into quite these words: the will-­to-­know has at last mastered the master-­text, a something concrete emerged out of all that evasive ­verbal nothing. The poet-­and-­prince issue gains renewed interest when one elects to see it as a structuring structure at the discursive level. Poetry is not entirely unreal. Power is not without its own poetry. Litotes gives the lie to the vacuity of the situation, a situation that is “not without” its sincere investment in something, even if that something is on the order of a nothing.33 A poet’s only fear is that he might (not) be understood.34 There’s nothing quite (un)like castration. Just ask Domitian’s eunuch boyfriend. Critics of Martial and Statius are themselves baited into a premature resolution of the crisis in the relationship—which is also a non-­relationship . . . —between form and content in this poetry. A hater of Statius says that he  is a sycophant and brushes past the poetry disgustedly. The formal question ends as soon as one inspects the (seeming) contents: panegyric. A lover of Statius says that he only seems like he might be a sycophant and lingers with the poetry fondly. The verses are full of the fruits of poetic genius. But rather than bouncing off the surface or pushing past it, one needs to linger with panegyric precisely so that one can ask whether or not the sublimity is not fundamentally related to the sycophancy.35 The poetry itself needs to be approached as something that is akin to one of the paradoxical objects that the verses are so drawn to. In particular the poetry resembles the gloriously beautiful eunuch that it ecstatically celebrates. But the very same celebrations are suffused with dread, loathing, remorse, and disidentification. Sympathetic readings of these poets easily become complicit readings. Comprehension begets understanding which leads to forgiveness, or perhaps even overlooking. That is, aesthetic comprehension leads to a species of moral incomprehension. One apologizes for the awkwardness: they had no choice; their hand was forced; power expected as much.36 Then one 33  See again Lacan, 2014:89 on “not without.” 34  Tacitus’ Antonine diagnosis of the imperial condition in general comes to mind. See a passage like Annales 1.7: “But at Rome the consuls, senate, knights rushed headlong into slavery. The higher one’s station, the more false and eager. (At Romae ruere in seruitium consules, patres, eques. quanto quis inlustrior, tanto magis falsi ac festinantes).” 35  Dominik et al., 2015:3: “Statius has been wrongly regarded as a sycophant of Domitian.” What immediately follows is not exactly a proof of an absence of sycophancy: “He was never awarded the first literary prize in the emperor’s Capitoline games . . . and he seems to have maintained his ties to the Bay of Naples throughout his life.” 36  Leary, 1998:43: “Before criticizing Martial for writing such poems (as Epigrams 14.179), however, one should remember that he lived in dangerous times, when flattery, even if not sincere, was well-­advised.”

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Introduction  13

moves on to the business at hand, namely aesthetics pure and simple, aesthetics as the essence of poetics, aesthetics undistracted by politics. One is told that the rhetoric of consolation in the Siluae fits well with rhetorical advice about consolation.37 This sort of remark evades a discussion of the awkwardness of the poem’s situation: a wealthy man has lost a pretty serving boy, a dear famulus. The poor fellow. Tensions and ambiguities, allusions and intertexts: these can be ways of talking about the poetics of poetry while steering clear from the politics of poetry.38 The pleasure of detecting an allusion in the background drowns out a discussion of the foreground.39 But when one does talk about the politics of the poetry, this is typically done by a strategic return to the same set of critical tools. The tensions and ambiguities turn out to be pointedly pointing in a certain “resistant” direction. No actual political resistance is required, of course. And the sotto voce resistance that only the cleverest ear can catch somehow undoes the shouting affirmation that the politics of the hour is the fairest politics of the finest of hours. The omnipotence of subterranean thought is sufficient as a political act to undo whatever it is that utterance performed.40 The allusions and intertexts expose a subtext that those in the know will appreciate as being subtly, oh so subtly, devastating.41 And this is something we know about both ourselves and poetry, namely that it is knowing and that we are knowledgeable about its knowingness. But the “either . . . or . . .” of pro and contra fails to satisfy. As Geysson notes concerning Ahl’s thesis about the self-­subverting quality of Statius’ praise, much in fact depends upon the preconceptions brought to the situation by the reader. The images themselves are both potentially positive 37 Hardie, 1983:103. 38  Contrast the typical evocation of “intertextuality” as, effectively, a species of allusion with other possible senses of the term. See, for example, Bourdieu, 1996:205: “Keeping what is inscribed in the notion of intertextuality, meaning the fact that the space of works always appears as a field of position-­takings which can only be understood in terms of relationships, as a system of differential variations, one may offer the hypothesis (confirmed by empirical analysis) of a homology between the space of works defined by their essentially symbolic content, and in particular by their form, and the space of position in the field of production.” 39  Consider what is happening at Hardie, 1983:170. 40  See also Marcuse’s warnings about “modes of protest and transcendence that are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.” (Marcuse, 1991:14) 41  See Sedgwick, 2003:138–139 on the limits of the hermeneutics of suspicion and its faith in demystification. Is the paranoid mode of reading fighting power or serving its own affective ends?

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14 Introduction and negative “by nature.” That is, the sign system itself has the ambiguity built into it.42 It is quite hard to see in the hyperbole of this poetry a necessary indication of partisanship or resistance: excess is more or less a formal requirement of panegyric.43 Martial’s case is similar to Statius’ with the added complication of the simultaneous presence of jokes: which ones are really serious? Which ones are mere jokes? While it might be notionally true that the man named Statius loved Domitian fully, completely, and uninterruptedly and that, conversely, Martial hated him and after just the same manners, hunting for the answer to such unanswerable questions will not be especially productive. In the case of each poet an ideology of the text subsists at the level of its own practice, of its participation in the game more generally, in its extension and complication of the same. What has the maker made?44 What gets said? And what is the force of saying precisely this? And something does indeed seem to be happening with this poetry. On the one hand, the Antonine age is self-­serving in its efforts to distance itself from the Flavian era. But, on the other, the Flavian era does seem to be at least in some measure distinctive, no matter how wooly and artificial a term like “era” might be. The testimony of the natives does not count for nothing, after all.45 A distinguishing feature of the poetry we will be examining is the simultaneous presence of contradictory elements. And the contradiction is not cleanly resolvable into a matter of surface as against depth. On the one hand, the poems tell of a wonderful age full of peace,

42  See Geyssen, 1996:87. 43  Geyssen, 1996:144: “Statius’ flattery is the result of the panegyrist’s need to exaggerate, his desire to go beyond his tradition, exploring innovative methods of praise and new settings in which these methods might be applied.” Dewar, 1994:202: “[Augustine] knew he was, in the literal sense, lying and so did his audience—and so, more likely than not, did his ­honorand—but the point is that everyone expected him to do just that.” Dewar,  1994:209: “The extravagance of the medium, with the high value it placed on sheer outrageousness of idea and expression alike, will always be alien in some measure to the modern reader.” Remember as well the “banality of praise”: it is old, familiar, and ubiquitous. Dewar, 1996:xxii: “It is clear enough that the praise of patrons, political and social superiors, or friends was regarded as a major function of literary compositions from the earliest times, and that encomium might be worked into any genre conceivable.” 44  Fowler, 1995:56: “The next step after staying our eye on the glass is to see what the patterns are, to try to integrate Martial’s ideology of the book with the wider ideologies of his world. I am not making a plea in this article for a formalism whose only values are sophistication and ingenuity. But we do need to take seriously the ways in which Martial creates his world rather than simply reflecting it if we in our turn are to attempt to construct a satisfying fiction.” 45  Boyle, 2003:2: “Like pre-­Flavian Rome, post-­Flavian Rome was perceived as temporally different.”

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Introduction  15

prosperity, and harmony.46 On the other hand, humiliation and rage are never far from the surface of Martial’s verses.47 And Statius’ dreamscape is filled with some nightmarish shadows. The belated re-­litigation of the Domitianic era that we find in Juvenal lingers with these very issues.48 But “the facts of the matter” are pointedly unclear: “If you possessed too delightful (amoenior) a villa in Domitian’s reign, Pliny tells us in the Panegyricus, the emperor was likely to snatch it away for his own private use. The Siluae, however, do not seem to suggest that owning a fine villa under the last of the Flavians was a risky investment.”49 Perhaps seething hostility at humiliation and a constant fear of property loss suffused the hearts of men in general and our poets in particular. Or it might be that a series of compromises and contradictions plays itself out in the poetry: “Things are great, even if some things are terrible. This age is fine, especially when you consider others. In fact, maybe it is fantastic. Of course, it might be a disaster as well. My friends and I have it good, but there have been some distressing cries and whispers heard in the distance.” In this sense the poetry performs an aesthetics of complicity. It articulates a thesis of unqualified joy and satisfaction while also revealing a variety of things that would act as limitations and qualifications were they expressed directly. This complicity is both a cynical complicity—“I’m getting mine, just you try to get yours . . . ”50—as well as a more passive, (willfully) unreflective complicity: “This is what life under any emperor looks like. This is how we go along and get along. There is nothing special about my outlandish praises that harp upon their own unparalleled quality . . . ”51 The Antonine critique hinges on the idea that one set of people are going to call another out on this complicity. One generation will pretend

46  Henderson,  1998:104: “The sparkle of the Siluae attests social cohesion and political order in contemporary Rome all the more emphatic for its juxtapositioning to the blocked and choked Oedipodonian rivalry and civil war in mythic Thebes.” 47  Miller, 2012:323: “When the principle of absolute hierarchy becomes the engine of subversion, what results is not increase, not the liberation of repressed energies, but terror: Stalin as the ultimate party animal.” 48  Freudenburg,  2001:214–215: “[T]his satirist has so much to say, too much, we often complain, and in such fulsome, aggressive tones. This is satire in a time-­warp, making up for all the satires never written in the last twenty years or more.” 49 Newlands, 2002:119. 50  Gossage, 1972:208: “Statius . . . wrote to please and knew what was expected of him.” 51  Geyssen,  1996:100: we are not seeing anything especially new or different in Statius’ praise poetry. Gossage, 1972:184: “Statius and Martial preferred adulation and the survival that it guaranteed; in any case, their position in society was such that neither of them had any prospect of a political career, and consequently neither needed to protest on behalf of a class whose political aspirations were frustrated.”

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16 Introduction to be shocked and appalled at the fawning and flattery of another.52 But the Antonine negation of the Domitianic theme of joy is insufficient. This is because it hides the fact that there really was nothing radically disjunctive about the Domitianic age. Loving the emperor and loathing him as well had long been and would continue to be conjoined affective twins. The emperor is always both the condition of possibility for the courtier as well as a condition of multiple simultaneous impossibilities.53 A key ingredient of complicity is the mooting of sincerity. It may well be embittering to give up on sincerity, yet that very bitterness does little more than to mark the site of guilty conscience. And this same site of guilt in fact houses a species of reward. Here is where the private, authentic self separates itself off from the hypocrisy of the world. But the world is relatively indifferent to this privacy. In fact, the world has thrown the private self out as a sop for those gullible enough to take it up. The stereotypical stage-­tyrant says, “Let them hate so long as they fear.”54 But a more practical-­minded emperor can simplify this maxim substantially: “Let them praise so long as they praise.” Even, and perhaps especially, as a hollow performance the enactment of praise suffices. One who praises can, more or less, be counted upon to fall in line with the whole system that enables and requires the very same praise. While such a person might not be utterly reliable, he is also manifestly not an agitator. Instead he is a man who has declared that he has a price, and that it is being paid. Of course, problems might well arise if someone comes along and offers a better deal. That is perhaps an “Antonine” way of putting it. Consider the quasi-­ alienated individual of today: “Even though capitalism is destroying the planet, nevertheless . . .” The alienation occurs only at the level of thought, not action. One still goes to work, works hard, then comes home and buys the cheapest items online and has them shipped in from China to arrive overnight. Substantive resistance “would cost too much,” in more ways than one. Meanwhile “clicktivism” replaces the concrete interventions of activists. The “good conscience” of the private self enables the bad-­faith behavior of the concrete political agent who never in fact resists and often in practice sustains the dominant order of things. “The deserts of the 52  See Kreuz, 2016:50–51. 53  “Courtliness” might seem like an anachronistic and hence potentially misleading category, but the idea that there is a “Roman court” and that one can, with qualifications, use of it the vocabulary familiar from other courts should not be too controversial. See Talbert, 2011. 54  Oderint, dum metuant is a suspiciously beloved line. See Cicero, De Officiis 1.97, Philippicae 1.34, Pro Sestio 102, Seneca De Clementia 1.12.4, De Clementia 2.2.2, De ira 20.4, and Suetonius Caligula 30.1. Compare Suetonius, Tiberius 59.2.

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Introduction  17

laudandus were less relevant than the virtuosity of the laudator, duly rewarded by his small share in the glory of the court.”55 “Despite his hint of liberties lost, Statius endows with dignity the role of praise poet.”56 “[W]hatever discontents might be festering under the façade of loyalty, the façade is holding up. This is something that both emperor and audience needed to see confirmed periodically. Fides, the term that sent me off on this trail, is doubly irrelevant.”57 Do your job well and take pride in it. It is not such a bad job. Give the boss a boost from time to time. It would be a shame if the company went out of business and you lost your post. The complicity runs deep, even if so much of its discourse emphasizes the surface of the world. The aesthetic project cannot be peeled away from politics since one of its principal gestures is an ostentatious embrace of the political by the aesthetic. And, in fact, the poet looks a lot like a prince and the prince a poet. The theory of power and the legitimacy of the literary domain are not tidily separable from the story of politics that the verses tell, even as that same story is “fake” and “insincere.” Who better than a poet to claim that lying is the most earnest act that one can perform: for, without fiction, where would the poet be? If politics is the art of the possible, the literary embrace of politics yields a situation where the domain of the possible is constructed as an object of artistic representation. This object is bodied forth as a fantasmatic object that nevertheless embodies both a politics of representation and a representation of politics. In this case we privilege the already privileged. Tradition and authority underwrite both power and writing itself. The real origin of the (artistically/politically) possible is retrojected onto a “real origin” that is also an invented origin. For example, the Flavian house is both fully legitimate in as much as it is a house of Caesars and wholly illegitimate in as much as the Flavians as a house are not specially positioned to assume the title of Caesar any more than Caesar himself had been entitled to turn his specific name into the generic name for autocratic power. The poetic will to power and so too the will to power qua poetic force are, it turns out, traditionally both self-­siring and self-­effacing when it comes to the fact that they are self-­siring. It is only a conspiracy of the convergently self-­interested that enables the emperor’s new clothes to be seen for what they are, namely a nullity that has become a plenitude. The whiplash one experiences upon the death of one Caesar and 55 Coleman, 1988:xxv. 56 Newlands, 2002:283. 57  Damon, 2002:180. This is in fact a post-­Domitianic reference, but it is useful for our purposes.

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18 Introduction the advent of another better, yet more glorious Caesar testifies to the supremacy of fiction/power. Without any order being issued, the stories themselves move with lightning speed to shore up the new order of things. The difficulties of reading each of our authors are notorious and legion. But I think it useful to at least start from a point that I do not believe to be especially controversial. Specifically, on the surface, at least, this poetry is not promising revolution.58 Whatever modulations might be on offer, they are couched in a rhetoric of satisfaction with the over-­arching socio-­ political order of things.59 The poems may well contain some provocative implications for those who wish to work through the material, but whether it is authorial intention or something else that is lurking “down there,” up here the narrative is a positive one. The intersection between the verse and reality produces a series of ­evasions in both the poetry itself and in the criticism of the same. It seems odd to detach the verses from the world. It seems foolish to make any specific determinations. Humor and/or panegyrical excess as features of the poetry send up flares that warn any but the most rash against rushing in.60 But, on the other hand, the poems are quite insistent that they are very much about the here and the now, and that there is a vital connection to reality that animates them.61 And even if one appreciates that reality has been worked up and worked over by the literary imagination, only a truly

58  Fitzgerald,  2007:87: “The wonders of this imperial age are not the exemplary figures who resisted tyrants, but the displays with which the emperor regales his people; the emperor who puts on the shows and invites his people to them is the generous host par excellence.” 59  Sullivan, 1991:115: “In fact almost all of Martial’s work is focused by a unified and hierarchical vision of imperial society as it should be, which inspires the eulogist with the ideals against which the satirist judges and condemns the defects and failings. It is a vision which is coloured by a very personal view of how life should be lived and the Epicurean values it should manifest, a life that is sheltered in the bosom of generous friends with a modest competence secured by a warm acceptance of the ideological status quo (4.77.1–3).” ­ Sullivan, 1991:139: “Martial’s open support of Domitian’s politico-­religious innovations, his proclamation of the emperor’s divinity and the protection extended him by Jupiter and other deities, is carefully and intelligently orchestrated throughout the books. In these extravagant eulogies Martial was not just indulging in the conventional flattery of a patron, he was also carrying out the wishes of an imperial ruler, as was Statius.” Zeiner,  2005:228–229: “The social and cultural values that Statius attaches to these forms of capital also correlate with the values championed by Domitian and his reign . . . . In this regard the Silvae mirror the dominant culture of Domitianic Rome.” 60  Studies like Spaeth, 1929 and Spaeth, 1932 come across as very naive today: Martial’s poems are sifted and summarized as if they provided direct documentary evidence about Roman life and manners. 61  Fitzgerald, 2007:68: “Martial’s books have a distinctive presence to their world and, to the extent that they are part of the very world they describe, their peculiar status shines light on the social relationships dealt with in the book.”

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Introduction  19

perverse skepticism could radically detach the poem and poets from the world being represented. Concrete institutions, events, and persons are constantly adduced so as to anchor the poetic project in a Rome, even if this Rome is not “the” Rome that the historical imagination constructs for itself. Of particular interest is the manner in which the narrative voice of the poetry insists that the poet himself is writing what we read owing to a special set of material circumstances. The poetry pointedly embeds its own narrative within a larger world. In both Martial and Statius, foundational elements of the poetic project include moments where a figure steps forth and says, “I, the poet, am addressing you, the prince.” The text weaves its own context for us. In Statius’ case the situation is quite stark: we know nothing about him other than what he elects to tell us.62 And yet readers of the Siluae will feel that they know a fair amount about the author of the Siluae.63 The same is effectively true of Martial. But in his case, at least, the comedy makes it a lot easier to detect a gap between who the author ought to have been and the character the narrator presents to us.64 It is easy to see the art and then to choose to keep on seeing it. The narrator is not the author. The political bits are then literary. And, so, syllogistically, one need not claim anything about the politics of the verse: “All literary characters are not mortal men. This narrator is not a man. Therefore there are no men here at all.” The poetry contains within itself just such an invitation. It both solicits our earnest appraisal of the reality on offer and also laces everything with abundant indications that it would be naive to take any of this precisely at face value. Nevertheless, it is at least somewhat distressing to observe what can happen when the invitation to radical aestheticism is accepted. “The art of safe criticism” in such a case is a phrase that describes the contemporary critic. For one takes up the task of demonstrating all over again that the poetry is very poetic. Both corpora are filled with metapoetic meditations. And, provided one decides to linger with the theme, it is entirely possible to see nothing but a garden of the muses instead of an actual Roman estate. The double vision on offer in the poetry becomes singularly immaterial in 62  See Coleman, 1988:15. 63  For example, after a thorough sifting of the evidence, Newlands concludes that Statius presents himself as “a mediator between the godlike isolation of the emperor and the imperial desire for public fame and immortality.” (Newlands, 2002:279) 64  See Saller on the historian’s dilemma when reading Martial: “To provide entertainment, Martial chose stereotypical characters and situations, which were familiar to a wide audience, and exaggerated, distorted, and poked fun at them.” (Saller, 1983:246)

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20 Introduction the end.65 The whole universe of signs is in communication with itself, but that communication is only a matter of semiotics and abstractions. The mastery all resides at the level of the symbol. One declares that the artist has mastered his tools, namely the poet has read his predecessors thoroughly. A necessary corrective comes with the final dialectical move. Thesis: this is political poetry. Antithesis: this is poetical poetry. Synthesis: power itself is metapoetical. Both author and prince are makers and doers. Both author and prince are masters of a world of symbols. Both author and prince are likewise posited within the (pseudo-­totality) of the symbolic construct of the verse world as Master Signifiers within the same. Meanwhile both author and prince circulated as imaginary constructs within the broader cultural symbolic of contemporary Rome. Power as metapoetic allows one to see a power/poetry dyad in which each term must be thought of in conjunction with the other. Poets writing about poetry—that is, the standard, limited definition of metapoetic ­activity—becomes a special case. It is the special case wherein the hypothetical autonomy of poetry from the political is likely to be most strongly registered. Such a retreat into a de-­politicized sublime is, of course, a political gesture and one that is expressive of the partitioning of the world and its legibility by power, and so also power’s power to make/do/ποιεῖν. For example, talk about sexual invective as metapoetic may well be apposite in that one aspect of the abuse may well be a commentary about poetry itself, but side-­stepping the question of sociality more generally turns everything into a sort of joke. And yet concrete power is assuredly exercised within the social field when one condemns the lives of certain classes of people to the objects of humor and consigns their complaints— if they are foolish enough to make them—to the category of uncultured, humorless, and obtuse grumbling. Even if the “I” speaking to us in these poems is a poetic persona, this only complicates the question of one’s appraisal of the modalities of speaking to power rather than mooting them.66 Consider a comic whose act involves making a lot of misogynistic jokes while adopting a stereotypical macho persona. People should feel 65  Consider some of the headings of Grewing, 2010: “(IV.) Groteske Körper metapoetisch; (V.) Relativität metapoetisch; (VI.) Landgüter metapoetisch; (VII.) Frauen metapoetisch.” 66  Lorenz,  2002:4: “Vor allem die Trennung zwischen dem historischen Dichter und dem Sprecher der Epigramme erscheint mir als eine unerlässliche Grundlage der Martialdeutung.” Lorenz, 2002:53: “Über den historischen Martial können wir allein spekulieren, während seine persona als ein Dichter mit einer eigenen Weltsicht sowie einem eigenen poetologischen Ansatz auftritt und nur diese Figur für uns fassbar ist.”

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Introduction  21

free to decide that they don’t think that the act is “just an act”—even though it is obviously an act as well.67 When is a clown instead a troll? When is clowning around itself a part of the problem? When does a posture of “plausible deniability” of itself merit criticism? The situation is not much different but less glaring if we consider Statius’ baroque descriptions of real estate.68 The political economy of ownership and consumption gives way to meditations on the building of word-­ palaces. The idea that poetry is only about poetry leaves poetry in a position of complete freedom: it is never really answerable to the world even as it is clearly always intervening in, playing with, and modulating a collection of worldly referents. It is free to say anything but to be responsible for nothing. It is autonomous and autarchic without any dependence or responsibility. It is, in a word, imperious. And in that sense it is more ­“perfectly Domitianic” than is the emperor himself. I now conclude by glossing my specific approach to the poems of Statius and Martial. Martial is, in many ways, “illegible.” Or, rather, there are so many possible readings of him that there will never be one, masterful reading. This fact, of itself, speaks to a kind of “resistance” to monological hegemony set within the poetry. Nevertheless, to the extent that Martial is no freedom fighter, his hide-­away is also a coward’s retreat even as it is not just and only that. In any case, my own argument will commit as its original sin a “wholistic” appraisal of the atomistic and atomized world of the Epigrams.69 Key themes, images, and words will also be investigated. The books are organized internally and their structures need to be explored.70 A continuous reading of the books reveals cycles of poems. Juxtapositions, smooth transitions, and abrupt contrasts are key features of the text’s original presentation. One has to have some sort of account of what this specific medley of seemingly disparate ingredients reveals in its very disparity. I will read more or less year by year and so tacitly bind the interpretation to the shifting concrete circumstances of the author himself. But the connection, though felt, is sufficiently loose and attenuated to prevent one 67  Lorenz, 2002:19: “Durch die Unverhältnismäßigkeit des intertextuellen Vergleichs wird also schon zu Beginn der Epigrammaton libri deutlich, dass der Sprecher der Epigramme eine lächerliche Figur ist.” 68  But see Zeiner, 2005 for a sociological appraisal of Statius. 69  Fitzgerald,  2007:2: “The epigram being the most closed of forms, almost closure as form, you cannot continue an epigram; you can only start again.” 70 Grewing,  2010:158–159: “Die Kunst des Dichtens von Epigrammen besteht also weniger im Einzelprodukt als vielmehr in der Komposition eines ganzes Buches von ­ Gedichten . . . Um die individuelle Kürze eines Gedichts goutieren zu können, muss man sich auf einen langen Leseprozess einlassen.”

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22 Introduction putting too much force on it. It would snap if any real pressure was brought to bear. Here my approach to Martial pursues an agenda that will not be unfamiliar to readers of Lorenz. The reading is chronological.71 And, as one of its chief points of orientation, the deployment of Caesar throughout the epigrams will be traced over time. And the role that this figure plays relative to the poetic project of the corpus will be explored. Caesar, that is, will be treated as a theme that is integral to the whole rather than as an addressee to whom one speaks occasionally and only by way of prologue.72 Defending or blaming Martial for the nature of his address to Caesar is a trap.73 The ethical drive can short-­circuit the necessary preliminary work of discovering the actual state of the evidence. One needs to resist the temptation to read the poems as if we had the transcript of a frank speech of an individual named Martial to an emperor named Domitian rather than a poem with a narrator that emerges amidst a collection of other poems.74 As a collection of statements about power, authority, and legitimacy, how is one to appraise the material in front of us? This is the key question. It will be asked both of Martial and Statius. Accordingly, this project follows a specific route through these texts, but others are available. In fact, I believe that one might fruitfully revisit some familiar topics like gender and sexuality in Martial in the light of an expanded sense of the politics of his poetic enterprise. So a lot of what one finds below on this particular topic, as with so many others, is supposed to be more of a “first word” than a “last word.” The volume would yield an unpleasant irony were I generating an oppressively closed set of hermeneutic possibilities. And I would be doing this precisely in the course of discussing a tyrant. The notes highlight the successes of others and point to avenues that have yielded productive conclusions. This project has followed a specific route through these texts, but many others are available. And my basic complaint where I do take issue with other work is that one needs to re-­insert the political dimension, or at least to acknowledge the broader political context of the poetry. Thereupon revised, enriched, and expanded conclusions emerge. There really are non-­political preserves and reserves in these poets, but one always needs to acknowledge that these have been carved out from some broader

71  See Lorenz, 2002:109. 72  See Lorenz, 2002:1–2. 73 Lorenz, 2002:2. 74  Any biography of Martial derived from the things the narrator says about himself will need to confront an array of contradictions. See Lorenz, 2002:8–9.

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Introduction  23

context, a context that needs to be properly acknowledged in the course of making more local, limited observations. One can learn a lot about “friendship” or any other number of engaging topics in this poetry without focussing obsessively on politics. And yet my point throughout is that the poets are themselves frequently pushing the political context into the center of their own discussions of cultural moments. That is, they are the ones who have effectively insisted that there be a “politics of beauty” and so forth. My reading takes their gambit seriously. In the case of Statius’ poetry, the general approach will be rather traditional. We will linger with whole poems. A running commentary on the articulation of the argument will be offered. Poems on related topics will be read next to one another. The chronological orientation of the Martial segment will largely be displaced by a thematic one. Or, rather, we will explore the world-­building of Statius as a whole, his rhetoric of power, its favored tropes, its preferred objects. Key ideas emerge. We will keep track of them. A “progress” of sorts will be noted. And I work up to a crescendo. But the climax emerges only as a function of a critic’s wholistic take on the corpus. And this interpretive climax presents my ultimate understanding of how one should read these poems as a collection of themes, issues, and tropes. Earinus, in both Martial and Statius, provides the key figure who lets one get the most vivid look at the historico-­politico-­aesthetic nightmare that is “the unparalleled glory of the Domitianic age (as per the subjects of the same).” One of the readers of the typescript noted that just as there is a history on offer in the Martial segment one could offer a highly convergent narrative in the case of Statius. Specifically, one could argue that we see engagement, increasing proximity, an intense and painful moment of excessive intimacy, and then a complex aftermath where the poetry withdraws, wounded. The insight is wonderful, and, for me, convincing. I was keen to incorporate the idea. But it is easier to embrace this observation than it is to prove it. Martial has roughly a thousand poems that he writes over a decade, and he is constantly making “where we stand right now” into an element of his poetry. In some ways it is hard not to do a chronological reading of the Epigrams given that his narrative regularly shouts the theme of “The Present” at us. Conversely Statius has far, far fewer poems. And the timeline of poetic production is less obvious, much more compressed in any case, and, given that we have a (probably) posthumous fifth book, deeply ambiguous. Meanwhile, internal to the verses we do have a poetic narrative of “where we stand,” but it is handled in a rather more cagey manner.

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24 Introduction The historical angle is very much worth pursuing and tracing the build­ p to a crisis in 95 and/or 96 ce across corpora is a valuable project. Note, u for example, that the Earinus poetry which I depict as thematically crucial is also arriving at the same moment in time in each author. So a historical reading and a thematic reading are not actually at odds. But, for present purposes, I think an approach to Statius that works through the material thematically serves the general reader better in the end. Specifically, Statius offers a “better”—or is it “worse” . . . ?—illustration of the logic of complicity than does Martial, and so he is also fittingly presented as the sequel to the Martial chapter. The Siluae are in practice less obsessed with Domitian and less preoccupied with tying the project as a whole to the imperial persona than are the Epigrams of Martial. Of course, there is plenty of that sort of thing on offer in the Siluae too. The specific attachment to the emperor needs to be explored. And it has been explored. But what makes the Statian collection of themes worth examining in its own right is the way that Statius effectively commits to “an imperial world” that is not Domitianic in a narrow, literal sense even if a lot of the points and images Statius deploys are indeed inspired by Domitianic particulars. Please note that I in fact do think that one can and should read Martial in a more diffuse, thematic sense as well. Reading Martial chronologically makes vividly present one set of ideas. And reading Statius ­thematically makes vividly present another set of ideas. And yet both collections of ideas are more or less shared between the authors. The choice of which reading mode is emphasized in which case is motivated by considerations of clarity and coverage not by any essential gap between the two. In short, Martial’s universe is likewise “an imperial world” even if it strikes me as “less pointedly so” than does the world of Statius. In any case, Statius is singing to a variety of “important people” who are not always in fact the very most important men of the hour. These minor luminaries are celebrated after the fashion of the emperor. The warm glow that suffuses these poems about individuals who are “emperor adjacent” and who are “going along with the program” is fully consonant with a poetics of power that invests in and so connives with a certain configuration of cultural domination. As such the themes as a collection provide an “imperial imaginary.” At the level of its manifest, repeated rhetorical formulations, this poetry “believes in” a configuration of power that does not really require the ­concrete particularity of Domitian himself. Statius offers a gateway to

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Introduction  25

the Panegyrici Latini and to a lot of the Latin of the next few centuries.75 Statius is a direct influence for someone like Claudian. And the logic of the  Siluae as a logic can be said to adumbrate multiple aspects of the Late  Antique aestheticization of power. In the course of exploring the “Domitianic” quality of this poetry one comes to appreciate that the imperial adjective designates not just the man Domitian, but that, ultimately, the term can lead us to the idea of a certain kind of imperial presence as well as a whole mode of rhetoric that sets itself the task of depicting the power that corresponds to this presence. In short, a reading of Statius can quickly transfer from the specific and out to the generic. This is much more clearly the poetry of “generalized complicity,” and, accordingly, we have in Statius a “consummate artist of complicity.” Alas, Martial, you do not win the crown. Statius’ poetry assuredly keeps track of Domitian in a year-­by-­year sense, but it also evinces a commitment to a Glorious Emperor whose name (for the moment) happens to be Domitian. This means that, like Martial, Statius is somebody whom one can easily suspect of falling out with the emperor or of being ready to change camp when the time comes, etc. The real point is that none of the historical vicissitudes actual or imagined much affect the deep logic of the poetry itself and its esthetic commitments to power, pleasure, mastery, and domination in general. In these verses Domitian winds up as also “just a metaphor.” Domitian becomes a pretext for complicity, a someone out there who makes Statius do what he was going to do anyway—namely, (insincerely and hyperbolically) praise the powerful—so as to realize his own ambitions as a poet. The relative uniformity of tone and the general constriction of the topics of the Siluae relative to Martial’s Epigrams makes it easier to make at least an initial appraisal of the material. Here too it will be necessary to push past the first available answer, namely that this is occasional poetry destined for a variety of patrons and flattering to them. And, similarly, it is easy enough to declare that the poetry about the emperor is of the pan­e­ gyr­ic­ al variety. This is not in the least an inaccurate appraisal, but it is also only a starting point. The mental state of the author at the moment of inscription is not the destination. Nor, for that matter, are we going to be overly concerned with composing our own panegyrics addressed to the

75  On late antique panegyrical theory and practice see Gunderson, 2020b.

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26 Introduction author that praise his mastery of his genre, his appreciation of Callimachus, his craftsmanship more generally. Instead, the aim will be a full appraisal of the question of what it meant to have said precisely this rather than something else. As a collection of statements about an imagined, too good to be true world, what is nevertheless revealed as its constitutive theory of power/poetry? If power and poetry are a dyad, then we need to explore as well a related phrase with a double meaning, namely the art of complicity. The phrase designates both a practical know-­how when it comes to complicity as well as the product of that know-­how. It indicates art’s own complicity in the question of power-­as-­poetry precisely because art is unwilling to give up on the idea of poetry-­as-­power. And the profundity of this art acquires its depth precisely in the same measure as it deepens the hold of power upon the world. The “ramifications” of the Siluae consist of a profusion of teeming roots that sink down and branches that rise up as power-­poetry flourishes. And power-­poetry teems with fecund vitality both in the bright light of meaning and in the dark, subterranean zone of signification. While strolling along the streets of Rome with “Martial” and surveying the woods of a villa with “Statius,” we will be touring this special sort of art, an art that makes all too much all too possible. I would like to close with some brief remarks on the notes and the translations. The notes complement and at times complicate what is said in the body of the book. And critically, for a volume that appears in the “Classics in Theory” series, a lot of the explicit “theory” is to be found only there. In my earlier work I usually put the theoretical discussions in the foreground. It is important to articulate how ideas and methods that were originally generated to describe as well as to intervene within a revolutionary present of the twentieth century might facilitate an exploration of Greco-­Roman antiquity. For example: How can one use Althusser to read the Roman arena?76 What does it mean to think of Roman rhetorical performance in light of Butler’s performativity?77 How does psychoanalysis let us open up the repressed content of declamation?78 How can one do a Foucauldian, Deleuzian, and/or Derridean archaeology of Roman knowledge?79 Can Slovene critical theory facilitate an encounter with Plautus that lets us explore the social symptom of servile subjection?80 How does the uncanny Lacanian Thing make itself felt in Senecan

76 Gunderson, 1996. 78 Gunderson, 2003b.

77  Gunderson, 2000a. 79 Gunderson, 2009.

80 Gunderson, 2015b.

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Introduction  27

philosophy at the point where the system simultaneously coheres and fails to cohere?81 In this volume I see myself as building on many aspects of that earlier work, but I was not convinced that the present study required me to insert, yet again, the words “Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains.” Proof in the form of pudding seemed to be the more appetizing option. The study is supposed to perform a symbiosis of theory and classics. Theory does not drive the agenda. It instead has a heuristic value and offers a constant supply of practical hermeneutic service. The body of the text is supposed to feel like a sensible appraisal of the material we have before us in the Latin. And yet one sees from the notes that the issues that arise from the same Latin are themselves fully consonant with major strands of the research agenda of the humanities more generally. For example, the efforts of the Frankfurt school to revise, expand, update, and modulate Hegel and Marx can and perhaps should be seen as consonant with our own efforts to (re)appraise the ancient city and to encounter it dialectically, that is, to meet up with it again, but also anew, and to change both ourselves and it in the process. Similarly Žižek’s cynicism about cynicism speaks both to and with the canny (dupli)(compli)city of Martial and Statius. Bourdieu cites both Horace and Homer: participating-­ and-­ observing is very old indeed. And the invitation to reflexive sociology was in part extended to the future by the past. Theory has always been keen on the classics: Marx wrote a thesis on the atomists. Freud’s couch is literally surrounded by antiquities. Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains an extended meditation on Homer’s Odysseus. Foucault reboots the History of Sexuality with a return to Greece. Derrida is a commentator on the Platonic corpus. Just about everyone wants to talk about Sophocles’ Antigone. The list of examples can easily be extended. Conversely, I argue throughout the present volume that we have always been doing theory of one sort or another when we do classics. But any disavowal of such is problematic in as much as we then become numb to just which authority we end up authorizing when we generate our objects of study. The one-­sided claims of estrangement between classics and theory that one finds in some quarters serve mostly as a gambit designed to safeguard a specific political economy of philological hermeneutics. Tyrants fear amity with its fecund non-­ hierarchical association, interaction, and exchange. And so I hope that 81 Gunderson, 2015a.

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28 Introduction readers will see in here that theory and the classics are old friends and dear friends and that the only scandal is that these boon companions have sometimes been called strangers or even enemies. And finally, a word about the translations. People who do not know Greek and Latin should be able to read this book. Long passages are translated in full. Phrases are as well. Most individual words are glossed on the spot. The meaning of some terms will need to be remembered going forward. If a word or phrase is not obviously translated here and now, then what comes before or immediately after is supposed to provide the context that shows the meaning(s) of the relevant terms. High style passages are usually done in a higher style. Low in a lower one. Statius’ Latin is highly artificial. Perhaps unnatural English is a good fit. His Latin is, though, always quite clever, and almost everything means at least two things. I hope to have reproduced at least some of the “pregnancy” of the verse. Most of the translations are done line-­by-­line, and in translating each author I typically try to capture something about the word order of the original. Our authors use word order to provide stress and surprise, among other things. This method of translation can leave the English feeling a bit unnatural at times. But it is well worth knowing what words are supposed to jump out at you in a passage and how the flow of information has been arranged.

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2 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature A.  “But now I know that you really are going to Rome” It might be useful to begin with two somewhat naive questions, “In what ways are Martial’s Epigrams Flavian literature?” and “To what extent are they specimens of Domitianic literature?” The categories folded into the questions themselves are coarse, and they are likely to yield a lazy confusion rather than ultimate clarification. One is all but invited to turn correlation into causation: specifically, given when he lived, Martial was a Domitianic writer by definition. And here the adjective is allowed to “govern” the noun in a strong sense. One falls back on under-­articulated assumptions about the relationship between history and literature. One leans upon relatively vague ideas about the manner in which things we happen to know about the times can be detected in the sorts of things Martial writes about or, conversely, fails to write about. And, succumbing to the siren song of defective syllogisms, just as the most important man in Rome is the emperor, so too for the literary critic the principal point of inquiry is the relationship between prince and poet. As a research agenda, this mode of reading, if adopted as a matter of reflex rather than undertaken in a spirit of deliberation, readily reduces the object of inquiry—“the poetry is really about politics”—and it can easily conjure phantoms precisely where one wanted sober conclusions. One could use the same sort of vague thinking to call Martial a Spanish poet: he was born there after all. Then again, how many Roman authors were in fact born and raised in Rome? This is a trick question: virtually none were. Or one could be puckish and call Martial a Neronian poet: Martial’s “formative years” when he was between the ages of seventeen and thirty-­one (more or less . . . ) coincided with that emperor’s rule. Martial is in his forties when Domitian becomes emperor. The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The  Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Erik Gunderson, Oxford University Press. © Erik Gunderson 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.003.0002

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30 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature A more revelatory way of talking about the connections between the poet and his circumstances is needed. One cannot let calendars and labels do all of the work. For example, a politics of Senecan tragedy is, on the one hand, certainly worth considering, but, on the other, this same political tenor is not at all clear as a feature that can serve as a reliable guide to the criticism of the plays. Various plays could be assigned to any number of different dates as a function of a political allegory that “must” be there. In short, a “timely” reading of a poet can be a fraught enterprise. One might be forgiven for yielding to the temptation to bracket the political and the contemporary in any given poem and to attend to other matters which can be demonstrated with more clarity. There is perhaps some sagesse in the maxim that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But in the case of Martial one has a rather difficult time avoiding a political reading. And this is because the poems are constantly invoking contemporary Rome.1 And we are able to catch sight of the emperor himself in the poems. Nevertheless, Martial teases us about the pseu­don­ y­mous quality of the many day-­to-­day people he conjures. This only accentuates the fact that the emperor and very select people close to him are the “real” names stitched onto a textual fabric that is otherwise woven together out of generic character types. But even the last point has its complication: the generic characters might not be generic. We are teasingly invited to suspect that many of these stock types in the poems in fact correspond to some concrete specificity.2 Of course, at some point we will need to wonder as well about the extent to which the emperor is also a mere persona despite being presented as so really real and so very

1  Rimell, 2008:4: “You feel you can see, hear and smell the city in Martial – he is, and has been, brilliant fodder for all those ‘everyday life’ books about ancient Rome.” See, for example, Best, 1969:208: “Martial offers the student of Roman social history a unique storehouse of information about life and manners in the imperial capital during the reign of the Flavians . . .” Best effectively makes the poetry immediate and autobiographical: Martial knew the emperor at first hand; Martial knew the dregs as well. Boyle, 1995:87–88 has a more satisfying take that avoids confusing the literature of everyday life with life itself: “The criteria advanced for this inversion of the literary hierarchy and elevation of epigram are to use Martial’s terms, uita, homo, mores, te, ‘life,’ ‘man,’ ‘morals,’ ‘you.’ ” 2  “There is no such man as Athenagoras, but . . .” See Martial, Epigrams, 9.95b: Nomen Athenagorae credis, Callistrate, uerum.|Si scio, dispeream, qui sit Athenagoras.|Sed puta me uerum, Callistrate, dicere nomen:|Non ego, sed uester peccat Athenagoras. “There is such a man as Postumus, but . . .” See Martial, Epigrams 2.23: Non dicam, licet usque me rogetis,|Qui sit Postumus in meo libello, . . . “Your girl is no Thais, but . . .” See Martial, Epigrams 3.11.1–2: Si tua nec Thaïs nec lusca est, Quinte, puella,|Cur in te factum distichon esse putas? . . . Note, though, the efforts of Balland, 2010 to make vividly real and historically concrete a number of the persons in the poems. And not all of them are necessarily to be dismissed as “courtiers.”

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unique. But that will come later.3 And, then there’s Martial himself: poet or poetic persona? Yes. For now, let us linger with the idea that the reader feels the generic presence of “contemporary Rome,” a Rome that is full of stock characters and stock situations. And then the same reader is also asked to feel the specific presence of “Flavian Rome,” a Rome that is inhabited by a concrete dynasty with a distinct history, a group of people who live in a very specific house. In the former case this “typical Rome” is inhabited by a quasi-­comic collection of characters who themselves can be imagined as falling, for the most part, into two general classes, the scoundrels and the disappointed. The disappointed are those who had thought that normative social structures might somehow serve them well. The scoundrels are those who either neglect or trample those same structures. The collection is quasi-­comic rather than comic because, unlike Plautine comedy, this is not a critique of power launched by a member of a subordinated fraction of society. Instead, this is a much more dyspeptic world in which men snarl because, though not themselves powerful, they expect better than they have gotten. They are likewise outraged to note that their putative inferiors are coming out on top. In short, the laughter is reactionary rather than revolutionary. At the center of it all, even more centrally positioned than the emperor, is Martial. Naturally this is “Martial” rather than Marcus Valerius Martialis, a poet from Augusta Bilbilis who was born somewhere between 38 and 41 ce and who left behind his native Iberian soil and migrated to Rome. The figure of Martial plays more than one role in the poems. The poems stage a Martial who is a fictionalized hybrid between a concrete historical individual and a character who is himself but one of the types on display in the poetry. On the one hand he is “that famous Martial” in marked passages at the openings of books, on the other, Martial may well be just another guy looking for dinner and so a stereotype liable to fall into  familiar patterns and to make familiar complaints. “Martial” (and Martial . . .) can be both a unique, unparalleled, inimitable poet and a put-­ upon everyman.

3  For now: “Es dürfte deutlich geworden sein, dass der ‘ich’ Sagende der Epigramme eine Dichter-persona mit offensichtlich stark fiktionalisierten Zügen ist. Zudem spricht vieles dafür, dass auch Martials Kaiser als literarische personae auftreten.” (Lorenz, 2002:42) “Die Darstellung Domitians ist von Martials literarischem Konzept bestimmt.” (Lorenz, 2002:112) See also Holzberg, 2002:66–74 on the various deployments of Caesar within the Epigrams as part of world of the epigrams.

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32 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature In the epigrams we have an ostentatious slide between reality and ­ ction. And “Martial” is himself one of the places where one can see this fi movement the most readily. Accordingly, we can return to our emperor, the “really real” figure from a couple of paragraphs ago. Domitian may well be a specific, historically situated individual. But he too is the product of a number of fictions. Some of these come to Marital pre-­made: the emperor as a cultural fixture is not something Martial can invent ex nihilo, but rather something that one works with and on. This Martial doing the work on Domitian (who is also “Domitian”) is also himself the thing-­in-­ quotes: “Martial.” In short, we see the poet-­and-­character working with, working on, and working through the emperor-­and-­character. If literary epigram mimics the “really real” epigram of words on stone, then this situation furnishes a fit instantiation of the ironies of the genre. The verses “fix” a political reality that is all too fluid and labile.4 The “reality effect” of Martial’s verse more generally—for these poems are regularly adduced as insights into the “lived experience” of everyday Rome—accordingly emerges as a very peculiar species of realism. We have a Rome so vividly portrayed that one is invited to smell it (in its loathsomeness), but, on the other hand, the people running around in this Rome are a collection of characters from the stage, familiar types wearing stereotypical masks and executing stereotypical gestures. And, moreover, even the central historical characters seem to be some sort of mixture of actual persons and dramatizations of those same persons. In short, one might well ask of Martial’s realism, “What fictions does your mask of realism in fact serve?” And, conversely, one should not be too quick to dismiss these fictions as “mere fiction”: if reality itself has a discursive structure, then how do these stories connive with that same discursivity so as to feed the dominant fiction in its very dominance?5 Marcus Valerius Martialis writes up a “Martial” who is pretending to be a scurra. But Martial/“Martial,” in so pretending, is in practice actually a scurra.6 In this “actuality” he reveals the sort of collapse that occurs in the English idiom where “plays the part of ” can be either “pretends to be” or

4  The idea that inscriptions are themselves “really real” is itself a fiction of that genre. What is carved on a stone is by no means the totality of the concrete [sic] situation. 5  Silverman, 1992:28: “The ‘familiar,’ ‘well-­known,’ and ‘transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself)’ can only in the first instance be those through which it articulates desire and identity.” 6  Fitzgerald,  2007:9: “Martial, [in contrast to Juvenal], adopts the persona of the struggling dependent not to give voice to the resentment of the unrewarded but to explore the art of survival . . . Martial casts himself as a scurra.”

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“serves the actual function of.” In this case the structure is not “either . . .  or . . . ” but instead “both . . . and . . . ” The oldest sense of the word scurra is “an elegant, town-­bred man.” But the smart set themselves do not spend long mistaking any of the urbane urbani for a scurra. Already in Plautus the term comes to have a valence that will predominate for centuries: the scurra is “a city buffoon, droll, a jester.” He is a sort of parasite whose wit gets him ahead in this specific Roman world.7 The prefatory letter to Martial’s Epigrams promises mere drollery. People of good conscience are not to complain about what they read in here. This is all fun and games (ludant), and a due respect has been shown even for the most humble persons: “I hope that I have so achieved in my books a due measure and mixture that anyone who has a good conscience cannot complain of them as they play their games while leaving even figures of lower station unharmed (spero me secutum in libellis meis tale temperamentum, ut de illis queri non possit quisquis de se bene senserit, cum salua infimarum quoque personarum reuerentia ludant. Martial, Epigrams 1.pr).” It might be useful to pause to consider what “good conscience” (de se bene sensere) might really mean given what follows. One retroactively smirks at the conjured character of the virtuous reader: he or she does not really belong to Martial’s Rome. The personae—the persons who are also characters who are also masks . . . —that appear in the Epigrams are an array of hypocrites and people with dirty little secrets. And so there is a joke in the “serious” preface. And, conversely, but less obviously, there is something serious about the jokes.8 But, to return to the message that the preface bears on its face, we next hear that the “problem” with the older versions of this sort of literature was its use of the actual names of real people, and, what’s worse, “even important people” (magnis): “[A reverence like mine] was so wanting in the authors of old that they abused not just actual individuals, but even leading citizens (quae adeo antiquis auctoribus defuit, ut nominibus non tantum ueris abusi sint, sed et magni).” Martial’s “modernity” is one and the same as his “harmlessness”: fake names for real laughs.

7  In Cicero’s very first speech we are already well aware that clowning around can mean getting ahead and that this is very old news (uetus est, “de scurra multo facilius diuitem quam patrem familias fieri posse.” Cicero, Pro Quinctio 56). Goldberg, 2005:147: “A scurra was a man who lived by his wit in a culture naturally suspicious of facetiae: originally a man-­about-­town and then a dandy, idler, or fop.” 8  Roman,  2001:118: “The rhetoric of playful joking in Martial presents the reader with scenarios that cannot be taken literally, but cannot be disregarded either.”

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34 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature But, before we get “too clever” in our readings of Martial, the narrator of this preface—someone we are supposed to call “Martial” . . . —makes a series of prayers to ward off any such approaches to the text: “Let my fame not come at so high a price. Let cleverness be the last thing that recommends me (Mihi fama uilius constet et probetur in me nouissimum ingenium).” Genius momentarily becomes a synonym for evil genius, for malice: no longer merely clever, one is “too clever.” There is something “expensive” about the license of a Lucilius and it “costs too much” to let it be exercised. For whom the price is too high and just why are left unstated. The second prayer ends with an “ironic” invocation of “genius”: he cleverly asks not to be thought clever. The Latin even contains a slight ambiguity that one might refuse to resolve: the collocation ingenium probetur might be either “cleverness that wins approval” or something like “convicted of cleverness.”9 Perhaps it somehow simulatenously points to both acts. In addition to authors with nasty wits, the preface also conjures a world of wicked over-­clever readers who foist costly meaning onto mentally impoverished authors. The latter theme is about to receive attention in the next sentences. These lines are tongue-­in-­cheek, but we are assuredly being asked not to be so obtuse as to fail to see that reading-­and-­writing can be more than just fun-­and-­games. Politicized literature is an avowed and avowedly dangerous possibility. The prayers continue apace: “Keep clear from my unaffected verses ye spiteful interpreters” (Absit a iocorum nostrorum simplicitate malignus interpres). The jokes are all “just jokes.” What you see is what you get. Doubleness would be duplicitousness. And that second sense would be something the reader invented, writes this “artless” author.10 Again, it is quite hard to take this insistence that we take everything at face value, especially since a second meaning of simplicitas itself is (epigrammatic) “obscenity.”11 That is, perhaps he has only promised to write what he 9  The construction aliquid in aliquo probari is far more likely to be “to approve of X in Y” than “to demonstrate X in the case of Y”, but see Servius, In Vergilii Aeneidos Libros 1.663: “ . . .  as is illustrated in the case of Dido herself (alatus autem ideo est, quia amantibus nec leuius aliquid nec mutabilius inuenitur, ut in ipsa probatur Didone).” 10  Rimell,  2008:40: “Martial invites readers to play the malignus interpres, while reprimanding us in advance for ‘over-­interpreting,’ for mixing up the literal and the metaphorical.” Fitzgerald, 2007:71: “[T]he malignus interpres is a more insidious figure, who reminds us that in the end the author of a book of epigrams has no control over the reception of his work, which is porous to the interpretations, imputations, and depredations of the world in which it circulates.” 11  See the ending of Epigrams 11.20 where Augustus the epigrammatic emperor has just used “fuck” repeatedly. The narrator then concludes, “Naturally you excuse, Augustus, witty little books given that you know how to talk with ‘Roman simplicity’ ” (Absoluis lepidos

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is  presently writing, and so not to write “simply” in the simple sense of the word. Nevertheless, if we can suspend our problems with simplicity and push on with the rest of the passage, we will find that the narrator will linger with the “bad reader” a while longer. “Let him not (re-)write my epigrams! (nec epigrammata mea scribat).” The reader needs to just sit back and read simple verses in and for their simplicity. Otherwise this reader turns into a writer. And then Martial’s epigrams turn into The Critic’s Epigrams. And then this same volume will be brought into court and used as evidence supporting a capital charge. An attack on the emperor’s “bigness” is treason. The emperor’s maiestas is inviolable. Think again of the non-­abused “leading citizens,” the magnis above: these are the big-­but-­not-­biggest-­ wigs. The situation is not at all simple, not at any level. A flat declaration in the indicative closes the set of prayers: “The exercise of genius in the case of another’s book is the business of scoundrels (inprobe facit qui in alieno libro ingeniosus est).”12 It takes a special kind of villainous genius to convict another on a charge of cleverness. The preface writes up all criticism of the poems—the present criticism included—as suspect, as ipso facto partisan. Beware the clever. There is only so far we will get if we take the preface in its own terms. This is a faux-­simple message about simplicity. It is a clever denial of cleverness. The preface is serious about the political question of jokes. It also effectively makes light of the serious issue of the fatal consequences of delation, something which is unnamed and kept at a pointed remove from the text and its immediate environs.13 A protective web of irony claims that carmen (“song”) cannot be error (“mistake”) provided that there are sufficient layers of this same irony: “I know that you know that I know . . . ” And, “therefore” this is all OK. This formal matter of the de-­realization of nimirum, Auguste, libellos,|Qui scis Romana simplicitate loqui.)” Lavigne, 2008:291: “Martial’s tone, like that of Augustus, embraces simplicitas; in fact, Martial’s poetics, and the authority of his voice, lies in its very explicitness.” One should also recall that “proper Latin” (Latine loqui) also means “frank obscenity.” See both 1.pr and 11.20. 12  And yet, as a formal matter, readers of the Epigrams have no choice but to exercise their genius if they are going to decide that there is anything here beyond a random spray of verses. Fitzgerald, 2007:198: “The book requires us to imagine other readers, with different interests, occupations, and access to author and book, and it also invites us to try out new groupings and associations as we move from epigram to epigram. It does not add up, requiring us in some respects to be ‘witty in another’s book’ (ingeniosus in alieno libro, 1 praef.).” Of course, were Martial’s books truly disorganized, they would assuredly be outliers: everyone else had been artfully arranging their poetry books for centuries (Scherf, 1998:119–120). 13  See Martial, De Spectaculis 4, a poem that celebrates the emperor for punishing delatores: “a mob that weighs upon peace and is hostile to unruffled tranquility . . .  (turba grauis paci placidaeque inimica quieti . . . ).”

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36 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature the referent effected by endless (and endlessly clever) troping de-­fangs the “evil critic” by making light of his very evil. Everything winds up at a conceptual remove. The literary plane is filled with literary objects.14 Reading more into the situation is a violation of the structure of this pointedly abstract space. Let the books be bookish, says the book. Only the writer is allowed to play the game of more-­and-­less. And the writer dresses everything up in quotation marks from the get-­go. And so we get as close as we can to eating our cake and having it too: poetry is “edgy” and not edgy. Isn’t that a “clever” thing to say? The “genius” of Martial specifically circulates around the process of putting quotation marks around the word genius. And then he erases them, and then he pencils them back in, and then . . . The same meta-­literary ludic enterprise of punctuation also governs the relationship between Marcus Valerius Martialis and “Martial” and “the narrator.” It is all a show/for show. Rule-­changing and genre-­flagging come next. “I would need to apologize for wanton linguistic truth (lasciuam uerborum ueritatem)—i.e., the language of epigram itself—if I was the one who set the precedent. But Catullus wrote this way as did Marsus, Pedo, Gaeticulus, and everyone who gets read front to back (Lasciuam uerborum ueritatem, id est epigrammaton linguam, excusarem, si meum esset exemplum: sic scribit Catullus, sic Marsus, sic Pedo, sic Gaetulicus, sic quicumque perlegitur; 1.pr.).” One notes that, despite my invocation of Lucilius above, “satire” is assuredly not the genre. Instead this is epigram à la Catullus.15 Catullus used some real and big and really big names: Cicero and Caesar, for example. But he also used some fake names, Lesbia, for example. “People have been doing this for ages!” History is evoked and plowed under with a gesture like this. The man in the last but not least position is not at all harmless: Gaeticulus was executed for conspiring to murder Caligula. He had been close but not too close to Sejanus. He was a historian more than he was an epigrammatist. It is very difficult to adduce his name and not to touch upon exactly the issues we claimed that this 14 But, at the same time, it is also filled with disavowals of literariness itself . . . Roman, 2001:138: “For Martial, epigram was the ideal genre in which to develop his most characteristic and absorbing fiction: a subliterary conception of literary activity.” 15  Roman, 2001: “The very notion of advertising a libellus of playful verses is derived primarily from Catullus in his role, not as epigrammatist, but more broadly as a writer of polymetric nugae (trifles).” Neger, 2014:329: “Martial programmatically tags, among others, the Roman poet Catullus as his most important epigrammatic model, even though Catullus himself never characterizes his poems as epigrammata.” Fitzgerald, 2007:168: “Harold Bloom has taught us that reading, or misreading, is one of the forms that writing takes in the case of epigonic poets, and Martial may be deliberately misreading the earlier poet.”

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“simple” book would not handle. But Gaeticulus is adduced as a “mere name”: one of the points of his invocation is his disappearance in the next breath. We jump into danger momentarily precisely so we can be seen jumping out of danger. It’s all a bit like a rabbit jumping in and out of the jaws of a lion. A new name comes up in his place, Cato: the man, the myth, the censor who is perpetually censor in the Roman imagination. Of course Domitian himself is censor perpetuus, the “forever-­censor.”16 And this very title is a modern innovation: nobody had claimed as much before. Nor was the example followed. If the reader wants to be ostentatiously gloomy and/or “sad” with an eye to capitalizing on this (staged) affect (ambitiose tristis), then Martial wants to shoo him away from this text: either stop after this letter or maybe just stop after reading the title of the whole work: “Epigrams” (“And what else did you expect?!”). No Catos allowed, or, if they do show up, they need to obey the rules of watching (Non intret Cato theatrum meum, aut si intrauerit, spectet; 1.pr.16).17 We have pivoted: “Just watch” replaces “don’t write-­by-­reading.” Moral authority needs to be passive. The aggregate implications are all highly contradictory. Meanwhile this image of power’s passivity is unconvincing at best. A jussive subjunctive does little to dispel the threat of the actively malicious reader: this is precisely the sort of person who would push on with a nasty agenda all the harder if you asked him to leave off. But, rather than unpack this tendentious argument, the narrator over-­ determines it as a prelude to dodging it.18 The prose version of the claim is ostentatiously turned into a verse version of the same: “I think I will act well within my rights if I close this letter with some verses (uideor mihi meo iure facturus, si epistulam uersibus clusero).” And then the closing 16  Epigrams 1 and 2 come from 86 bce. Domitian starts broadcasting this title right around the same time. Buttrey, 1975:27 on the inscriptions seen on Domitian’s coins: “From this point, mid-­86, to the end of the reign CENS P is the rule.” The title first appears the year before. See the table at Buttrey, 1975:28. I will follow the table at Fowler, 1995:32–33 for the dates of Martial’s works. Domitian is only thirty-­one in 85 bce. 17  We are just kidding around. Martial is re-­playing Ovid’s games: “Martial is cleverly mixing up the Ovidian (pseudo-)injunction to polite women not to read, with the Ovidian construction of a staged critic who enables programmatic statements (and also political ones).  . . .  Martial’s apotropaic move, like Ovid’s, could be interpreted as an enticement to read” (Janka,  2006:284). Fitzgerald,  2007:80: Martial offers multiple “critique[s] of heroes of the past” and a “systematic unraveling of Cato’s image.” And Martial consistently shows us “a contrast between the unbending icons of a heroic past and a more accommodating present.” (Fitzgerald, 2007:82) 18  Note that tendentiousness is a preferred mode of argumentation/appropriation in the Epigrams. See Hinds, 1997:196 on how the narrative voice of the poems can turn Ovid’s Ars Amatoria into The Joy of Sex.

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38 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature e­ pigram, Epigram 0 of Book 1, makes more or less precisely the same point that the prose had just made. The text of the poem and the text of the letter coincide, and each effectively denies that we should imagine that there are any subtexts. If a man swears he is going to Cracow, then he is, plain and simple, going to Cracow, right?19 We are twice told that the “problem” of epigram is its “lustiness,” a lustiness that is a matter of reproach only to the extent that one balks at the sort of sanctioned smut that we can find at public festivals that honor the gods. There is, in short, nothing to see here other than a few good, old-­ fashioned dick jokes. The whole work regularly insists on having it all ways. This “both . . . and . . . ” also includes a “neither . . . nor . . . ” And it constructs one of the key ideological moments of the project as a whole, an ideology that regularly insists on its “essential mere-­ness.” This claim offers a permanent site of refuge for the narrative voice: “merely a joke, not a political threat,” and so forth. But the insistence on desubstantialization also provides a symmetrical excuse for power itself: “merely hegemony, not tyranny,” “can be offered panegyrics, does not mistake itself for an actual god.” The poetry more generally generates a portrait of being “in the middle of it all” and the immanent immediacy of Roman life. But this same life is held at an ironic distance and commented upon. And here the distance of the narrator corresponds to the distance of the emperor: both are observers, set apart. Each puts on a show of Rome. We will explore this structural complicity in more detail below, but first we need to examine some more of the particulars of the self-­positioning of the narrative voice. The inside and outside motif can be detected from the very (lack of a) beginning.20 Epigram 1 of Book 1 is also Epigram 2 of Book 1.21 This first-­ but-­not-­first epigram tells us that the very epigram itself “is” Martial (Hic est quem legis ille, quem requiris . . .)22 19  Freud, 2001a:115 under “skeptical wit”: “Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one. ‘To Cracow,’ was the answer. ‘What a liar you are!” broke out the other. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?” Nun weiss ich aber, dass du wirklich fährst nach Rom . . .  20 See Borgo,  2003:17–20 on convergences between Martial and Statius in their dedications. 21  The numbers game is quite the game: “The first thing to notice about Martial’s first book is the profusion of first things.” (Fitzgerald, 2007:69) And, more generally, see the math chapter of Rimell, 2008. 22  Fitzgerald, 2007:4: “Martial may suggest that we browse his books (10.1), but it is clear that in some respects they are as constructed as any other books of Latin poetry. Opening sequences with programmatic and dedicatory material are the most obvious evidence of this,

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“But now I know that you really are going to Rome”  39 Hic est quem legis ille, quem requiris, toto notus in orbe Martialis argutis epigrammaton libellis: cui, lector studiose, quod dedisti uiuenti decus atque sentienti, rari post cineres habent poetae.   The man you read is the man you were after: world-­renowned Martial, famous for his witty little books of epigrams. Keen reader, to him you have given a glory while he yet lives and breathes that few dead and buried poets possess. Martial, Epigrams 1.1

The reader is looking for something and the reader gets it. The “genius” that this reader exercises conjures here-­he-­is-­it’s-­Martial, the man himself, a concrete actuality. What you read is who he is, says the thing you read. Please forget the prologue that warned you about the problems of reading this way. Martial is/is not “in” the book. The over-­clever reader of the preface was a problem: he wrote something nasty into the book. The new, affable reader embedded in the book’s own opening seeks and finds the author. Good reading means finding the author-­cum-­narrator and letting him tell you his intentions and then leaving it at that. You are doubtless reading here-­he-­is-­it’s-­Martial (who is-­and-­isn’t here) because of all the other famous epigrams he has written.23 He is a world-­famous celebrity author of epigram.24 Rather than one-­off festal but there are also closural poems or sequences.” Were Martial’s books truly disorganized, they would be outliers: everyone else had been artfully arranging their poetry books for centuries (Scherf, 1998:119–120). 23  Fitzgerald,  2007:140–141 explores a very important issue: there is a long-­established tradition whereby poets insert into their works a conjured literary intimacy. This affable rhetoric of intimacy connects the figure of the author to circles of readers to whom the concrete author is likewise closely attached in concrete social reality. Conversely, in the Epigrams the narrator repeatedly conjures a relationship to his readership that is abstract, remote, and mercantile. 24  An indication that this is a pose: the repeated invocation of the plagiarist Fidentinus in Book 1 (1.29, 1.38, 1.53, 1.72). The same preoccupation dissipates over the course of the collection. That is, when Martial is not that famous he pretends that his work is so great that someone might want to steal it. When he is actually famous, he does not need to play that game. See Zeiner, 2005:37–38 on Martial’s lust for distinction. Note also the “profits of distinction” that emerge when we realize there is an allusion here: “It is striking, however, that Martial himself within a poem that attacks a plagiarist uses someone else’s intellectual

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40 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature buffoonery—have we really already forgotten festosque lusus et licentiam uolgi from Epigram 0? That was three lines ago for those who read from cover to cover, just like fans of Catullus do . . . —we now seem to be thinking of precious Alexandrian high art, argutus and libelli flag as much. That is not any old eloquence and these are not any old books. And the reader is free to imagine himself as a sort of scholar-­reader of the scholar-­poet, too: he is addressed as lector studiose.25 And the reader has already given to Martial the sort of glory that most poets receive only posthumously. The literary present, the presence of Martial, and the glory of epigram meet up, or, rather, they have already met up, “at the point of reception,” namely the lector studiosus, the attentive, enthusiastic, and scholarly reader, who seems not to have noticed that he himself is a multiple, contradictory fiction, much as is his poet. And, most importantly, the reader’s application-­ and-­enthusiasm (studium) is formulated as part of a (politically) a-­political scene of non-­partisan interpretation (studiose et sine ira, as it were).26 Members of the cult of High Art have no time for clownish irreverence and sharp-­edged political subtexts. The first step in creating a non-­political poetry is the creation of a non-­critical reader, a reader who can be counted upon to read for Art and/or whatever else he or she is told to read for now at this juncture, now at that.

B.  Welcome to the show: Epigrams 1 i.  Run, rabbit, run The Epigrams “begin” by launching us in medias res. And the specific “middle” that is being conjured is the already famous status of the author as well as the product to a comic effect: the last lines of the epigram recall another poem of Lucillius.” (Neger, 2014:340) 25  One has to be careful about over-­generalizing from specific moments. It is more useful to aggregate the moments and then to evaluate the resulting collection. Fitzgerald, 2007:20–21 notes that the actual shape of the conjured lector across the Epigrams is in fact quite heterogeneous. We have lectores, then. The issue is explored across his fifth chapter. See also Fitzgerald,  2007:70. Boyle,  1995:95 shows that studiosus is a polyvalent trick pulled on us right up front: “Martial’s [reader] is studiosus, a word itself derived from Tristia 5.1.1 and one of extraordinary ambivalence: ‘eager,’ ‘friendly,’ ‘devoted,’ ‘scholarly,’ ‘learned,’ ‘expert.’ What is this studiosus lector, this ‘expert, enthusiastic reader’ to see in this interrelationship of texts, an awareness of the intrinsic opposition of poetry and the political world, of the Ovidian paradigm and the dangers of public discourse, of the social and political constraints on, but the undying nature and power of, the poetic voice?” 26  Fitzgerald, 2007:74: “If we have crossed the threshold of the book, we have accepted the contract of the genre and have been absorbed into the category of ‘fan and reader’ (lector studiosus).”

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Welcome to the show: Epigrams 1  41

already complicit reader. The latter is meant to shower more glory on the already glorious poet. Obviously, there is more than a bit of wishful thinking folded into this prolepsis. Readers need only renew the pre-­existing contract. Lucky you to be able to invest in an already hot property, provided, of course you do not invest too much genius/ingenium in your readings. To the extent that the First book of Epigrams is itself a Second book of Epigrams, much as Poem 1 is itself Poem 2, then this is the “next” book of Martial’s On the Shows. In 86 we are going to party like it was 80 bce all over again.27 This also means that the imperial ecstasies of the eternal, glorious Domitianic age are cast as a continuation of the wonders one already saw under Titus, the eternal, glorious emperor whom we fêted effusively one year into his two-­year reign. Martial has been producing verses in the meantime, but the De Spectaculis is the antecedent text to this one at several levels.28 The narrator is cashing in all over again on the glory of having portrayed glory.29 Dynastic continuity and poetic continuity connive. And we will soon hear the narrator reprise some of his “greatest hits” from that earlier work. Most notably Epigrams 1 re-­invokes the animal paradoxes from the De Spectaculis.30 Many of the poems there celebrated ironic reversals and unexpected sights. When “nature” is on display in the power-­ center that is Caesar’s arena, said the narrator, marvelous things happen. Expect the unexpected: verbal wit and rhetorical climax attempt to encapsulate a core feature of the event itself. We saw a bear caught in birdlime.31 We lingered with the sow who gave birth as she died.32 We saw an elephant 27  Sullivan, 1991:8: “The propagandist character of the Liber de spectaculis is undeniable, although the reporting of the highlights of these games is no different from the epigrams in later books which celebrate [similar displays].” 28 The De Spectaculis is from 80 bce. The Xenia and Apophoreta are published in 84–85 bce. Books 1 and 2 in 86 bce. See the table of (not always certain) dates for all of the books at Fowler, 1995:32–33. Fowler is following Sullivan, 1991. Fans of the Xenia and Apophoreta will excuse me for treating these books as “minor.” They at least pose as minor and are discontinuative relative to the (tendentious) sequence that is traced by De Spectaculis, Epigrams 1, Epigrams 2 . . .  On the Xenia and Apophoreta see Hinds, 2007:141: “No, what we have here is an under-­appreciated masterpiece of catalogue-­poetry, a Borgesian tour de force.” 29  Dyson and Prior, 1995:250: “Early poems like the De Spectaculis show that Martial was interested in using architectural celebration as a springboard to patronage.” 30  Rimell, 2008:12: “Indeed, one of the most interesting and difficult features of Martial’s poetry is its reliance on paradox. The epigrams constantly manipulate and distort space and scale, twist hierarchies, and build up edifices only to make them splinter.” See also Fitzgerald, 2007:2–4 on the formal paradoxes that structure the project: whole books of little self-­contained poems. Something like a “prologue in the middle,” then, is almost to be expected. See Grewing, 2010:156 on Epigrams 3.68. 31 Martial, De Spectaculis 11 ends with the flourish si captare feras aucupis arte placet, “if you like catching beasts as one does birds.” 32  See Martial, De Spectaculis 12–14. The last poem closes with a praise of the “genius” of this sort of (as if by) chance event. The poetic craft of nature and the poetic craft of the author of “occasional verses” fuse (o quantum est subitis casibus ingenium!).

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42 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature “spontaneously” supplicate Caesar.33 We saw a real-­but-­fake Orpheus who could not charm the bear that ate him: “But the man himself lay low, mauled by an ungrateful bear. This item alone didn’t go by the book (ipse sed ingrato iacuit laceratus ab urso. haec tantum res est facta παρ’ ἱϲτορίαν).”34 This last episode might occasion a bit more anxiety for a bard such as Martial. The story that the poet tells of the prince’s shows is, “expect the unexpected.” And yet, all might not be well or end well for a poet. That this “Orpheus” was not really Orpheus but instead some sort of criminal offers absolutely zero consolation: poets can be turned into criminals quite readily, all that is required is a spiteful reader, a malignus interpres who is ready to denounce him. And then everything will have ended up to one side of the well-­known write-­up, that is, παρ’ ἱϲτορίαν. You thought you had it all figured out until you realized that a will to poetic power can and will rewrite literary history. Imperial modernity is a modernity that includes the idea that power is up to something that goes beyond the familiar and expected. Power is more powerful than ever. And this modern power excites. It excites admiration and dread. The poems explicitly celebrate the one affect. They displace and suppress the other. One such displacement can perhaps be detected in the “bad lion” of De Spectaculis 10. He bit the hand of his teacher. The animal receives its merited punishment: “But it paid in full punishments that befit so great a crime (sed dignas tanto persoluit crimine poenas).” The lion is killed, and this offers a “moral” lesson to us all. No wild genius allowed: “What ought the morals of men be ’neath such a prince who bids the breasts of beasts to be more mild! (quos decet esse hominum tali sub principe mores, | qui iubet ingenium mitius esse feris!)” The narrator of the Epigrams set a limit on genius/ingenium. Caesar also sets such limits. Caesar teaches the self-­ deluded “king of the jungle” not to bite his teacher. Of course, given that

33  It was so authentic a moment that we have to be over-­assured of its authenticity by the narrator: “He was not ordered to do this. No teacher taught him. Believe me: even he perceived our god (Non facit hoc iussus nulloque docente magistro: | crede mihi, nostrum sentit et ille deum.).” See Martial, De Spectaculis 17. Note that this “believe me” clause has also turned Caesar from the first line into a god: Caesarem—> deum. Once you yourself “feel” (sensis) this identity, you too will . . .  Sullivan, 1991:10: “The most striking aspect of the De Spectaculis is the poet’s stress on Titus’ divine numen or Genius: his mana, as it were, which is recognised and worshipped even by the beasts of the field.” Compare Lorenz, 2002:78–80 on the imperial numen in these poems. 34 Martial, De Spectaculis 21. The poem begins quidquid in Orpheo Rhodope spectasse theatro | dicitur, exhibuit, Caesar, harena tibi . . . : “Whatever Rhodope is said to have seen in the Orphic theater, the arena presented to you, Caesar . . . ”

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he is killed, this lion learns nothing. Instead, it is every political animal/πολιτικὸν ζῷον in the audience who receives instruction.35 The exemplary animals in the first—or is it second . . . ?—book of Epigrams are a rabbit and a lion.36 Well over half of all the rabbits in the epigrams can be found in this first book. Similarly, about a third of all references to lions occur in this book. And we will not hear much more about lions until we get a few snapshots of them in each of Books 8 through 10, books that are decidedly imperial. Much as the fecund-­in-­death sow required multiple returns in the De Spectaculis, so too does the bunny who does not get bitten act as an ostentatious emblem for this new book. This book is not called On the Shows but it is nevertheless by “that same famous Martial” and it too is pointedly “showing” us something, namely that if you zoom back from the arena, you find another arena, namely Rome itself. The rabbit and lion offer a way to transition between perspectives: they are in this book, but redolent of that book. But they are not just “in” this book, they also offer a species of commentary about it. But before we get to the animal contents of the shows, we need to make our way carefully into the edifice that contains them and to look about us to get our bearings.37 In our first few glimpses of him, “that famous Martial” is also a man hustling to get his books sold. Author, narrator, and character might all be named Martial, but they do not seem to be leading one and the same life. In addition to the lateral contradictions between these three one should note that we have not even gotten into the internal contradictions within each figure. The first four epigrams are about this book of epigrams: who wrote it; how you can get your hands on it; how Rome consumes books like this; what Caesar might make of the book. The fifth epigram is also about the book and about Caesar, either directly or indirectly: a book of epigrams is a poor return for (presumably) Caesar’s sea-­battle-­spectacle, his naumachia. Maybe it should be tossed into the 35  Rosati, 2006:45 on the political significance of the animals: “Although a sharp distinction between a symbolic programme planned by the organisers of the games and an interpretation in a symbolic key provided by the poet who describes them cannot always be traced, it has a considerable importance on the interpretation of Martial’s text.” 36  The “tame lion” is also an emblematic figure in Statius’ Siluae. Barwick, 1958:291 sensibly includes the rabbit-­and-­lion poems in his catalog of Caesarean cycles: “Zum Schluß soll unter den Kaiserzyklen noch der Löwen-­Hasenzyklus besprochen werden, da auch er im wesentlichen auf eine Verherrlichung des Kaisers hinausläuft.” He is also very attentive to the whole poetic “neighborhood” of these poems. See also Lorenz, 2002:126–134 for a more prolix treatment and a more up-­to-­date bibliography. 37  See Holzberg, 2002:37–39 for Epigrams 1.1–9 as a structured, programmatic sequence that give us a distinct set of core themes: “Poetik des Epigrammbuchs,” “Kaiser,” Patronat,” and, of course, “Skoptik.”

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44 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature waters and its author with it.38 But, as Lorenz notes, this poem presents a success story: not only is Caesar in fact reading these poems, Caesar is even conjured as offering an (aggressive) epigrammatic joke in return for the saucy epigrams he is being sent.39 The ease with which Martial tosses off a poem about Domitian throwing away the book says that the book has in fact “arrived” as of Epigrams 1.5. A double figuration is characteristic of the epigrams. Version One: Martial is a Roman author immersed in the welter of crazy, messy Rome. Version Two: Martial is writing to Caesar and being read by Caesar. In the latter schema other readers fade into the background and Rome is decidedly Caesar’s Rome. In the former version of things where Caesar is not the ideal reader, the narrator wonders if maybe the poems should not be published at all: Rome is quite fastidious.40 But we pivot away from that general, multiply anonymous situation with its crowd of readers and focus down onto just one reader, Caesar. He does not buy the book, it comes to him via the economy of the gift. And yet as a gift, how can this book really fight and win against the sorts of contests that Caesar himself stages? Caesar the Reader is conjured as an appraiser. The Cato of the introduction reappears in the censura of Epigrams 1.4.7. Cato should not read this book, but Caesar the Censor might be reading it.41 And so we make the twice-­made case of the prefatory letter all over again. And we make it by alluding and intertexting. Of course, if an author adduces all of the passages about carmen and error—all of those apotropaic memories about poets who may or may not have bungled their relationships with the powerful—it is not at all clear that in so doing a poet is guaranteed that his poem could never run afoul of the mighty. But it never hurts to try. A collection of arguments sprays forth: the books are (erudite) libelli (just like Catullus’ libellus); as a triumphator you know what it means to be the butt of a joke; you know how to enjoy festal laughter; this is (mere) play (lusus); 38 Martial, Epigrams 1.5: “I give you a staged sea-­fight. You give me epigrams. I guess you want, Marcus, to take a swim with your book (do tibi naumachiam, tu das epigrammata nobis: | uis, puto, cum libro, Marce, natare tuo).” 39  See Lorenz, 2002:116–117. 40 Martial, Epigrams 1.3: “Alas, ignorant, so very ignorant you are of the finicky tastes of sovereign Rome: trust me Mars’ throng has a hyper-­sensitive palate (nescis, heu, nescis dominae fastidia Romae: | crede mihi, nimium Martia turba sapit). 41  Griffin, 2000:79: “Domitian’s reign was characterized, not by exceptional efficiency nor by an increased concern for justice and welfare, but by the censoriousness of a disciplinarian.” Griffin, 2000:83: “Domitian, in fact, had conferred on himself the title that most accurately conveyed the character of his rule: he was Censor Perpetuus. He had no inhibitions about the autocratic and reproving image that his predecessors in that office had tried to avoid. That may explain why subsequent emperors declined the office altogether.”

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my life is an upright one and so the uita is proba, even if my verses are full of license, lasciua. Obviously, there can be no problem here: he says he is going to Cracow, so we know he is going to Cracow. The poetic cross-­reference is Catullus, Carmen 16: “I’ll ram my cock in you, you filthy perverts, if you think that what a poet says is the same as who he is. A poet should be chaste, his verses are under no such obligation.”42 Domitian, he can get fucked if he thinks that Martial is doing anything that might merit a censorious appraisal. That seems rather bold, at least it does at first blush. But the “charm”—lepor is the word used in Catullus’ salty poem—of this “daring” suggestion specifically works against its daring qualities. The poem tells the censor that he in fact “triumphs” when he catches sight of the allusion and appreciates the ribald, fescennine quality of this moment. The benevolent interpres is rewarded. And this same interpreter offers his imprimatur to the ludic lusus itself: “Yes, this is harmless.” The narcissism of the studious reader and the warm glow he feels when he remembers that he has read all of this before is leveraged as a sort of salve for any hypothetical chafing that a harsh latent message might occasion. The “real” latent message is that literature is harmless and that we have been making this tired old joke about its potential threat for some time now. Probe facit qui in libro suo ingeniosus est. Inprobe facit qui in alieno libro ingeniosus est. A fine fellow is clever when it comes to his own book. A scoundrel exercises his genius in another’s book. The subtext that you find because the author invited you to find it gives you the index of good genius as well as upright citizenship. Note that even if you decide that Martial hates Caesar and that the allusive web proves as much, this decision does nothing to change a core component of the previous thesis: “good genius” is still being served because one is attending to the sovereign will of the intending author. And in so attending, the studious reader shows his fidelity to the Empire of Letters. That was Epigrams 1.4. Then we have a two-­liner about swapping books for naumachiae: a crap deal. Then we see our charming rabbit for the first time: the lepus who conjures a certain species of lepor for the verses

42 Catullus, Carmen 16:1–6 “I’ll ram my cock in your mouths and in your asses, pathic Aurelius and you dirty bugger Furius, if you think that owing to a few little verses of mine that happen to be on the soft side I am myself insufficiently chaste. An upright poet ought to be pure in his person. His verses need not be (Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo, | Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, | qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis, | quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. | nam castum esse decet pium poetam | ipsum, uersiculos nihil necessest).” Selden,  1992:478: “The piece not only warns its readers off of any access to the writer through his text, but is specifically set up to block that passage.”

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46 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature themselves as he dances his paws de deux with the leo. The first invocation of the lion-­hare pair can seem “odd” or “forced.” But we are setting up some images and ideas that will have a long-­lasting connection in the Epigrams.43 Specifically, Ganymede is a major motif that we will be lingering with when discussing the emperor’s boyfriend. This particular poem forces together two marvels, one heavenly and one earthly. Then it compares them. This same mechanism can in fact describe a vast number of Martial’s epigrams addressed to power. The message inside the medium is that when talking to power, one can and should make reference to the gods. In this instance the heavenly miracle is the abduction of Ganymede (who is unnamed) by the eagle of Jove. Aetherias aquila puerum portante per auras inlaesum timidis unguibus haesit onus: nunc sua Caesareos exorat praeda leones, tutus et ingenti ludit in ore lepus. Quae maiora putas miracula? summus utrisque auctor adest: haec sunt Caesaris, illa Iouis.   The eagle carried the boy through the heavenly breezes. Timid talons did no harm to the burden that clung to him. Now their own plunder prevails upon Caesar’s lions, and, safe, there plays in a massive mouth a rabbit. Which marvel do you think the greater? For each a superlative agent is to hand: this is Caesar’s, that is Jove’s. Martial, Epigrams 1.6

The delicate “burden” was whisked away to heaven unharmed. That was then. The poem then shifts. It conjures immediacy by starting the next verse with “now,” nunc. The verbs are also all present tense. We are here. It is happening. We can see it when we read it. “Now their own plunder prevails upon Caesar’s lions | and, safe, there plays in a massive mouth a rabbit.” The verses stage the “surprise” by carefully arranging the order of the words: the animals come at the end of the successive lines. The bunny

43  See Lorenz, 2002:126–134.

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hops out at the very end: “Surprise!”44 And then the reader-­as-­spectator of Caesar’s games is invited to consider compare and contrast. There is a summus auctor, an unsurpassable author/agent, “present” (adest) on both sides of the calculation. This one is Caesar’s miracle. That one is Jove’s. You be the judge. A precious conceit asks you to pick between delicacies, between a pretty boy (puer delicatus) and a tender hare. Everything is pointedly impacted.45 After talking about sportive poetic lusus we suddenly see a rabbit playing. The poetic play was supposed to be “safe” albeit showy: triumphal Caesar allowed it. Here Caesar’s lions allow the rabbit his fun. It is a miracle. And it reminds the narrator a lot of a certain unchaste but nevertheless sublime story, the one where the pretty boy about whom poets love to sing wound up as the heavenly serving boy. “This reminds me of Ganymede . . . ” will be one of our most interesting Domitianic tics throughout this study. And what makes it so interesting is the way that the story of an abducted boy keeps on being somehow linked up with the narrator’s own sense of self and his project. The indistinct quality of the “somehow” needs to be preserved, at least momentarily: Ganymede is an allegory that is also not an allegory. He offers a semi-­avowed as well as disavowed way of talking about what we are doing and why. In this poem the narrator implicitly aligns himself with the playful rabbit who is, upon reflection, not really a brave little bunny. To the extent that the rabbit is doing what he does, it is only because he has been permitted-cum-forced to do such. This “miracle” is anything but miraculous. Much as we occlude the real fate of Ganymede—rape victim . . . —we also elide the fact that these are trained animals who have been taught how to put on this show. The real showmanship in the case of a poem like this consists of its discomfort in saying that this is all empty artifice. Poetry itself is “full of artifice” and this poetry is filling itself up with a reality effect that leans heavily 44  Coleman, 1998:21 introducing Martial’s relationship to his genre and his era: “As the elder Pliny complains to Titus in the preface to the historia naturalis, it is in the spirit of the age to be attracted by casus mirabiles; and this taste is well represented in contemporary Greek epigram, as has long been recognized.” 45  Holzberg, 2002: “Doch wenn Martial allegorisiert, was will er zu verstehen geben? . . .  Die allegorische Aussage von 1.6 verstehe ich jetzt folglich so: Martial präsentiert sich als ein Epigrammatiker, dessen lasziven lusus Domitian akzeptiert und der auch ludens dazu beitragen kann, daß die Zuschauer bei dem Spiel — also die Leser — den Kaiser als einen Herrscher mit göttlicher Macht betrachten.” Sullivan, 1991:29: “Just as the lion is too dignified to hurt the hare, so Domitian would not deign to crush his humbler adversaries . . . [And] the lion, the emperor in the allegory, will protect the weaker form the stronger.”

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48 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature on the really real fakery of Caesar’s Rome and its collection of ostentatious displays. As such it is a display of the ability of a “society of the spectacle” to enable displays of displays of displays.46 Caesar is the auctor, the narrator says: Martial claims only derivative, secondary authorship for himself. This is, pointedly, “derivative literature.”47 And the politics of this literature is also itself derivative: this is a little rivulet that descends from the vast main stream. A studious reader will infer as much. A malignant one will conclude otherwise. The “programmatic” quality of the poems continues apace. And throughout the opening of the Epigrams the program is both a (mere) playbill for a set of shows where Caesar is the giver-­of-­shows (editor) as well as the high-­style version of the same, a manifesto about the craftsmanship of a skilled master versifier. For example, the seventh poem insists that we read it through the filter of Catullus, a Literary Giant of the miniature form within the world of these epigrams.48 The poem praises “Stella’s Columba.” The joking but not exactly joking conceit is that the bigger bird and/or poem of Stella is better than the smaller bird in Catullus’ famous poems to Lesbia. The contest that has matched these pairs of beasts against one another ends in a “victory” (uicit). Stella’s bird wins. The addressee of this beast-­baiting uenatio is Mr Biggest, Maxime. The owner of the bird is A Real Star, Stella. It is possible to imagine that one poet, Martial, teases another poet, Stella, for a bungled competition with Catullus: bigger is not really better for an Alexandrian. But let us not be too quick about things. Saying that one loves Catullus is not the same thing as sharing thoroughly convergent aesthetic frameworks with him.49 For example, there is no particular reason to think that even if Stella were being teased here that he is, for all of that, a “bad poet” in general, at least so far as the manifest 46  Despite its resolutely hyper-­capitalist thesis, Debord, 1994 nevertheless contains a variety of useful avenues for exploration. 47  Rosati, 2006:47: “[Martial] celebrates the spectacles, and above all he puts himself forward as their creative interpreter: he offers himself, in a certain sense, as the ‘ideologist’ of the regime, who is above all capable of finding an original medium, easy to exploit in order to popularize that ideology.” 48  Roman,  2015:455: “[T]he idea of Catullan informality, playfulness, ephemerality, and casual dilettantism is used by the Flavians as a convenient antidote to the potential burden of being a Poet in the Augustan sense.” 49  Fitzgerald, 2007:171: “Martial has ‘read’ himself into Catullus’s writing, but not before he has established that Catullus is dead.” Fitzgerald, 2007:173: “Whether in the scoptic or the panegyrical mode, then, Martial reads Catullus from the perspective of his own very different world, and this brings Catullus’s casual assumptions into question.”

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messages addressed to him in the Epigrams are concerned. Stella is someone to be thought of alongside Vergil and Horace and Ovid.50 In fact, Stella is part of the imperial panegyric machine. He is important. He is not an obscure little scribbler.51 A man on the make would be careful about insultingly calling him a cut-­rate Catullus to his face. He would also be careful about deploying an “obvious” critique of Stella, a critique that anyone and everyone who “knows” that “big is bad” for an Alexandrian could hear. Rather than taxing our ingenium with a narrative of “resistance,” one might even imagine that in this poem there is either a direct praise of modernity or, barring that, a moment in a larger recalibration of the framework of evaluation. Little things are lovely, but so too are big things . . . Old things are fine, but they are not always the best . . . Stella’s hypothetical victory over Catullus flatteringly implies that Martial too might stand a chance. In fact, there are any number of other poems where we are told that “today” knows about yesterday and surpasses it. In Martial’s poems a story of then versus now is not one that inevitably entails sad resignation on the part of modernity. Rivalry and success are indeed quite common. There are many victories wherein antiquity is forced to yield.52 And it is “Catullan Martial” who pens such poems and sings such praises of the here and the now.53

50  See Martial, Epigrams 1.61. “My Stella” makes a dozen appearances in the epigrams, and he is presented throughout as a poet and friend, not a fool. Stella is also the man to whom Statius dedicates Siluae 1. 51  See Martial, Epigrams 8.78. Pauly sv. Arruntius: “[II 12] A. Stella, L. Cos. suff. AD 101/2, Patron of Statius and Martialis. As son of a Patavian patrician family, he was appointed quindecimvir sacris faciundis and in AD 89 and 93 arranged the games to celebrate Domitian’s victories. He married a rich Neapolitan widow, Violentilla (Stat. Silv. 1,2) and was suffect consul in AD 101/102 (Mart. 12,3,10; CIL VI 1492). He was patron of Statius and Martial and himself wrote lascivious love poems under the influence of Catullus, Tibullus and others. No fragments.” [http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-­s-­new-­pauly/arruntius-­ e201040?s.num=7&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.brill-­s-­new-­pauly&s.q=Stella] 52  The issue of “yielding” will receive its most extensive treatment in the discussion of Statius. See pages 225–29. 53  Fitzgerald, 2007:49–50 on the De Spectaculis: “Since Caesar allows us to see what Fame has sung, antiquity changes its mode of being: no longer veiled in the aura of distance, or installed as the object of fides, it is like an ancient building that has survived, shabby with old age, to compare unfavorably with the spectacle in its shiny new arena.” [original emphasis] Fitzgerald evokes Benjamin’s discussion of the aura from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But Fitzgerald’s project clearly owes much to Benjamin,  1999 wherein one finds a discussion of the aura à propos the flâneur, another figure that has inspired Fitzgerald.

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ii.  Power and play in the hare and now These moments in which we praise modernity are frequently “Caesarean.” The glorious now is also a Domitianic now. For “Domitianic literature” as per the Epigrams we can also turn to Martial, Epigrams 8.55: “Though our grandfathers’ days yield to our own era and Rome has grown greater along with Her Leader . . . (temporibus nostris aetas cum cedat auorum | creuerit et maior cum duce Roma suo . . . ).” The poem’s “ironic” conceit is that though things have never been better, the age nevertheless lacks truly great poets of Vergil’s stature.54 The humorous solution is to increase the funds doled out to poets: another Maecenas, please. The narrator, though, does not promise to become an epic poet if given an epic salary. Instead, he promises to stay inside his chosen genre. That is, the narrative voice implies that, even if Caesar might somehow deserve “bigger and better,” these many little snapshots of Caesar’s Rome nevertheless do constitute a Roman epic (of sorts). The question of “allegory” is, yet again, obsessing the text. To what extent is saying one thing and meaning another allowed by the rules of the game that the narrator is laying out for us? And would it be naive to follow that and only that roadmap? If you read something, is that the way it is? If the poet says something naughty, is that itself naughty? That was the prefatory problem. The flip side of this: if the poet says something nice, is that nice? Or, worse still, if he says something, is it anything? The vital immediacy of the poems and their settings is always also attended by this simultaneous problem of essential distance, of canny self-­positioning and ironic self-­deprecation. The decision to sing of Domitianic arms and men in the here and now of the Epigrams means that everything is both too true and completely hollow: this is how it is/this is the game one plays when one says, “this is how it is.” The rabbit in the lion’s mouth is multiply emblematic of this aesthetic of indirection that fails and succeeds in the same gesture. It is a transparent allegory. It is an obvious fabrication. It is a fraud. It is also the way this poetry “really works.” The lion is Caesar’s and it is Caesar. The lion bit its master. Caesar punished the lion. Cato is an inappropriate reader. Caesar is a censorious reader. And, next, in 1.8, Cato is an anti-­Caesarean traitor. The more 54  Fittingly enough, Martial’s Vergil seems to be based only on the specifically literary traditions surrounding Vergil, not any strong historical sense of the realities of the Augustan age. See Goodrich, 1949. Everything is always (and especially) only a literary footnote.

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“programmatic poems” we get, the more difficult it is to sort out “the program” as a simple, singular thing. More and more pieces keep arriving on the chess-­board. Some of them move diagonally. Others move ahead a bit and then over to one side. Others . . . The difficulty of detecting “the message,” of course, is itself another sort of message: only an atomistic, contradictory—schizophrenic, even—perspective can really “represent” this world where “the spectacle” goes all the way down . . . to nowhere. Specifically, in 1.8 we praise Decianus for his “philosophical commitment” to Cato the Younger, the Late Republican anti-­Caesarean rebel as well as his fondness for Thrasea Paetus, the anti-­Neronian senator with philosophical leanings. But the poem does not have to be a secretly subversive praise of wisdom as a site of resistance. In fact, its cynical face can be taken as its real depth.55 Quod magni Thraseae consummatique Catonis dogmata sic sequeris, saluos ut esse uelis, pectore nec nudo strictos incurris in ensis, quod fecisse uelim te, Deciane, facis. Nolo uirum facili redimit qui sanguine famam, hunc uolo, laudari qui sine morte potest.   Great Thrasea and Consummate Cato, their doctrines you follow as a safety-­minded fellow would: no running onto bared swords bare-­breasted, and so you do what I would have you do. My vote is for the guy who can be praised without dying. Martial, Epigrams 1.8

We already know that we are not really part of the resistance, nor will we ever be. Even if, like Catullus, we praise-­and-­blame The Politician, allusivity and elusiveness are of themselves signs that we are playing war-­games and/or meditating on the meaning of war rather than going to war. Even if we “secretly admire” Cato, we “manifestly” act otherwise. And our actions (fecisse . . . facis . . . ) are, in and of themselves, the “true dogma” to which we adhere, namely, “fail to act in such a manner as to provoke power.” The 55  Žižek, 1989:33: “Cynical distance is just one way — one of many ways — to bind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things serious, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” [original emphasis]

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52 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature poem is also over-­full with words of volition. It wants us to see all of the wanting, real and imagined: uelis . . . uelim . . . uolo. You want to play it safe. I want you to play it safe. I want everyone to steer clear of revolutionary republicanism. The course of action adopted is prudent inaction. The censorious mark of a Caesar-­Cato who has the power to expel us from the senate and/or from life itself cuts us off from the substantive acts of some other Cato who dies rather than bow to Caesarism. This cynical philosophy of moral compromise is pointedly written onto the face of the poetry. Joking, quipping, teasing, rewriting, one-­upmanship: this is all that the legacy of a Thrasea can expect these days. I will boldly tease you for pretending to be a rebel, but the joke is on both of us if we think that confessing our spinelessness is itself somehow a bold move. It is pseudo-­bold, and the speciousness plays into the hands of an epistemic regime that insists on canniness and irony, on winks and nods, on breasts literal and metaphorical that are never really bared. One is perfectly ­familiar with all of the gestures of real resistance, but they are all going to be turned into ironic postures that, in their bravest moment, might secretly hide some sort of furtive “real” gesture “deep down there.” But for all of that, “the act” will never arrive: the here and now of vital epigram praises death forever deferred. Living Martial is praised for his slices of life (1.1). Living Martial praises all who “Choose life” (1.8). The very next poem zings its target and accuses him of the failing of which this book could itself be accused. In this poem it is a question of wills again. “You want (uis) to seem, Cotta, to be both fine and great at the same time. | But a man who is a fine fellow, Cotta, is a shabby little fellow (Bellus homo et magnus uis idem, Cotta, uideri: | sed qui bellus homo est, Cotta, pusillus homo est).” Bellus is a programmatic word within Catullus’ corpus. It can be used ironically there, too, but nevertheless, it is a token of “the world” in which that text operates. Indeed, it is part and parcel of the (charming) “smallness” of that world. Accordingly, with a couple of minor twists of the dial, one could say that an epigrammatist should seek to be a charming man by writing charming little poems. That is old (poetic) news, as old as the neoterics, in fact. Here, though, we are abusing someone who is “trying to have it both ways”: you can’t be both “epic” (magnus) and a charmer. Fine, this too is standard fare. And the main jingly joke that the poem wants to make is that a dandy is not a grandee. But the “metapoetic” point is an uncomfortable one, especially coming as it does after the “poetics of resignation” in 1.8: “sell out”; “do less, and win more fame,” “only the dogmatic go in for

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dogma.” Let’s keep it small. Let’s keep it fun and funny. Don’t be a great man. Be a man-­about-­town. And so the jokes about legacy-­hunting and drinking to excess can start flowing. To the extent that we retain the idea of depth, we nevertheless insist that deep down we remain shallow. This is the promise made and the bargain struck. Caesar need not read. If he does read, and if he does suspect, he can nevertheless rest assured that these “hidden depths” are never “depths of meaning” that somehow overwhelm the vital, vibrant superficiality of the world. Caesar is the one who matters: he the auctor who offers the authoritative writing of the text of the world; he is the reader whose censorious reading sets the authoritative mark on the texts of this world. This text lays those out as “the rules of the game,” and a (bitter) smallness ensues. This recalibrates the economy of the adjectives from 1.9: I am “great” (magnus) in as much as I have embraced my “insignificance” (pusillus), and that is not especially “charming” (bellus). Back, then, to Epigrams 1.1. Martial is great and world-­famous: toto notus in orbe Martialis. The work is small: argutis epigrammaton libellis. He’s famous and living, not famous for dying: uiuenti decus atque sentienti. The careful reader has granted this to him: cui, lector studiose, quod dedisti. With poems such as these, especially given that they are such strategically placed poems, Book 1 of the Epigrams looks a lot like a continuation at a distance of the De Spectaculis. The book about the shows has turned into a show of books about any number of shows. And pointedly shown is the way the books fit with the program of the editor, the giver-­ of-­the-­show, namely the emperor. The rabbit poems, that is, are both poems about shows and poems that show a key logic of showing. They do this by showing showing. And so they are emblematic for the book as a whole.56 They promise “harmless danger.” They promise that danger is always and only “danger.” And it is precisely the recognition that it is indeed possible to get hurt that keeps everyone from getting hurt. So long as everyone plays their part, then nothing bad will happen and everyone will have a good time.

56  Rimell, 2008:204: “As critics have suggested, Martial hints at the identification of epigram or epigrammatist with the hare, lepus, the tiny, delicate, naughty and ambitious animal which ‘plays’ (ludit, 1.6.4) with the merciful lion-­king, and whose name is itself an epigrammatic slurring of the Catullan buzzword for clever neoterics, lepōs (‘charm’), or lepidus (‘witty,’ ‘charming’).”

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54 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature The rabbit returns in Epigrams 1.14. Nothing “new” is really going on here.57 This poem, like so many in Martial, is more a question of the poet’s ability to work variations on a theme than it is about radical innovation. Accordingly, the rhetorical climax of any given poem stands out  all the more. We can contrast the “joke” poems that also reach a rhetorical climax. There we lack all of the relevant information until we reach the surprise ending. An old hand might be able to guess the punchline of any given poem in advance owing to the familiarity of the  set of revelations on offer in other poems: he’s a cocksucker; that one’s a legacy hunter; she’s a poisoner . . . But, from a formal standpoint, the recognition of the message of the poem only comes as the last line closes.58 Delicias, Caesar, lususque iocosque leonum uidimus—hoc etiam praestat harena tibi— cum prensus blando totiens a dente rediret et per aperta uagus curreret ora lepus. Unde potest auidus captae leo parcere praedae? sed tamen esse tuus dicitur: ergo potest.   The frolics, Caesar, the games, and the jokes of lions we saw—this too the arena offers you— when repeatedly caught and returned from caressing tooth throughout the open mouth ran the wandering hare. How could it be that a ravening lion spares its captive spoils? But he is called your lion: so it is possible. Martial, Epigrams 1.14

We see again the strategic deferral of both “lion” and “rabbit” in the syntactical structure of the verses. But the surprise cannot be that surprising. Given that we already know the core plot of the story of the lion and the

57 Positionally something important has happened. The poem’s neighbors matter. Fitzgerald, 2007:83: “Clearly this is an allegory of the emperor’s clementia, and implicitly it points out that the story of revolt and death under Claudius, which is the background of the previous poem, is no longer pertinent under the current regime.” 58  Holzberg, 2002:87: joke poems are mini-­dramas of δέϲιϲ and λύϲιϲ, of “Erwartung” and “Aufschluß.”

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rabbit—i.e., unharmed mouth-­ play59—the anticipated pleasure of the clever conclusion is not an energy that coalesces around some surprise event. Instead, the real force that drives the poem can be detected by observing the artfully contrived praise of Caesar. We are looking for yet another way to talk about the event that filters it through him. And, ideally, we have found it. If a joke-­poem ends with “Sucks dicks” (fellat), then the symmetrical equivalent in a Caesar-­poem turns out to be something like “He can do anything” (potest).60 “Glory” and “humiliation” work as a disavowed pair. This is a theme that we will explore in some detail when examining Book 9. In 1.14 the closing idea is that Caesar makes the impossible possible. The creative genius of an author is nothing compared to the concrete efficacy of this auctor: How is it that the lion did not eat the rabbit? (unde potest?) “He is said to be your lion: and so it can happen (sed tamen esse tuus dicitur: ergo potest; 1.14.6).” Merely saying that a thing belongs to power of itself suffuses that thing with power. And, in fact, this same power has the power to do the miraculous. It is a “spectacular power” that breaks with the laws of nature and rewrites the world: inde . . . ergo . . . . Isn’t that wonderful? Poetic genius is executing pirouettes around the question and repeatedly gesturing towards it as part of the way that the narrative voice stages its own discursive universe.61 The poem ends with potest. The narrator of the poem starts with the word delicias. The shows were deliciae, lusus, and iocos. They were delightful, playful, and witty. That is, they were precisely the stuff of Martial’s own poetry.62 These are programmatic words for an author of a book of epigrams, and, to the extent that they are used of something from the arena, they are terms that have been imported into that venue rather than being essentially a part of it. “We saw, Caesar, your show.” Caesar is addressed by  people who tell him that they saw what he showed them. The poem 59  Rimell, 2008:30: “As well as being an original spectacle, this is a civilised move, given that touching is often associated in Martial with pollution and the abuse of bodily boundaries.” 60  See, for example, Martial, Epigrams 2.33: “Why don’t I kiss you, Philaenis? You’re bald. | Why don’t I kiss you, Philaenis? You’re a red-­head. | Why don’t I kiss you, Philaenis? You’re one-­eyed. | And the man who kisses these things? He sucks cock. (cur non basio te, Philaeni? calua es. | cur non basio te, Philaeni? rufa es. | cur non basio te, Philaeni? lusca es. | haec qui basiat, o Philaeni, fellat.)” 61  Meanwhile, according to Martial, a rabbit-­warren is also the breeding ground of subterranean siege-­craft: “The bunny loves living in his dug-­out caves. He is the one who demonstrated the hidden path to the enemy. (Gaudet in effossis habitare cuniculus antris. | Monstrauit tacitas hostibus ille uias. Martial, Epigrams 13.60).” 62  And, so too of Martial’s Catullus’ poetry. See Mindt, 2013:152–153.

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56 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature immortalizes the moment from the perspective of the moment itself. And what we saw was, of course, “power.” But it is also a specific narrative of power. The narrative tries to siphon off for itself the power of playing inside the maw of power. There is an apotropaic gesture in here: “Do not hurt us.” There is also a straight assertion: the poem is all about the way that power does not hurt us, even though, of course, we recognize that it has every right to do so. In fact, it might be the most natural thing in the world for it to bite down hard upon us.63 Caesar’s “creativity” lies in his break with a Hobbesian state of nature in favor of an acculturated nature that subverts while retaining the traces of “raw nature.” The lion and the rabbit are Caesar’s lovely poetry, says this poet. And this same poet attributes to Caesar his very own poetic program. The sparrow (passer) is dead, and it lives on only because Catullus celebrated it. The funny bunny, the lepus lepidus, though, lives on because it is delightful that it lives on. Martial stuffs his epigrams full of this sort of “pleasant conceit.” He shows us a portrait of himself taking a long, hard look at Caesar. He shows himself “reading” Caesar and his games and writes it all up for us, re-­editing the already edited. And he also offers to Caesar the spectacle of himself doing this for us. Contrast, then, Catullus’ ostentatious stance: “I’m not at all so eager to please you, Caesar | nor even to know whether you are black or white.”64 Martial’s narrator is eager to be seen as a man eager to please. And he can be seen to be very keen indeed to find an unequivocal answer to Catullus’s question: “Caesar is bright, bright white. He is so brilliantly white that the eyes are dazzled.” We return to the lion’s jaws eight poems later. In the interim we were told that the book is full of poems of varied quality, that mixing wines is a problem, and that the emperor Claudius ate a poisoned mushroom, among other enlivening and enlightening tales. If 1.14 was about “how” the rabbit survived the lion, then 1.22 insists, at least for a moment, that this was a “political” episode.65 The rabbit’s fate is pointedly allegorized as an image of imperial relations. Bunnies are for dogs. Lions need bigger prey that is suited to their massive jaws. “Accordingly,” the Dacian youth 63  Please note that the epigrammatic narrator has himself bitten into a rabbit, and he loved it: “If you can count on my verdict, the best delicacy among the birds is the thrush, among the quadrupeds the hare (Inter aues turdus, si quid me iudice certum est, | inter quadripedes mattea prima lepus. (Martial, Epigrammata 13.92).” 64 Catullus, Carmina 93: “No special effort on my part, Caesar, to aspire to please you, nor to know whether you are black or white (Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi uelle placere, | nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo).” 65  See again Fitzgerald on the neighbors of these poems. 1.14 had a political poem preceding it, and so does 1.22 (Fitzgerald, 2007:86).

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should not fear Caesar’s arms (Praeda canum lepus est, uastos non implet hiatus | non timeat Dacus Caesaris arma puer; 1.22.5).66 The next time we see the rabbit in Epigrams 1.44, he makes us think about poetry, not war. But actual rabbits nevertheless run a graver risk than ever before in the poem about rabbit poems. High-­style alliteration fused with light-­style diction announces the next bit of play: “The frisky frolics of hares and the ludic lions: | my greater and lesser page bears them, | and I have done the same thing twice. Stella, if too much appears | such to you, you too twice a hare set before me. (Lasciuos leporum cursus lususque leonum | quod maior nobis charta minorque gerit | et bis idem facimus, nimium si, Stella, uidetur | hoc tibi, bis leporem tu quoque pone mihi. 1.44)” The poet is ready to bite down on that bunny if you would just give him a chance. With Epigrams 1.44 we find that we have entered into another warren of rabbit poems. The rabbit pops up again in 1.48. We are offered a new portrait of the same thing. A new rhetorical twist constitutes the “value added” by the return. Rictibus his tauros non eripuere magistri, per quos praeda fugax itque reditque lepus; quodque magis mirum, uelocior exit ab hoste nec nihil a tanta nobilitate refert. Tutior in sola non est cum currit harena, nec caueae tanta conditur ille fide. Si uitare canum morsus, lepus inprobe, quaeris, ad quae confugias ora leonis habes.   From these jaws the trainers snatched not bulls. But through them the fleet prey passes in and out. More amazing still, he emerges the swifter from his foe’s mouth: he gains no small boon from such great nobility. He is no safer when he runs on the deserted sands.

66  The full poem: “Why now do you flee, hare, the savage mouths of a pacific lion? They have not learned to crush such small beasts. These talons have been set aside for massive necks, nor does their tremendous thirst delight in meager blood. A hare is dogs’ prey: it does not fill massive maws. Let the Dacian youth not fear Caesar’s arms (Quid nunc saeua fugis placidi lepus ora leonis? | Frangere tam paruas non didicere feras. | Seruantur magnis isti ceruicibus ungues | nec gaudet tenui sanguine tanta sitis. | Praeda canum lepus est, uastos non implet hiatus | non timeat Dacus Caesaris arma puer (1.22)).”

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58 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Nor is he tucked away in his cage as trustily. If, naughty bunny, you seek to avoid the jaws of dogs, you have in the mouths of lions a place of refuge. Martial, Epigrams 1.48

Taking yet another look at the way the rabbit moves about in the lion’s mouth we suddenly appreciate that not only was the rabbit not harmed but, “in point of fact”, the more time the rabbit spent hopping around in there, the more agile he got. The idea is forced and contrived. It even requires the reader to avoid lingering with a line of thought that is nevertheless present: the rabbit runs faster because he is terrified. The narrator pushes us in another direction. It turns out that the safest place of all was the lion’s mouth: running alone in the sands and being caged in a pen exposed him to more danger. The sands of a desolate wilderness in general or the arena in particular? This is not clear, but the former is perhaps more likely. We are either talking about the rabbit’s natural condition or his cultural-­masquerading-­as-­ natural condition. In poetic practice, the distinction makes no difference. The poetry-­arena makes of nature what Caesar’s arena does of the same, namely a nature that has been composed and edited so as to be read by culture for culture’s own ends. If the naughty rabbit wants to be saved from the dogs, then he ought to flee to the lion’s mouth. This is the best place for him. It is better than his natural habitat, better even than the safe place that culture has made for him, namely his cage. The “naughtiness” of the improbus hare is well worth a second look. What sorts of transgressive hijinks might the fellow have been up to? Avoiding the scary lion? Avoiding the dogs? Avoiding his cage? Longing for the fields? Naturally, the transgression is only left implicit. One is all but invited to imagine something at least mildly “anti-­ Caesarean” in improbus if only because the situation as a whole in these poems is always so “Caesarean.” Implied rebellion against recognizing the greatness of Caesar by avoiding Caesar’s lion merits a condescending translation of improbus. This is a revolt against what is really one’s own best interests. There is an improbitas in failing to know just how lucky a rabbit he is. Better, faster, “more-­Caesarean,” the rabbit needs to appreciate how good he has got it. We are all in this lion’s mouth together, both readers and writers, and we need to be careful about what we say and do about this fact of our lives

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that are lived amid a death forever held en souffrance.67 One has to bear up under this unbearable burden of anxiety, to find a way to thrive in the lion’s jaws. The slippery courses of the naughty signifier, the lasciui cursus uerborum, offer the vital image of the vitality of images. And these forever mobile signifiers need to “keep it moving” because the final determination and the fixity of meaning arrives when the hermeneutical jaws snap shut: “I denounce you as a traitor. The rabbit signified revolt. Caesar, kill!” The rabbit lessons multiply like, well, rabbits. We ostentatiously show ourselves to be working through the showy lesson of the Fate of the Rabbit. And the rabbit’s fate was not death, not fatum. We too can hope for not-­ death, if we too have just a bit of ambition. Only three poems later we read “Why do you flee these teeth, Runaround Rabbit (ambitiose lepus)?” Non facit ad saeuos ceruix, nisi prima, leones. Quid fugis hos dentes, ambitiose lepus? Scilicet a magnis ad te descendere tauris et quae non cernunt frangere colla uelint. Desperanda tibi est ingentis gloria fati: non potes hoc tenuis praeda sub hoste mori.   Insufficient is any but the choice neck for a lion. Why do you flee these teeth, Runaround Rabbit? Really? They will want to abandon great bulls and stoop to you, to break necks they can’t even see? Abandon your hopes for the glory of a Great Doom: meager prey, you cannot fall before this enemy. Martial, Epigrams 1.51

Ambitiosus is such a tricky word. What sort of political image corresponds to the sight of a rabbit behaving “ambitiously”? It is “ostentatious” to run like that, but, of course, this is a show, so ostentation is not necessarily out of place. Nevertheless, there is a potential political problem if the rabbit is showing off his fright at his unsettling place in the world, namely, the fact that he is snugly positioned in the jaws of death.

67  Rimell sees throughout the epigrams “a tightrope-­walking sense of political risk and transformability.” (Rimell, 2008:14)

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60 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Ambitus once upon a time meant running around town and seeking office. These days the associated adjective is allowed to mean nothing but “being too full of yourself in a world where everyone is supposed to be empty.” Excessive, ostentatious, conceited: these are the meanings of the term when used negatively. And so the word can indicate “obsolete political activity.” Some of the things we civic bunnies do are obsolete, and clinging to them is just a sort of self-­interested show. We fight against power without realizing that we are safest in the lion’s jaws, because, were it not for those jaws, we would be hanging dead from the mouth of a dog. Give up. Embrace your lot and take the happiness you can, Mr Rabbit: you are too small for any ambitions you might have, and this very smallness is your salvation, even if you are too much of a Silly Rabbit to see this. “Abandon your hopes for the glory of a Great Doom . . . ” Rabbit politics are a politics of despair: you have swapped your meaningful death in exchange for your tiny life. Alexandrian tenuitas consoles us for our abandonment of epic fatum: the fetish of the refined slender style denounces the bombast of the big and its (would-­be) finality and in so doing makes an aesthetic virtue of political necessity while ceding the domain of concrete political resistance in advance. The Res Publica died with Cato the Younger. The res tenuissimae live on in the pens of poets. The public thing yields to the bookish and learned thing. Caesar came, saw, and conquered. I alluded, intertexted, and smirked. Whatever political resistance might be detected in the interstices of the latter act subsists precisely at the cost of a retreat from the forum, the site of public and publicly accountable discourse as such.

iii.  Stage-­managing the passions As with improbus, the word ambitiosus has not been seen in the Epigrams since the preface. And, as before, the word was applied to the bad reader of a situation. The rabbit is always simultaneously a metaphor for “the mere subject,” “the author himself,” and “the reader.” The bad reader of the preface was ambitiose tristis, a phrase that feels ever more Tacitean as we work through Martial’s first book. What, after all, is a “moroseness on the make” (tristis + ambitiosus) and who might evince it? That reader from the preface was pointedly gloomy, gloomy with an eye to being seen heaving his heavy sighs: O tempora, o mores . . . Such times! Such people! There we deflected the question to the mere verbal content. Bad words were

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(strategically) mistaken for bad things by such readers. But it is clear that a few dick jokes are very much not the object of “hermeneutic ambitiousness” when we consider the preface more fully as well as the expansion of the problems of reading-­and-­writing that have ensued. The would-­be censorious Cato of the preface was a sort of sham prey flushed out of the forest by the narrative voice. The real quarry for any doggedly murderous hermeneutic hound such as ourselves would not be “Who is this Cato?”. Instead, our ambition ought to be to run down the rabbit who asked, “What ever happened to Cato anyway?” As a phrase, libertas loquendi captures the spirit of epigram: “the freedom to say ‘cock.’ ” But the same phrase is much bigger than this small genre, even though Martial is promising to “keep it small” and, indeed, insisting that we’ll all be a lot better off if we succeed in keeping it small. The same pair of words also formerly designated “frank, Republican speech.” But the freedom to say “freedom” itself, the libertas libertatem loquendi, has been deformed by the imperial period.68 Clever writers and clever readers will confine their cleverness and their ambitions to things that stay “inside the lion’s mouth.” Neither party is best served by adopting any of the other roles in the available bestiary. Too much liberty and someone—i.e., me—might get hurt. Intres ampla licet torui lepus ora leonis, esse tamen uacuo se leo dente putat. Quod ruet in tergum uel quos procumbet in armos, alta iuuencorum uolnera figet ubi? Quid frustra nemorum dominum regemque fatigas? Non nisi delecta pascitur ille fera.   Feel free to enter, bunny, the capacious jaws of a fierce lion, the lion himself nevertheless thinks he’s got empty fangs. Upon what back might he rush? Upon what flanks fall?

68 Tacitus’ Dialogus plays a central role in the modern understanding of the death of rhetorical freedom: “empire killed free speech” is a familiar but over-­hasty summary. See van den Berg, 2014 for a nuanced approach to the details of the presentation of the issue there. Note in particular that “radical freedom of speech” can be read as a disagreeable phenomenon: keen political critics and abrasive jerks cannot always be readily distinguished, at least by those who occupy certain socio-­political positions. van den Berg, 2014:301: “The tension between libertas and licentia is one way Romans explored the limits of individual expression and communal sufferance of that freedom.”

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62 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Where in the cattle to plant deep wounds? Why do you vainly importune the lord and king of the forest? He feeds on none but choice beasts. Martial, Epigrams 1.60

The advantages of smallness are extolled in Epigrams 1.60. The rabbit’s vanity might lead it to feel piqued that the lion does not even perceive its presence in its jaws—too small . . . —but being slighted is nothing compared to the advantages of being slight. Of course, the poem is articulated from a contrary perspective, namely that of an ironic scold. Doesn’t a lion have better things to do than to eat you? Who are you to try to get the lord and king of the forests to condescend to turn his violent attention in your direction? The last line asserts that the king of the beasts eats like a king. The selectivity and exclusivity of deligere passes the rabbit by. High social station and high geopolitical significance and high style are not the bunny’s lot. And so he is safe because he is common, small, unrefined, not noticed, and not worth noticing. We smirk at the rabbit, and in so doing, we articulate a wish that Caesar might remember how to treat a “lowly epigrammatist” who runs around making his inconsequential little circuits. No more rabbits for a good while, at least not until we get to the end of the book with a longish poem. An exotic imperial bestiary from the arena is catalogued: leopards, bears, bison, dancing elephants . . . But we mention them only so as to forget them. The focal point is the lion whom we reach at the middle of the poem. The lion and his lowly prey attract the spectator. Look at how “the high-­speed terror of the rabbits wears them out (quos uelox leporum timor fatigat; 1.104.14).” The affective life of the rabbits and that of the lions is contrasted. It is tedious to deal with a scared bunny. Nevertheless, the lions “play along” (with Caesar’s game) and they release, recapture and “adore” their little captives (dimittunt, repetunt, amantque captos; 1.104.15). From a modern, non-­imperial perspective, the rabbits’ terror is all too understandable. A cat that catches and releases a mouse may well “love” mice, but the frightened mouse is very much correct: he is not loved as he might choose to be loved. Release and recapture, at least when it comes to a little cat and not a big one, is something a lot more like sadism than straight-­up love. But the poem seems not to care much about this kind of observation. The forced perspective of the narration is accompanied by a warped account of the feelings that one is supposed to feel. As we will see in Statius

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too, the affective dictation of “Feel like this about that” is characteristic of this verse world even—or is it especially?—as there is a gap between how one might reflexively react to a notion and the manner in which one is told to react to it. Let us linger, then, with the second half of the poem: dimittunt, repetunt, amantque captos, et securior est in ore praeda, laxos cui dare peruiosque rictus gaudent et timidos tenere dentes, mollem frangere dum pudet rapinam, stratis cum modo uenerint iuuencis. haec clementia non paratur arte, sed norunt cuï seruiant leones.   They release, recapture, and love their captives. And their prey is all the more carefree in their mouth. The lions give a loose, gaping maw, gladly, and glad too they are to restrain tooth timorous: they think it a shame to crush their soft spoils, even though they just came from laying low young bulls. Clemency like this is not won by Art! Instead the lions Know Whom They Serve. Martial, Epigrams 1.104.15-­22

The ironic and paradoxical psychic life of the poem befits a poem about a spectacle. The logic of the shows relishes such. But the visual surprises have been re-­staged and then supplemented by affective surprises. And the affective matrix is pointedly schizophrenic: several simultaneous overlapping and contradictory consciousnesses are lain over one another. Love meets up with captivity. Which parties are feeling which segments of this juncture? The prey is “carefree” even as it is terrified. But is “carefree” only if you are not a rabbit and are instead a spectator: “Nothing bad is going to happen to that rabbit . . . ” The rabbit is, then, both full of care and free of care at one and the same time. The naive and/or empathetic spectator might feel the same. But the savvy spectator sees the care, but does not care about the care because that would be a misapplied sentiment that mistook the rabbit for the key element of the equation.

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64 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Other psychically charged words are piled into the verses. Laxos rictus really ought to frighten: that is a “gaping maw,” after all. But, of course, we have been told that the sentiment that those words will provoke is precisely the wrong one to feel. Compare, “Don’t think about death”: this is an injunction that conjures nothing so much as the idea of death. We cannot, that is, not identify with the rabbit’s fear even as we are supposed to be alienated from it. Instead, we are supposed to focus on the “love” and the “joy” of the lions. The lions, though, do feel a sort of fear: they are afraid for the rabbits who are so frail. Accordingly, the lion fears while also displacing his fear: they are not so much afraid as it is the case that they have these teeth in their mouths that are themselves afraid (timidos dentes). And maybe these last are not so much themselves “afraid” as they are merely “abundantly cautious.” Then again, the lions are feeling a welter of emotions: pudet frangere . . .  “What if I hurt him . . . ?” This shame will need to be connected to their sense of Caesar later. But at the moment it is tied up with the question of “softness.” It would be a shame to destroy something soft even though something big and strong was just slaughtered by these same jaws. The artful poem ends by denying art. The lions were not taught to do this, it says. We cannot possibly believe this to be true. But we submit to the fiction that this is not fiction. And in so doing we comply with the rules that govern reading poetry more generally: what the verses say goes, otherwise, how can you read any of it? Venus was Aeneas’ mother, you say? Well, okay . . . But, in the same gesture of submitting to art, we comply with the rules of Caesar’s Rome. If Caesar even implies that this is natural, who am I to say that it is not? At a minimum that would “spoil the show.” In both cases what is demanded is not credulity, but instead a “suspension of disbelief.” Even if you do not “believe in Caesar,” your job is to enter into Caesar’s world and to act within it in such a manner as to never make your disbelief into a part of public life. This is the “social contract” that binds everyone together in a structure of complicity and which makes, therefore, any diminution of the “(so-­called) majesty” of Caesar into genuine treason. Removing the brackets is a crime. Bracketing the words “so-­called” is the public display of the goodness of one’s bad faith. This was not Art, it was Faithful Subjection to Caesar: sed norunt cuï seruiant leones. Art corrects itself. Art says, “Not art but (sed) . . . ” But what? But servitude (seruire). When you know that you are a slave, then you will know that it was not art (even if it was art). Elided from the line, present in his very absence is “Caesar.” Caesar is the who who answers all

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of the questions about the world of the poem: for him, to him, by him, about him, . . . The poem walks through his circus, walks up to his lions, then dives into their heads, then finds, deep down inside those heads . . . Caesar. They know whom . . . We celebrate subjection as the very thing that enables the marvelous terror of the rabbits.

iv.  It’s not just about rabbits, you see Everyone can and should be able to identify themselves with multiple elements of these poems. They are constructed so as to afford several points of allegorical purchase. The poet is the rabbit, is the lion, is the spectator, is the editor. The reader is the rabbit, is the lion, is the . . . One notes, however, that Caesar himself never occupies all of the positions. He is never the rabbit. And our recognition (nouimus) of this fact forever splits him from us: he is no longer a mere man (even though, of course, he is a mere man . . . ) but instead he is a god-­man or even just a god. It should always be remembered that Caesar is only notionally a reader of these poems. Martial is “ideally” being read attentively by Caesar. There is no reason to believe that the emperor is in fact a diligent, attentive, regular reader of Martial’s poetry. But in their concrete practice the poems have written into themselves a situation where the actual audience, “us,” comes across as a sort of secondary audience. The Caesarean frame and Caesarean address are always waiting to thrust us into the background, and, “properly so”: for who are we, after all, but a bunch of dogs to his lion? The opening poems of this book stage the movement from the generic to the specific, from Rome to Caesar’s Rome. And, when we stand face-­to-­ face with Caesar, or, rather, when we imagine ourselves doing such, what gets written up are a collection of moments that are more “on edge” than they are edgy. The endless array of epigrams has a neurotic quality: here’s another one; this is disposable; it’s just a joke; . . . And within this schema, the Caesar epigrams work—at least they partly work . . . —according to the very same joke logic despite the fact of Caesar’s overwhelming power and super-­ singularity. “This Caesar” is in some ways no more real than “Famous Martial” is real: both are mere tokens in a game, each is conjured by the text and a mere figment of the textual imagination. Of course, like the games at Rome themselves, people really can get hurt: a bear might eat a bard, after all. And this gives us the anxious quality of the Caesar

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66 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature poems.69 The secret that was hidden in plain sight arrives on the scene and disrupts it, and it disrupts it despite all of the ostentatious me-­and-­you games of an ego fiddling with his image in front of the mirror of the text. The rabbit in the mouth is a formal feature of this poetry, not some mere colorful episode. The game of filling our mouths with verses about such rabbits takes place as part of some bigger spectacle. It is but a show inside a show. And let us be somewhat expansive with our use of the metaphor. If we imagine the edges of the lion’s maw to be capacious and permeable (laxos peruiosque rictus), then one might see in the strongly Caesarean borders of the books of epigrams the outline of that same dangerous gape. Just inside the entryway and just before the exit we have the poems that praise him and his fangs: the book has begun; the book is about to end. And, within this space of free play the rabbit runs around doing this and that.70 And rabbit games are heterogeneous from lion games, of course. What the rabbit fears is not what the lion fears, for example. For the rabbit the maw is “the space within which”: it enables, but it enables only so much and so far. If we run out, we will nevertheless return. We are free to do anything we want, but, even so, we only do so much and no more. If we are afraid, then we are always also only afraid of the wrong thing. We are not going to get eaten, at least not yet and not for the reasons we are claiming: “Cato does not like dick jokes, so I will get in trouble.” That is just a bit of the old run-­ around, really. The actual problem is that the fabula can morph on the fabulist at any moment. Orpheus might just be a guy about to be eaten by a bear while everyone laughs, cries, smirks, and/or heaves a sigh of relief that it’s not them down there in the sand. Had he sung more sweetly to Caesar, then the bear would not eat him. As the last line of Epigrams 1.104 would pointedly not put it, “Know for whom the song is sung, slaves.”

C.  To whom it may concern: Epigrams 2+ And so we should take a look at some of these openings and closings in order to appreciate the outline of these leonine mandibles. And then we 69  Lacan, 2014:76: “Anxiety is the appearance, within this framing [of Erwartung], of what was already there, at much closer quarter, at home, Heim.” Lacan, 2014:77: “[A]nxiety is that which deceives not, that which is entirely free of doubt. . . . Anxiety is not doubt, anxiety is the cause of doubt.” [original emphasis] 70  This is perhaps the scary rewrite of Rimell on Epigrams 12.57: “Martial is boxed into his tiny apartment yet still cannot escape the city . . . [He is] both trapped in a confined environment and fully immersed in the vastness of the city.” (Rimell, 2008:26)

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can look at Book 9 and the rabbit that the book pulls out of its hat: Earinus. The reading of Book 1 above is strongly Caesarean. And I think that it is more than fair to emphasize this theme in that book. But one can note that the book does not close with a strongly marked invocation of Domitian. There is an imperial Rome in the penultimate poem, but such is more a reminder than anything else. Book 2 is not addressed to Domitian. We hear of the emperor in the second poem, a poem that is quite flattering to him, but, after that, we leave Domitian to one side for a good while. He is a passing presence in 2.32 and 2.59, but these are not obviously programmatic poems for this book. Of course, one might opt to allegorize any given poem among the remainder, but we would be doing so more in the light of our own suspicions about how one might read rather than as a function of a collection of heavy-­handed cues such as are fed us in the first book. We really only care about the emperor again at the very end of the book. And Martial evinces a fairly light touch, or, rather, a relatively light one given that poems to the emperor tend to be heavy-­handed. In 2.91 Domitian is briefly invoked as a god-­like figure who might be kind enough to give Martial the legal privileges of a father of three as a reward for the how-­many-­is-­it-­again books of poems that Martial has written.71 In 2.92 we read that the right was so granted by “the only man who could grant it”/“the only man who was not impotent” (solus qui poterat). Book 3 does not have an opening poem to Caesar. Near-­ish to its end we hear about Caesar. But what we hear is old news: Caesar likes Martial and gave him the three-­baby-­prerogatives, the ius trium liberorum (3.95).72 Book 4 opens with a flattering birthday poem to Domitian. And we talk more about him in 4.3 and 4.8. His weight is more strongly felt, then, in this book than in the preceding two.73 At least we feel this at the book’s opening. The close of the book is not “imperial,” instead it is Saturnalian (4.88). 71  How many books? One? Two? Three? A reward for Epigrams 1 alone? For De Spectaculis + Epigrams 1? For Epigrams 1 + 2? For De Spectaculis + Epigrams + Epigrams 2? Note that Epigrams 2 in fact jokes about its own number: “Where is #1? Maybe this could be #1, if you want, Regulus.” A little king can do whatever he wants. As a rule, measure by the ruler’s little ruler. 72  See Fitzgerald on the way the ius trium liberorum and the one-­two-­three of liberi-­as-­ books receive a real work-­out as Book 2 closes. Fitzgerald, 2007:136–137: “It can hardly be a coincidence that Martial is asking for the ‘right of three children’ at the end of the second book . . . The emperor can make three from none (if this is the third child, where is the second?) and Regulus, little king that he is, can turn second into first, exercising, with Martial’s permission, the same power over appearance that is credited to the emperor.” See similarly Hinds, 2007:135–136. 73  Sullivan, 1991:33: “Book IV, although containing only eighty-­nine epigrams, represents a dramatic change from the touristic Book III. Martial emerges as much more the Flavian apologist and propagandist.” Henderson,  2001:71: “And [Book] Four shifted the

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68 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature As this book ends Martial, as he will elsewhere, associates his production of poetry books with an annual cycle in which the year ends with the completion of a new book of verse, and this book is itself something that can be offered as a present for the holidays. And, naturally, he hopes for a little something, if not more than a little something, in return. There is an echo of the opening in the close: festal time, celebration, gifts . . . But it is pointedly just an echo. If we step back for a moment, we can see that Martial is not writing “Domitianic poetry” in any simple sense of the term. The relationship between power and the verses regularly shifts, at least in certain dimensions, chief among them the very literal question of Caesar-­talk. Sometimes the poems address power, sometimes they do not. Power does not seem to be compelling praise in the strong sense of a demand that requires a response. Power can be “safely ignored,” if one decides not to hurl oneself into its jaws. That is, being the “subjected subject” of Domitian can also be described as a “free choice.” And the narrator is generally choosing to spend his time otherwise. And he does so over the course of several years.

D.  Trust and truth: a confidence game in Book 5 And so we note that Book 5 opens with longer, more ornate meditations on Caesar.74 In fact, the syntax of the first poem itself makes this point: hoc tibi . . . mittimus . . . To whom does he give this charming little book as a gift? Cui donat . . . ? To Caesar. Hoc tibi, Palladiae seu collibus uteris Albae, Caesar, et hinc Triuiam prospicis, inde Thetin, seu tua ueridicae discunt responsa sorores, plana suburbani qua cubat unda freti, seu placet Aeneae nutrix, seu filia Solis, siue salutiferis candidus Anxur aquis, mittimus, o rerum felix tutela salusque, sospite quo gratum credimus esse Iouem. stamping-­ground to Domitian’s palace, inaugurating a significantly engrossed presence of ‘imperial poems’ from this point on: Caesaris alma dies are Four’s first words, so implied second ‘title’.” 74  Sullivan, 1991:35: “The political emphasis of the book is unmistakable.”

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Trust and truth: a confidence game in Book 5  69 Tu tantum accipias: ego te legisse putabo et tumidus Galla credulitate fruar.   This to you, whether you enjoy the hills of Athena’s Alba, Caesar, and look from here upon Diana’s and then Thetis’ shrines, whether the truth-­telling sisters learn your oracles where the level wave of the civic sea slumbers, whether Aeneas’ nurse is your pleasure, whether the daughter of the Sun, whether the Anxur bright with healing waters, we send, O blessed guardian and salvation of the world, whose salvation we trust is Jove’s pleasure. You need only accept it: I will fancy that you have read it, and, full of myself, I will savor a Gaul’s gullibility. Martial, Epigrams 5.1

It takes six lines to unpack what “Caesar” is going to mean within the world of “this thing” that is being sent to him.75 Caesar is a who who is  turned into a where, or, rather, into a semi-­inscrutable everywhere. The  topography can be decoded quickly enough by those in the know: the  emperor may be visiting Alba, Aricia, Antium, Caieta, Circeii, Anxur . . . But, rather than turning the catalog at once into a collection of banal place names, we should note that the poem’s topographic description is mytho-­historical and Greco-­Roman. Thus, there is not just the sense that numinously charged hot-­spots and Caesar’s presence are natural affines, but Caesar is also hooked into everything that has ever mattered more generally. And so it comes as little surprise that the second gloss on tibi after the vocative Caesar in line 3 is the more baroque address in line 7: “O blessed guardian and salvation of the world (o rerum felix tutela salusque).” The capaciousness of the terms used is hard to capture in a translation: felix means fertile and fortunate and bringer-­of-­good-­fortune.

75  Spisak,  1998:243 on gifts more generally: “[T]he gift-­giving poems are sophisticated moral dialogues on trust and friendship.” Reciprocity plays a key role in the system (Spisak, 1998:250–251). Which gives rise to the obvious question both inside and outside the poems: to what extent is Caesar participating in all of this along with the rest of us?

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70 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Rerum indicates something bigger than the res publica, and it seeps well beyond public affairs to, one imagines, private affairs, and even all the way out to the universe itself, to rerum natura, if one wants to make Domitian seem like a god. And that is just what we want to do. We know that god loves us because he loves Domitian who, it will be claimed with increasing regularity, is himself a lot like Jove.76 Our very belief in the existence of Jove is mediated: what proof do we have of a “beyond,” what proof that Jove himself exists? Why, it is the presence of this god-­like gift named Caesar that is the efficient cause of belief. One is more than free to take such claims as being not exactly serious, as being part of a sort of game of flattery where all parties know that this is a quasi-­ritualized form of address. And, indeed, the very next lines shift gears and become much more playful and ironic. “If you would just be so good as to receive my book, then I will tell myself that you have even read it | and, a regular fat-­head, I will be as happy as a thick-­headed Gaul.” Caesar does not read books, we only tell ourselves that he does. Caesar does not hear us praising him. Only a dope would think that he did. But that by no means stifles our praises or the effort we lavish upon formulating them. The joke is on us: we spend so much effort on his indifference. “I know better, but . . . ” This is the formula that gives us ideology itself.77 As ever, one could flip the terms here and turn this into a “radical” bit of hare-­play. Maybe we are saying that you should no more believe that I am praising you when I say this than I believe that you are reading it. But positing secret reserves of resistance does very little to change the fact that a poem like this formally reproduces the structure of legitimate domination. If the first poem of the fifth book ends by intimating that maybe, just maybe, Martial is not sincere, the second poem loops back and starts up the praise-­machine all over again. Indeed, we are not getting down to the business of epigrammatic wit now that that first poem is out of the way.78 Instead the second poem is straight-­faced all the way to the end.79 In fact it 76  Pitcher, 1998:71: “When considered as a whole, the way in which Martial takes up and develops this identification of the emperor with the father of gods and men reveals a gradual increase in confidence on his part. It also shows another aspect of his interaction with the Roman poetic tradition; Martial likes to keep before his audience his poetic, if not necessarily political closeness to the emperor.” Pitcher is discussing poems from later books of the Epigrams, as we will as well below. 77  See again Žižek, 1989:29 and Žižek,  1989:21: “‘Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness.’ ” [emphasis modified] 78  Grewing, 1998:315 offers a review of the bibliography on “Martial’s wit.” 79 See Merli on the epigrams that open Book 5: “We are in this together, Domitian.” Merli,  1998:150: “Es scheint mir, daß sich Martial mit dieser feinen Verknüpfung von

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disclaims the previous four books of poems, at least so far as their suitability for certain readers goes. Respectable women, youths, and maidens may read this fifth book. And that is because “Book Five jokes around with Master (quintus cum domino liber iocatur; 5.2.6).” The ablative of accompaniment with cum and a person: the joking is “good family fun” because Caesar is along for the ride. But that is too mild. Caesar is a dominus relative to these books. And so we can think back to our savvy lions: norunt cuï seruiant, “they know whom they serve.” Despite any hiccups, this book also knows whom it serves. It promises to be as gentle as a rabbit, but, at the same time, it also hints that its leonine moments will likewise be toothless. For a certain kind of reader, the closing two verses might well contain a nastier inference that extends the closing ideas of the first poem. Let us unpack the subversive possibilities. Caesar can read the book (if he chooses to read it . . . ) without blushing, and he can read it with maidenly Minerva at his side (quem Germanicus ore non rubenti | coram Cecropia legat puella; 5.2.7–8).80 The title Germanicus is relatively new. Domitian took it after—opportunistically, say the Antonine sources . . . —triumphing over the Chatti. This came after a visit to the Gauls. And so “Gallic credulity” might be required to believe that Caesar really merits the title Germanicus. Perhaps he should blush every time he hears himself so called. And he really ought to blush if this goddess is there in the room too, and looking him dead in the eye (coram). The poet has made it this far in public life by “playing this game.” Perhaps he is totally sincere—unlikely . . . —or perhaps he is deeply cynical— quite possible . . . —but, in either case, he helps to build up and to fill out a verbal Colosseum that plays by the rules. In fact, these edifices help to propagate and to reproduce the rules themselves. Even if none of us really believed on the day of the triumph over the Chatti that this was an event that merited a triumph, that subjective belief does not vitiate the fact that it was, in fact, a triumph and that we were all there celebrating it as

Feststellungen Domitian gegenüber in erster Linie als ein Autor darstellen will, der vom Publikum geliebt wird und geradezu zur Unsterblichkeit bestimmt ist, würdig also, den Kaiser zu preisen.” Garthwaite,  1998b:165: “Having begun the volume by signifying his remoteness from the emperor, Martial has gradually drawn himself closer to the palace until finally he, or at least his book, has been admitted timidly to the imperial presence (in Epigrams 5.15).” 80  Geyssen,  1996:7: Domitian is in fact a lover of verse and a poet and was (perhaps) taught by Statius’ own father. Wouldn’t Domitian stand a decent chance of seeing through the craftier bits of Statius and Martial?

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72 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature such. And the fact is that Domitian is now Germanicus, and we address him as such: “Yes, it’s you.” Compare, then, Althusser on the moment of subjectivation when the interpellated subject says “Yes, it really is me.”81 And then see as well the commentary and expansion of Butler: “Consider the logical effect of the disjunctive ‘or’ in the middle of [Althusser’s] formulation: ‘subjection to the ruling ideology or’ — put in different, yet equivalent terms — ‘the mastery of its practice’ (my emphasis). The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and this paradoxical simultaneity constitutes the ambivalence of subjection.”82 Cynical compliance with the ruling ideology fails to note that the compliance includes “the mastery of its practice,” and, accordingly, “actual (albeit ambivalent) subjection.” This gives us the recipe for Domitianic subjectivation: “Yes, it’s me, the guy who, whether sincerely or not, says ‘Yes, it’s you . . . ’ ” The fact that the “me” is “just the narrator” and “not really the author” does nothing to disrupt the fractal geometry of the situation. We can just rewrite it with as many frames as we want, “Yes, it’s me, the guy who writes up a guy who says . . . ” A practice is still being mastered. And somewhere down there a masterful self is still being consolidated in the same gesture as a subjected subject is being constituted: “It’s me, World Famous Martial.” The fact that he hears his own voice when he says “it’s me” instead of the emperor’s voice hailing him exposes the depths of the depravity: the Master Poet has assimilated himself to and/or mistaken himself for the Master of Poets. His free play of the imagination in its abstract liberty has failed to compass fully the actual, concrete meaning of libertas in today’s Rome. What sublime artist would deign to let the dialectics of the material sully his word-­palaces (which just so happen to depict the emperor’s house on the Palatine)? The narrator assuredly dismantles the category of sincerity, but mainly to his own detriment. And, accordingly, he further strengthens the hand of power in the same gesture. “If one can believe the truth . . . ” begins 5.19. What an absurd way to speak. What sort of conditional clause needs to qualify any connection between fides and ueritas, between trust and truth?83 Let’s try that again: “If there is a way to put one’s trust in the truth, 81 Althusser, 1971:178. 82 Butler, 1997:116. 83  Spisak, 1998:252–253: another key domain for talk about fides in Martial is mutual trust between two parties participating in a gift-­exchange relationship. That is, fides is also a word connected with issues of sociality, friendship, and intimacy.

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preference, Greatest Caesar, | can be offered to no age but your own times (si qua fides ueris, praeferri, maxime Caesar, | temporibus possunt saecula nulla tuis; 5.19.1–2).” Si qua has been over-­translated for effect. What sort of thing might be out there that breaks the relationship between fides and truth? Well, disbelief in “imperial ideology” is one candidate. That Domitian is a Caesar, that Domitian is the Greatest Caesar, these need to be presupposed as articles of faith: this is the qua that connects the official truth to belief in the same. Thereupon this age—as does each Caesarean age in its turn . . . —becomes the best of times. A catalog of the “truth” ensues: but little of it is, as it were, objective truth. Instead, it is all “faith-­based” truth: believe in Caesarism, and then you will know that all of this “is the way it is.” Kneel, and you will believe. This poem gives the official story, and any ironic distance one might detect in it does more or less nothing to actually disrupt that story. The story is a catalog that praises “the now” and thereby it supports the “truth” of the opening couplet. Under what leader was Rome ever more grand or more fair? Under what princeps was there so much libertas? (pulchrior et maior quo sub duce Martia Roma?|sub quo libertas principe tanta fuit? 5.19.5) The meaning of libertas is opaque. The principate and Republican liberty are, one is told, incompatible. Or, rather, that is one version of the story. The exact opposite version is also recounted: some are quite pleased to state that the two are not at all incompatible.84 That is how we know that right here and right now we are living in a good age. Under bad Caesars one has libertas. Under good ones one also has libertas. Caesars change, but the words about Caesarism remain the same.85 Caesar always leaves us at liberty, even when he does not. Martial uses his “freedom to speak” to tentatively bring forward the one fly in the Domitianic ointment: it’s hard out there for a client.86 The Great 84 Pliny, Panegyricus 34.4: “The principate and liberty make use of one and the same public space (Eodem foro utuntur principatus et libertas).” Tacitus, Agricola 3.1: “Now at long last our spirit returns. And though at the very outset of this superlatively blessed age Nerva mixed two things once immiscible, namely the principate and liberty, and Trajan daily increases the joy of our times . . . (Nunc demum redit animus; et quamquam primo statim beatissimi saeculi ortu Nerua Caesar res olim dissociabilis miscuerit, principatum ac libertatem, augeatque cotidie felicitatem temporum Nerua Traianus . . .)” 85  Bartsch, 1994:153: “Yet it is clear that all Pliny’s protestations [about excessive praise] are undermined . . . by the frame in which they are offered: a public panegyric is the most obvious site for the reproduction of the public transcript, and by dint of this fact any statement in it has but a tenuous hold on disinterestedness.” 86  Despite indulging in the biographical fallacy when he reads Martial, Jones emphasizes something that is perhaps not stressed often enough: though a normative institution, it is also often disagreeable if not loathsome to participate in the patron-­client system. “While these

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74 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Patron is fine, but the little patrons are a bunch of cheapskates who do not want to sustain their end of the social bargain. Accordingly, as a Great General Caesar should use his hegemony to replace and displace these defective social leaders: “Inasmuch as these are not, be you, Caesar, a friend | in a leader no virtue can be sweeter (quatenus hi non sunt, esto tu, Caesar, amicus: | nulla ducis uirtus dulcior esse potest; 5.19.15).” Caesar is invited to conquer and to dominate still more of the space of life. The senators have long since yielded their political roles. The senatorial aristocracy should consider yielding as well their social function. The “private” institution of patronage is failing, a Super Patron needs to be found.87 Fortunately, one is to hand.88 Naturally, this is a bit tongue in cheek: “Everything is perfect . . . Well, there is just one tiny thing wrong . . . ”89 But it is also serious. And, in fact,

duties cannot be called burdensome, they were calculated to destroy a man’s self-­respect and independence of spirit.” (Jones, 1935:356) Compare Gunderson, 2003b:234 on officium as a kind of “dirty joke” in more than one sense. Even where there is no emperor, there is a latent, pervasive rage in this culture: men love to subordinate other men; men hate to be subordinated. Roman, 2001:114 offers a nice overview of the ambiguous terrain in Martial: “Martial’s representation of the patron-­client relationship as degraded, and literature as tainted by this subservience, is interpreted as part of epigram’s fictive world. By contrast, in poems directed to actual friends and patrons of the poet, rather than to fictitious straw men, we are able to discern the traditional ideals of amicitia as an unquantifiable exchange.” 87  Saller, 1982:45: “To summarize, all senatorial magistracies, offices and honors were at the disposal of the emperor. . . . Several further considerations suggest that patronage was in fact unexceptional and taken for granted.” I am being somewhat cavalier in using the term “patron.” White, 1978 sensibly insists that we read the poet-­and-­patron relationship through the indigenous institutional framework of amicitia. “Here it will be more useful to show that there is a thoroughly Roman context for the activities to which we give the name of patronage, and that this context is the omnipresent institution of amicitia.” (White, 1978:76) 88  Has always been to hand? Geyssen, 1999 argues that Epigrams 1.70, a poem that looks like it is going to a nobody-­patron named Proculus, is in fact addressed to Domitian. 89  At the practical financial level this is very much a joke and a careful appraisal of the financial details of the situation clinches it. White, 1978:88: “It should be obvious that most Roman poets of whose lives we know any details could not have been poor men.” Martial is an eques. And “[t]he equestrian census of 400,000 sesterces would in fact have yielded enough income so that a man could live at Rome without depending on further employment.” (White,  1978:88) “Poets, then, at least poets who were knights, did not depend on  the munificence of their friends for their primary income.” (White,  1978:89) Sullivan, 1991:27 counts up the named servants: “A staff of about twenty slaves, distributed between the town and country residences is a reasonable supposition. Eleven of their names are known . . . but there are also anonymous estate managers (vilici).” Lorenz, 2002:14 observes that with “poor me” we are in the presence of a familiar pauper poeta topos, a topos that can be quite pronounced in epigram in particular. See the similar arguments of Cowan, 2014:361.

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we have a hard time seeing the distinction between the earnest version of the poem’s message and the ridiculous version of its message.90 And the “joke” that ends the poem seals the hybrid deal. “You’ve been laughing quietly to yourself, Germanicus, | because the advice I give to you is useful to me (Iam dudum tacito rides, Germanice, naso, | utile quod nobis do tibi consilium; 5.19.17–­18).” Says the narrator, “I know that you know . . . ” Caesar is a great reader, he sees the joke coming and laughs at it. The joke is that the narrator can be counted on to be (merely) self-­interested and not really a biting social critic. Caesar laughs to be told by a self-­interested man that the world could sure use a lot more Caesar in it. This is an old joke and a joke we saw coming and a joke that we make sure is seen as such upon its arrival: iam dudum becomes hic et nunc. The “implication” is turned into an explication. The evolution of the books of poems moves in tandem with an evolving sense of Caesar’s relationship to these same books. As the career of “that Famous Martial” marches forwards, it also advances closer to the Palace and to Caesar. And Caesar himself keeps on getting bigger and bigger. This growth in size can perhaps be attributed to extra-­textual questions. That is, over time the emperor Domitian is becoming “bigger,” i.e., more oppressive, and so one accordingly shifts the mode of address. But it is hard to say that such a cause is satisfactory as an explanation for the literary effect. There is no reason to believe that Martial was somehow compelled to speak ever more flatteringly of Domitian. What was so desperately defective in the effusions of the earlier books that Caesar should insist upon revision and expansion? Imputing the evolution of the praises to the emperor is too easy. A more useful way to approach the issue: Martial chooses to shift the perspective from which the narrative is articulated as the narrative itself shifts, and the choice is more or less consonant with a collection of prior choices that we can see over the course of several years of poetic output.

90  Compare the Marx brothers’ “Duck Soup”: “Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.” The logic of such a joke will return in the conclusion to the whole study.

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E.  Bigger, better . . . and badder: Book 6 Nevertheless, the portrait of Domitian is becoming decidedly more frightening even as the flattery waxes. Domitian’s literal and figurative censorship brings to the fore any number of expressed-­so-­as-­to-­be-­repressed items. And the contents of our praise take on a much more sexual cast. Where once we had a Great General, we are starting to see an Obscene Father. The first four poems of Book 6 mark a shift in this direction that will carry us forward into the subsequent books of epigrams. A self-­address that is not a self-­address opens the sixth book. The collection is being sent to a very dear friend named Martial.91 And this Martial is being asked to give the poems a close, careful (editorial) listen. The next stop after that will be a “less anxious and less fearful” submission of the same to Caesar. The little book is destined for big hands: “Here: a Sixth Book(let) sent to you, | Martial so especially dear to me. | If you deign to polish it with your practiced ear, | it will dare with less anxiety, with less fear | to make its way into Caesar’s great hands. (Sextus mittitur hic tibi libellus, | in primis mihi care Martialis: | quem si terseris aure diligenti, | audebit minus anxius tremensque | magnas Caesaris in manus uenire; 6.1).” “Fear” is, “of course,” (mostly) aesthetic here. The poet is afraid not of the political content of his verses but rather their (purely) abstract merit. At least, that is what one is meant to infer even as, naturally, it is easy enough to imagine other sorts of denunciation from which dear Martial is being asked to save Martial. The second poem starts with talk of lusus: “Twas fun and games to dupe wedlock’s sacred torch | Twas fun and games to chop off undeserving manhood . . . ” (Lusus erat sacrae conubia fallere taedae,| Lusus et inmeritos execuisse mares. . . . 6.2.1–2) Lusus is an over-­determined word within the world of Roman poets in general, and Martial is no exception.92 And we

91  Kleijwegt, 1998:273: “Iulius Martialis is generally recognized as the poet Martial’s best friend . . . [T]he language of intimacy dominates Martial’s account of their social encounters.” 92  For example, ludere is used about a dozen times by Catullus, and its evocation tends to be programmatic: the sparrow “plays” with the girl (Carmen 2) and writing and literary exchange are “play” (Carmen 50). See Gunderson,  1997 and Habinek,  2005:133–134. Swann, 1998:55: “Martial used ludere as Catullus had done, as well as Ovid and others. This is not a surprise; but what is perhaps unexpected is that, when he used the word, the name of Catullus or a Catullan image is likely to occur shortly after ludere.”

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have seen it with some frequency amid the passages discussed above. In fact, Epigrams 1.4 imagined Caesar the censor getting his hands on the little books of Martial. And the kindly censor would, of course, appreciate that naughty pages do not imply anything about the author’s biography. “Harmless play” is allowed: innocuos censura potest permittere lusus (1.4.7). We also saw the lusus that was rabbits running around in the lions’ mouths (1.14.1). This time play is Bad Play, and it is the sort of play that needed censorship and in fact received censorship. Lusus erat sacrae conubia fallere taedae, Lusus et inmeritos execuisse mares. Utraque tu prohibes, Caesar, populisque futuris succurris, nasci quos sine fraude iubes. Nec spado iam nec moechus erit te praeside quisquam: at prius — o mores! — et spado moechus erat.   Fun and games ‘twas to cheat marriage’s sacred torch, fun and games to have cut the manhood from undeserving males. Both you prohibit, Caesar, and to tomorrow’s populace you offer your succor. You bid for them a birth free of harm, free of error. Under your watchful eye, no eunuchs, no adulterers will there be. None. And yet formerly — oh, such morals! — even a eunuch was an adulterer. Martial, Epigrams 6.2

The “players” of 6.2 are people whose play was life-­play rather than book-­ play as per the dictates of 1.4. And, frankly, the punchlines of their “jokes” were disruptive to the normative order of things.93 Many an epigram offers as a “witticism” something to the effect that, “Ha, she’s an adulteress.” In short, the epigrams are quasi-­censorious in that non-­normative behavior

93  See O’Connor, 1998 on the aggressive sexual normativity of Martial’s priapic persona. The thesis owes much to Richlin, 1992. See also Lorenz, 2002:37–38 on Priapus and the narrator of the poems.

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78 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature is not praised.94 And as quasi-­censorious, such epigrams are not exactly playful.95 Conversely, immoralists have been playing around, making-­and-­doing their own sort of social poetry. And they would say something like, “Ha, I am an adulteress, and I am having a great time too.” Such a woman is not a punchline. She is the hero of her own little drama. Instead, it is her husband specifically and convention more generally that is exposed to ridicule. But that sort of thing is all over now. Caesar has forbidden both adultery and the “eunuchification” of youths such that pretty boys can remain forever toys. And in so doing Caesar comes to the aid of “the future” (succurris). Tomorrow’s Romans are ordered to be born authentically and legitimately, sine fraude. The poetry of today celebrates an ongoing prohibition that safeguards the future: huzzah, reprofuturity!96 The past and its play are over. The poem’s “point” is “tense.” The structure of the verses does not play around with words. Instead, its “cleverness” consists of the ostentatious arrangement of words that designate times. Ensuring that a wife is only a wife and that the signifier remains fixed is the legislative point to which the narrative voice lends its support. The final two lines are, then: “Now there will exist neither eunuch nor adulterer under your guardianship | but formerly — oh, what customs! — even a eunuch was an adulterer.” The censor cares about our genitals, and this supervision of genitality puts an end to game-­playing. The semantic slippage and word play of “then” is not the way forward, says, the ­opening of Book 6. Effusive praise of a pretty eunuch boyfriend of Caesar would seem to be one of the last things that a naive reader might 94  A sample of the “you should be ashamed of being shameful” schtick would be Martial, Epigrams 2.49: “You suck cock and drink water: no transgression there, Lesbia | the part of you that needs it, Lesbia, gets the wash (quod fellas et aquam potas, nil, Lesbia, peccas. | qua tibi parte opus est, Lesbia, sumis aquam.)” The “joke” concerns how the clever can deploy the word “water.” The scandalousness of oral sex and the vileness of the woman are presupposed (and reaffirmed). Garthwaite, 2001:50: “[I]n [Book 2] the poet portrays himself, or at least his literary persona, as what might be termed a conservative bi-­sexual . . . . In contrast, the vices which he denounces in other individuals throughout the collection are those which in his view clearly degrade male sexual authority — but which also have a social consequence.” Walter, 1998:224 on the general structure of Martial’s barbs: “Das ist fast allen Epigrammen in diesem Sinne eingesetzte Mittel ist die — vielfach als witzig empfundene — Kontrastierung von Sein und Sein-­Sollen sowie die von Schein und Wirklichkeit.” Walter’s broader thesis concerns the relationship between humor and social control. 95  Boyle, 1995:89: “Martial’s social hierarchy dictates that people know their place, and the epigrams are especially derisory of breaches of this principle among the classes below Martial’s own.” 96  For the neologism, see Edelman, 2004.

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expect of the future of the Epigrams themselves. But that tomorrow will indeed dawn in Book 9.97 Once upon a time the poet himself pledged that his mores were pure (1.4). Formerly—in the preceding and very much moral book, in fact . . . — the poet even exercised a censorial function by deciding whether or not a eunuch-like fellow was going to be allowed to sit in the front rows of the theater with all of the knights (spadone cum sis euiratior fluxo, . . .  5.41). Bodies, pleasures, and state all “work” and “will work” properly because poets and princes are policing them. This message, of course, cannot be taken at face value. First, there are a variety of subtle reasons for being skeptical about the story of castration. And various versions of the celebration of the end of emasculation will preoccupy us for some time going forward. For present purposes we can just assert that emasculation is taking place even as it is being forbidden by law. First there is the domination of Domitian, even if this is a domination that is also figured as “freeing us from . . . ” and “freeing us to . . . ”. Then there is the self-­emasculation of certain Domitianic subjects who are either “earnest” about their submission or “just faking sincerity” (while really also submitting). And, as we will see in Book 9, there is the sublime emasculated object sitting pretty in Domitian’s court. At a more basic level, one could doubt the poem’s sincerity by noting that while the market for eunuchs might be a bit of a fad, adultery, nevertheless, is a timeless classic that can be counted upon to never go out of fashion. And a poet who says that adultery is over “because Caesar says so” presumably knows that this is mere “wishful thinking.” He is, though, conniving with the would-­ be performative utterance of the law. The emperor’s new clothes are most lovely indeed. One likely “sees through them” but—o mores!—one makes sure not to be seen seeing through them. Look, Caesar, at my self-­blinding in your name. The “future peoples” promised to us all in Epigrams 6.2 turn out to be just one future person in 6.3. This poem celebrates in high style the prospective birth to Domitian of a child.

97  Lorenz states outright what would be obvious to anyone at the time: there is really just one reason to keep a eunuch around. “Statius’ Darstellung impliziert, dass Earinus Domitian auch als ἐρώμενοϲ diente, denn Kastrationen von Knaben hatten den Zweck, deren jugendliches Aussehen zu erhalten, sodass sie möglichst lange für ihre Herrn attraktiv waren.” (Lorenz, 2002:191)

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80 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Nascere Dardanio promissum nomen Iulo, uera deûm suboles; nascere, magne puer: cui pater aeternas post saecula tradat habenas, quique regas orbem cum seniore senex. Ipsa tibi niueo trahet aurea pollice fila et totam Phrixi Iulia nebit ouem.   Be born, name promised to Dardanian Iulus, true scion of the gods. Be born, great boy, that to you in the distant future your father can hand the reins, that you, yourself old, can steer the world’s course with your more aged sire. Julia herself will draw with snowy finger the golden threads and spin the whole of the Golden Sheep for you. Martial, Epigrams 6.3

This future emperor who is not even yet an actual living person is addressed in the here and now by the narrator: magne puer. He is nothing and yet already much more than a boy. The “program” from the previous poem is resumed and expanded, but also particularized. Perhaps it is even subtly subverted. The child is twice commanded: “Be born!” The poet is conjuring him into being. The boy who will command the world when the commander of the world hands over the reins of power to him is himself enjoined: “Be!” Be a name, nomen. Be a (mere) noun, a thing-­of-­speech that circulates. No, don’t be that, be a “promised name” (promissum nomen), a name promised to Iulus Dardanius. The name was “foretold.”98 Become in the here and now the thing that was foretold. And I foretell the following future for you . . . We have a poem that is again very much about tenses, but now we reflect on the way that time and dynastic power can and should intersect. “Legitimate offspring” were “promised” by 6.2 and its invocation of time and power and normative sexuality, here “the true offspring of the gods” is “promised” by the invocation of future power to be/become itself. Of

98  The name was also foretold by Vergil, Aeneid 1.288 where we see a magno demissum nomen Iulo. An intertext pure and simple or allusion as a vehicle for complicity wherein one cites another’s imperial flattery?

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imperial time the epigrams aver, “Formerly there was adultery. Now there is chaste sexuality. Tomorrow there will be an imperial heir.” Big baby morphs into an old man in the next couplet. Old-­but-­not-­dead Domitian will hand over the reins of government to this magne puer who has turned into a senex. Father and son are cum seniore senex, having/governing eternally (aeternas habenas). The hand-­off comes only after ages and ages of men (post saecula). Hundreds of years old, Domitian yet lives on, a chariot-­mate to his own aged son. Such, at least, is the fantasy. If a saeculum is an age of men, then several waves of futuri populi from the preceding poem will come into being and pass away as Domitian-­and-­promised-­son watch on. Meanwhile the thread of fate will not be woven by The Fates and it will not even be the familiar thread of life: instead of outsourcing such important work, the imperial house will see to it itself. Niece Julia will do the spinning, and she will have the Golden Sheep to hand to supply her. The conceits throughout the poem are recherché and over the top. That is, after all, part of the panegyrical esthetic. Nevertheless, we should not let the glare blind us to what distinctions might be noted amidst all of the high-­wattage lighting. The “politics of time” in this poem are very intense. This is more than a generic, “I wish you a long life.” Wishing “Nestor’s years” for another would be the “standard hyperbole” in Martial’s poems.99 But “mere men” might hope to reach Nestor’s age. This poem imagines a significantly longer span of time during which several sets of long-­lived people will come and go while (double) Caesar remains the same. Note the way that hyperbole is completely indifferent to pedantry: what if the new baby has a baby? And then that baby has a baby? cum seniore cum seniore cum seniore senex? Asking yourself, “How can this work in practice?” is ipso facto a violation of the rules of the game. This is a “bigger bigness” than we are generally used to. That is, this is some of the loudest praise we have heard. Furthermore, this bit of praise picks up on themes from the prior poem. It amplifies them and recasts our understanding of “the body politic.” And, similarly, the reverb from this full-­throated performance affects the way we read Epigrams 6.1, which was itself affected by our recollections of Epigrams 1.4. The “present” of the 99  Like most phenomena, if you see it once, you will see it around a dozen times. See also Epigrams 2.64, 5.58, 6.70, 7.96, 8.6 . . . it is interesting to note that “long life” is evoked more often in the later books. “Nestor’s years” are also thrice evoked in Statius’ Siluae: 1.3.110, 1.4.127, and 4.3.150.

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82 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature flow of Martial’s poems “rewrites the past,” and it does so in the name of the future, in the name of a future that is multiply “legitimate.” There is a smothering quality to this future: the people are born into an infinite Domitianic future and not into an “open” future. If the pervy man-­ on-­man bump-­n-­grinders, if the cinaedi of yesterday were hoping that things might get better for their sort over time, Martial is promising that things will only get worse. Not only are we not going to transition from the hate-­speech of a word like cinaedus and towards LGBTQ rights, but we will even be thrilled to note that now and going forward there are not going to be any more “perverts.” Domitian is “the new normal,” now and forever. This is the promise. And, in particular, we should celebrate the politicization of the personal. This is what our first four poems tell us. Censor maxime principumque princeps, Cum tot iam tibi debeat triumphos, Tot nascentia templa, tot renata, Tot spectacula, tot deos, tot urbes: Plus debet tibi Roma, quod pudica est.   Greatest Censor and Emperor of emperors, Though now it owes you so many triumphs, so many temples being born, so many reborn, so many spectacles, so many gods, so many cities, Rome’s greatest debt to you is her chastity. Martial, Epigrams 6.4

Domitianic futurity breaks even with the imperial past. All other censors are nothing when compared with this censor. This is the lord over all of those lords. The city “owes” so much to him. Birth and rebirth return, this time on the religious plane. All of these new, wonderful things, are so now, so many, and so wonderful. Shows are celebrated in this book by the famous author of a book about shows. And that is just one minor (but not really all that minor . . . ) dimension of the many, many add-­ons to Rome that Rome can, as it were, “never repay”: we can be expected to remain “forever in your debt.” But biggest and best of all is . . . sex. Censoring has become superlative censoring. And the matter of bodies and pleasures is turned into a domain into which we eagerly invite a censor perpetuus. Thank you for making the personal so political, says this poet of “private life.”

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It is not at all the case that there is no more adultery in Rome, even if that was the promise of 6.2. But, “ideally” Rome is chaste, and any unchastity can and should be addressed by the censor. To the extent that we will see adultery in this book—and we will . . . —it is to be conceived of as taking place precisely as a species of outlawry. Such behavior can be viewed within the framework of amusing private indiscretion, if one chooses, but such a choice would not be pudicus (“chaste”), and a writer whose life is proba (“proper”) would want to think carefully about implying that adultery was a simple laughing matter. One might laugh at it, but the laughter is not “simple”: instead, the laughter is “complicated” by the invocation for “you, Caesar, the censor” as the “ideal reader” of these various stagings of impropriety. A matrix of legitimacy and transgression has been mapped out. Adultery is not a question of traditional morality, family law, paternal authority, private virtue, legislation dating back from the republic . . . Instead this and other questions of good-­and-­bad are all to be read within a very specific framework. Heterogenous outlawry is being oriented around a fixed center that renders everything legible within a specific bright, white Caesarean light. The narrative voice is “censorious” about the clever inventiveness of “Julian scofflaws,” that is, of people who are obeying the letter of the law against adultery while disobeying its spirit. According to Epigrams 6.7 Telesilla has been “married” ten times in the month since the lex Iulia was “reborn” “for the people’s benefit,” if we wish to over-­translate the phrase populis renata est. Telesilla has figured out a way to get around the law by using the law against itself. Concludes the censorious narrator, “A woman who marries so many times does not marry. By law she is an adulteress. | I am less offended by a less artful cheat (quae nubit totiens, non nubit: adultera lege est. | offendor moecha simpliciore minus. 6.7).” Telesilla’s “poetics” is problematic in that she has made a ten-­ dimensional joke of the law itself. Meanwhile the narrator of the Epigrams insists that poet-­and-­prince jokes be always and only double and that they have a legitimate public obverse face that is profoundly connected to their private reverse. Such is the (Caesarean) coin of the (joke) realm. There is, to be sure, an inevitable doubleness to all jokes, a doubleness that flows from the nature of language in general. What stands out in these passages from Martial is his keenness to always acknowledge that the matter of “doubleness” can and will be a question that gets referred to “censorship.” Power is asked to recognize the narrative’s recognition that the discourse is to be framed in power’s own terms. All subtexts are themselves likewise

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84 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature subtexts to that particular text, namely power’s text (as per the narrator’s weaving of the shape of the same).

F.  High and mighty; near and far: Book 7 If Book 6 is in some ways a “censor book,” owing in no small part to the presence of Domitian the Censor, then Book 7 stages its Domitian in a different aspect: the conqueror. On the face of it, there are perhaps fewer reasons to feel disturbed when an emperor is hailed as an imperator. Conquering “out there” reaffirms many core Roman values and is generally conducive to various Roman conveniences. Nevertheless, the first poem of the book presents a Domitian that is “too great.” “Like a god” is an old and familiar piece of flattery that one mortal offers to another. But Martial—and, as we will see, Statius—is happy to go one step further and to portray a man whom the immortals might envy. In short, the “late Domitianic” aesthetic increasingly embraces a trope whereby the traditions of glorious sublimity are declared to be inadequate to the representation of the here and now.100 These inversions suggest that the only way to understand “the beyond” is to read it through the glorious immanence of power in the world. The net result is a dethroning of the god as well as a destruction of “the sublime” given that “up there” is never higher than “right here.” Or, to the extent that one retains the notion that “the lofty” exceeds representation, that experience of insufficiency is presented as the lived experience of approaching worldly power in today’s Rome.101 Epigrams 7.1 can be designated the moment at which this motif of the “immanent sublime” stages its official coming out party. We may have had over-­bold images before, but now we begin a collection of poems in this register. The “clever conceit” that animates the poem is that Minerva’s breastplate is a mere breastplate, albeit a scary one. But when Domitian 100  Roman,  2015:456–457: “Both Statius and Martial, then, allude to Augustan topoi of poetic immortality and vatic supremacy in the very act of shifting such immortality onto the emperor and his works. The priority of immortal poetic medium over the materiality of monumental building projects has been neatly and pointedly reversed: now it is Domitian, and not the poet . . . who is the master-­builder.” 101  See Porter, 2016 on all things περὶ ὕψουϲ. Porter’s “material sublime” is fundamentally connected to the world. The Domitianic short-­ circuit never leaves it. Porter,  2016:391: “[S]ublimity, though it frequently tends to draw the eye and the mind away from matter and the sensuous domain, cannot exist without reference to these same things. Sublimity originates in an encounter with matter. It bears, so to speak, the memory of this encounter even when it strains to pull away from the physical realm into some higher, often more spiritual realm.”

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puts it on, it gets charged up with the numinous dread that we associate with the old myths. That is, the poet strips myth of its “mythic” otherness and then asserts that it is only earthly power that fully powers up the object. Mere flattery, of course, but also flattery that plunders one domain in order to enrich another. Accipe belligerae crudum thoraca Mineruae, Ipsa Medusaeae quem timet ira comae. Dum uacat, haec, Caesar, poterit lorica uocari: Pectore cum sacro sederit, aegis erit.   Receive the raw breastplate of war-­waging Minerva, a thing feared by the very wrath of Medusa’s locks. When empty, Caesar, this can be called a cuirass: When it should sit on your sacred breast, it will be an aegis. Martial, Epigrams 7.1

One can note as well that this opening poem does not say “Take my book, Caesar . . . ” Instead of “book” we have “breastplate.” If the breastplate is not an aegis until Caesar wears it, the book is a mere book and is not itself an aegis until the poet elects to seize and Caesar-­ize it. Verse is weaponized and pressed into imperial service. The conquered will be, though, other books: cultural spoils are heaped at the emperor’s feet. The “cooked” cultural world of myth is rent asunder and turned into mere raw materials (crudum). Then these ravaged fragments are reforged into elements of the mosaic of (specifically) Domitianic culture. The Domitianic breast animates it all, says the inspired bard. The next poem tells us more about this breastplate. Its mythic mystery is glossed. Domitian is about to go to war. This item was made for him. He should wear it. That would be the prose way to talk of the situation. The poetic way is to praise the breastplate for its good luck at being offered to Caesar (Felix sorte tua, sacrum cui tangere pectus; 7.2.5). “The breast” that was emphasized at the end of 7.1 returns: pectus. The next line expands on the magical quality of the Ceasarean chest and its ability to “animate” objects (as well as to inspire poets): fas erit et nostri mente calere dei. “Lucky” to touch. And because touching, “(religious) legitimacy,” fas. The breast is the chest is the mind is the heart: concrete pectus is always also abstract “heart” specifically because mens is under there animating everything. The surface hides a depth that seeps back out to that surface. And

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86 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature then the surface of the leader’s body, a surface that is radiant with the power of the leader’s mind, further irradiates the objects that come in contact with it. The book is celebrating the prospect of Caesar’s return and the triumphal celebration that will ensue. “It is so great that you are gone . . . because you will return covered in glory.” It is easy enough to detect a sort of “sigh of relief ” in the first half of that sentiment. The choking closeness of Caesar evanesces as he heads off on campaign. And, as a subtext, that has its charm. While you are gone I write . . . and then you will return. Moreover, the trajectory of the poems in this segment of the book recapitulates this theme. We quickly get into a couple of small little epigrams that are about the little world of epigram as a separate world. Men who are not Caesar send one another books (7.3). There is the story of the man who swapped effect for cause and started writing since he had a bad complexion (7.4). If you are pale enough to be a poet, why not become a poet? These poems bracketed by another Caesar poem in 7.5. As such they are something like little rabbits running around in the lion’s mouth. Or perhaps they are lions who think themselves kings of the jungle and are ready to sink their teeth into anything. No matter how one wants to figure them, though, they are small and inconsequential and more or less unaware of the full context in which all of this writing is taking place. That is, they are numb to 7.1, 7.2, and 7.5. Poetry is set off in its own world, especially if one is not too anxious about the question of swapping effects for causes, given that that very “joke” made at the expense of the ridiculous poet of Epigrams 7.4 could be reapplied to aspects of Martial’s own process. In 7.5 we think of Caesar on campaign. But what could have been a portrait of him killing scads of foreigners is instead converted into a moment saturated with affects, specifically longing, jealousy, and benevolence. Wouldn’t it be lovely if Caesar were so kind as to return to us? How lucky the barbarians who get to see this god. “Emperor cult” is something one often imagines as a mechanism of imperial policy. That is, the subjected foreigners are required to swear to the divinity of the Roman ruler in an overdetermined gesture: they reaffirm their subjection all over again; they show what power can impose; they prove the distance between “us” and “them.” But the poem is insisting on the intimacy of emperor cult. Domitian is our god and we long for his return. It is a shame that he is out there inflicting his divinity on others when he could be back here imparting its warm glow to us. The psychology of the poem circulates around a

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collection of contrived conceits. But, much as with the shows in the arena, the contrived quality of elephants bowing to the emperor does not mean that something real has failed to happen when it comes to the concrete question of power in the world. Si desiderium, Caesar, populique patrumque Respicis et Latiae gaudia uera togae, Redde deum uotis poscentibus. Inuidet hosti Roma suo, ueniat laurea multa licet: Terrarum dominum propius uidet ille, tuoque Terretur uultu barbarus et fruitur.   If the longing, Caesar, of the people and senate, and the true happiness of the Latin toga you do consider, return our god as per our insistent prayers. Envy for her own enemy seizes Rome, even if many a triumph should come. They see more near the Master of the World; your face terrifies the barbarian; yours it enjoys. Martial, Epigrams 7.5

Dominus terrarum, “master of the earth,” is fine, on the one hand, but, of course, “master” is supposed to be an ugly word in one specific corner of that earth, namely Rome. God-­and-­master should return to us. Enslave them. Then return to us (who may well be your slaves). The over-­shot of  hyperbole winds up telling the excessive truth, namely the  story of Domitian’s excessive role: “Nomen omen. Domitian is a dominus.” The “too muchness” out there is, in its way, fine, a bit of propaganda that is suited for empire and expansion. It is the longing to turn that bit of fiction into the story of our Roman life that disconcerts. “Come closer”: we “envy” the enemy who stares at that horrifying aegis and is paralyzed into subjection. The poem’s rhetorical conceit in the last line is the “ironic” division between perspectives: they are terrified by and “have the use of ” Caesar. We “just” want to enjoy his company. But if Martial’s joke epigrams traffic in double meanings as the punchline, then this non-­joke epigram requires us to unsee the doubleness and simultaneity right in front of our eyes. We do not feel “terror”; we only feel “true joys.” And they are true because the poem says they are true.

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88 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature The contrived affective life of the poem emerges out of a collection of patent ironies: the envy of inuidet is so deployed, for example. And this same panoply of passions is supposed to subsist in its complexity but for the subtraction of fear. We are just like them, less the fear. Domitianic terror is real, and it can be seen close up, and we desire to see it close up. But when it gets close, it will be a truly joyous thing to behold. The poem exposes a “lived irony” of power. It plays around with the rhetoric of sovereignty. It even heaps “many laurels” upon sovereignty as only a poet with his own sorts of garland can.102 But the poem also reveals that, when you think too long and too hard on the question of sovereignty and subjection, when you ring all of the changes, you end up unifying the disparate under a single Caesarean aegis: the populus here is not qualitatively different from the populus there. What Martial adds to this syllogistic conclusion is a specific subtraction: “Feel no fear.” In the logic of the lion’s maw, is there really an “out there” at all?103 The opening of this book is telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Beginning: Caesar is about to put on his armor and leave (7.1, 7.2). Middle: Caesar is off fighting (7.5). Caesar might be on his way back after victory (7.6). Caesar is still fighting, and we are sill fantasizing about his absence (7.7).104 End: Caesar is coming back for his triumph (7.8). Just before we got to the middle we had those two tiny epigrams about writing epigrams. And after this mini-­epic about Caesar’s campaigns, we can “begin” writing Book 7 as a book of epigrams. Epigrams 7.8 serves as a border between the martial prelude to the book of epigrams and Martial’s Seventh Book of Epigrams as a whole. Time matters again. Now is the time for play. “Now” “if ever” Martial’s Muses can frolic (nunc hilares, si quando mihi, nunc ludite, Musae; 7.8.1). This is because Domitian is coming back, Domitian the uictor, Domitian 102  See [Longinus], De Sublimitate 8.2 for a purported tension between panegyric and passion: “In speakers’ works dedicated to praise, processions and self-­display dignity and elevation are found throughout, but for the most part emotional impact is wanting (παρά γε μὴν τοῖϲ ῥήτορϲι τὰ ἐγκώμια καὶ τὰ πομπικὰ καὶ ἐπιδεικτικὰ τὸν μὲν ὄγκον καὶ τὸ ὑψηλὸν ἐξ ἅπαντοϲ περιέχει, πάθουϲ δὲ χηρεύει κατὰ τὸ πλεῖϲτον).” Perhaps the pathos is just felt elsewhere and otherwise instead. 103  Gunderson, 1996:116: the arena has no outside. 104  See especially 7.7.8–9: “Our eyes and hearts are transported there, Caesar: that’s how you, an individual, hold fast the minds of all (Illic et oculis et animis sumus, Caesar, | adeoque mentes omnium tenes unus).” Caesar is The One: the word is stressed by coming last. And psychically we are “right there” with him wherever he might be. Pitcher,  1998:70: “The address to Domitian in VII 7 as summe mundi rector et parens orbis . . . aligns him clearly again with Jupiter, and with Augustus as addressed by Ovid. This extension of the concept of pater patriae to include the whole world shows the way in which poetry can embrace ideas at variance with more normal political expression.”

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the deus (uictor ab Odrysio redditur orbe deus; 7.8.2). December will see a triumph. December is also the time of the Saturnalia in Martial’s world. And December is also the time of giving books of epigrams as Saturnalia gifts.105 This blur between poetic activity and the actions of the princeps occurs at a more explicit level. Domitian’s soldiers will engage in the ritual raillery that takes place during triumphs. “Naughty” verses will celebrate the public joy (festa coronatus ludet conuicia miles; 7.8.7). The narrator is akin to a soldier in Domitian’s army: he too fights; he too wins; he too praises; and he also likes to joke around. Poetic lusus and Martial/martial epigrams are written up as a basic pair. There is an anxious quality to the write-­up, though. And we have to repeat our “witty” conflation just to make sure that no mistakes are made. Let it be fas to . . . Fas is an old religious term that in broader contexts means “right, proper, allowable, lawful, fit, permitted.” Here the formulation is “It is fas for Caesar to hear jokes and less serious verses, if . . . .” Let it be time for Fescinnine verses. Let it be time for epigram. But we heard fas not so long ago in 7.2: there it was the lucky breastplate that was allowed to grow warm with the genius of Domitian (as per the genius conceit of the poet). All roads lead to . . . Domitian. His is the god-­like heart that puts on the breastplate that wins the war that wins the triumph that inspires the raillery that permits the ribaldry of an epigrammatist. Epigrams 7.8 ends where it begins, namely with a declaration that epigram can begin now that the emperor is an imperator. Correcting our translation somewhat, we have, in full, “It is fas, Caesar, to hear jokes and less serious verses, | even for you, if the very triumph is fond of play (lusus) (Fas audire iocos leuioraque carmina, Caesar | et tibi, si lusus ipse triumphus amat . . . ; 7.8.9–10)”. Whatever Martial does and whatever Domitian hears Martial doing is itself but an extension of the celebration that is the  grand delight of Domitianic success. Play is again framed within a Caesarean context. Epigram and censorship, epigram and arena, epigram and triumph . . . Epigram is not a self-­standing art form. It is attached to the here and now—an impression of lived immediacy that has long attracted readers . . . —but this same hereness and nowness makes consistent address

105  And this is the time not just for a gift of poems but also for poems about gifts. The Xenia and the Apophoreta are themselves multiply “Saturnalian.” Citroni, 1989:207: “Anche Xenia e Apophoreta si propongono in un certo senso come una guida pratica per le giomate dei Saturnali.” See the extensive meditations of Grewing, 2010 on the metapoetic possibilities of the Saturnalian poetry in the two works.

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90 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature to the situatedness of the reality effect relative to the legitimate (one says) center of that same reality, namely the moral and political and, effectively, aesthetic center of life, the god-­like emperor. The seventh book closes not with a few items about the emperor and/or ones addressed to him. This time the book ends with a shift of perspective. These books that have so often talked to Caesar and been sent to him are now suddenly being sent to Crispinus as well. And Crispinus is supposed to recommend them to Domitian.106 A practical courtly reality is adduced, and the corpus of poems suddenly gets both closer to the seat of power while also retreating from its portrait of a direct connection to the same. The books no longer simply appear in the emperor’s hand. Instead, a scene of reading is conjured. And Domitian’s direct appraisal is replaced by a mediated and complex dynamic of reception: a room full of people evaluates, judges, criticizes, and makes their criticism known to the emperor. This poem stages such a scene and attempts to plead its own case within it. Most people in the poems are not real people with real names. Crispinus has made his way onto a relatively short list. His proximity to power has earned him this privilege. Despite this sudden vivid arrival of Crispinus, he will only be mentioned one more time, and then in the middle of Book 8. And in that poem too he is someone to whom things are given and around whom issues of value and calibration circulate. But the poem is not an emperor poem. So, Crispinus is something of a shooting star within the economy of the whole corpus of epigrams. He is not the same relative to Latin letters more generally: it is highly probable that this same person is a man who for Juvenal embodies the loathsomeness of courtly life in Domitianic era. One man’s disgusting Egyptian ex-­slave interloper is another man’s subject and object of fine verse about fine verse. Voices, perspectives, names and places explode as we close down Book 7 with a paroxysm of artistry. And this is an artistry that is also converting itself into “artistry”: look, here it is, art/“art.”

106  Crispinus: “Originally from Egypt, perhaps formerly a slave. In Iuvenal 4,108 he is mentioned as a participant in Domitian’s consilium on the Albanum (cf. [1. 532, n. 76]: perhaps praef. annonae; [2. 69f.]: courtier). Since Martial 7,99 is addressed to him, he was in any case an influential man at Domitian’s court (PIR2 C 1586).” [https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/der-­neue-­pauly/crispinus-­e308090#e308100]

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High and mighty; near and far: Book 7  91 Sic placidum uideas semper, Crispine, Tonantem, nec te Roma minus, quam tua Memphis amet. Carmina Parrhasia si nostra legentur in aula — namque solent sacra Caesaris aure frui — , dicere de nobis, ut lector candidus, aude: “Temporibus praestat non nihil iste tuis, nec Marso nimium minor est doctoque Catullo.” Hoc satis est: ipsi cetera mando deo.   Crispinus, may you ever behold a Thunderer so serene, may Rome not love you less than your own Memphis does. If my poems will be read in the Parrhasian court — for they are wont to enjoy the sacred ear of Caesar — dare to say of us as a frank-­spoken reader: “This man makes no small contribution to your age: he is not much behind Marsus and learned Catullus.” This is enough: the rest I entrust to the god himself. Martial, Epigrams 7.99

Martial’s poems are lucky enough to enjoy Caesar’s ear. The pleasure is all theirs? That is, the genteel conceit is that one would never presume to say that Caesar enjoys the book, instead it is the book that enjoys the privilege of being read before him. Such bold and frank sentiments as these can really get you . . . anywhere but in trouble. Given that the art dare not make too many claims for itself, a high-­status advocate is enlisted to plead its case. Bold Crispinus is asked to frankly state what any candid reader would say of Martial: “He’s great.” Of course, part of his greatness is his very smallness: he is a bit smaller than the giants of light verse. His great gift to Your Domitianic Era™ is this same slightness. Poets and poetry are ornaments to eras. They are all part of the show, and it is the emperor’s show. The courtier is enjoined to be so bold as to say that Martial knows how to pay court to the court. That message, “He’s with the program, and it is your program . . . ” is enough. We are penning “frank” confessions as to the connection between proximity and abjection, confessions that confess at the level of manifest content nothing of the sort. The ostentatious confession is that we are happy, so very happy, to have been given a hearing.

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G.  Turning things outside-­in: Book 8 Book 8 does not add many new motifs, but it does intensify old ones. We get the sense that we are drawing ever closer to Domitian, that the project as a whole is becoming more intensely “Domitianic.”107 The book will not just begin by invoking him, but it will linger and invoke many of his aspects individually. And the book will continue to return to him throughout its body.108 He is no longer the frame to the narrative, he is also suffusing the contents of that same frame all the more often. And, says the narrative voice, “That’s great.” Says the critic, “I’m not so sure.”109 It has been a while since we began a book of epigrams with a letter, but we have a prose preface for Book 8. And in it Domitian is directly addressed as the ideal recipient of this collection. The addressee is given, unsurprisingly, a long, lordly appellation: Imperatori Domitiano Caesari Augusto Germanico Dacico. The first vocative is domine, “master.” The first Caesar was killed by people who worried that they would end up calling him by this name. Now the ego is keen to position itself relative to this “you.” This master is the cause of the fama of Martial’s little books, we are told. “That great Martial” from Book 1 with his famous books that everyone knows has dispossessed himself of his own fame. Mr Small thanks Mr Big for giving him his place in the world. And “his place in the world” is “a place in the world at all.” The letter “corrects” fama by saying id est uita: fame is life; life is fame. Daddy Domitian has sired these little books: bio-­ dad Martial is happy to deliver to Domitian the birth certificate. As with all of Martial’s evocations of the motif of paternity in connection to Domitian—see “Ausonian Father,” etc. below—it is worth recalling that the poet is roughly sixteen years older than the emperor. But we are not even done with the first sentence which reads in full: “Indeed all of my little books, lord, whom you gave fame, that is, life, 107 Lorenz,  2002:180: “Buch 8 ist mit seinem panegyrischen Ansatz im Kontext aller Epigrammaton libri zwar eine Neuerung, in Martials Epigrammdichtung bleibt aber gleichzeitig vieles beim Alten.” 108  Barwick, 1958:285 on the “Kaiserzyklus des 8. Buches”: “Formal und inhaltlich bilden die 18 Kaiserepigramme einen einheitlichen Zyklus. Sie sind alle, außer dem ersten (2), das aus Hendekasyllaben besteht, distichishen gehalten; und alle verfolgen das Ziel, dem Kaiser irgendwie zu schmeicheln. Wie Martial schon in der Vorrede andeutet, sind sie über das ganze Buch verteilt, und zwar in folgender Weise: . . . . Nirgends stehen also zwei Kaisergedichte nebeneinander. Und nun die Art ihrer Verteilung.” 109  There are eighty-­two epigrams in this book. Consider the shape of the following array of places where we talk about the emperor: 8.pr, 8.1–4, 8.8, 8.11, 8.15, 8.21, 8.26, 8.30, 8.31, 8.32, 8.36, 8.39, 8.44, 8.49, 8.53, 8.56, 8.65, 8.66, 8.78, 8.80, 8.82. Domitian is everywhere. We constantly return to him.

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supplicate you (Omnes quidem libelli mei, domine, quibus tu famam, id est uitam, dedisti, tibi supplicant).” The books are suppliants. The idiom is quite appropriate of a mortal’s relationship to a god. But the supplicant designates a fundamentally “unfree” gesture when it concerns relationships between mortals, at least within the old republican discourse.110 Indeed, within Martial’s own poetic universe, supplication will have meant disgusting subjection to a king. In the rewritten Book 10, a book so not-­nice it got published twice, post-­Domitianic Martial writes a very bitter poem to “flattery” (blanditiae). We are told that he will call no man dominus and deus.111 There is no place in this city for the likes of those who do. Hie thee hither, says the poem: “Off to the Parthians who wear a freedman’s cap. Foul, groveling, and suppliant, they can go kiss the thrones of over-­ embellished kings. There is no dominus here, but instead an imperator . . . (ad Parthos procul ite pilleatos | et turpes humilesque supplicesque | pictorum sola basiate regum. | non est hic dominus, sed imperator; 10.72.5–8)”112 The supplement to the first sentence of the opening of the eighth book is the following: et, puto, propter hoc legentur. “And I believe that this is why they will be read.” The fame that Martial “will have had” is on the line here. And the cause that will have produced the reading that will yield the life and after-­life for this book and this author is . . . what, exactly? One

110  See Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum 5.40: “[A desire for political advancement] forced men who thought themselves citizens of the first rank to be slaves to Cethegus, no fine fellow he. It forced them to send him gifts, to visit his home at night, to entreat him, indeed even to supplicate him. ([Cupiditas honoris] Cethego, homini non probatissimo, seruire coëgit eos, qui sibi esse amplissimi uidebantur, munera mittere, noctu uenire domum ad eum, precari, denique supplicare).” Compare Plautus’ world in which the same verb characterizes a cringing submission to another character in the plot. See, then, the defiant Epidicus: “I’m not supplicating you! Feel like tying me up? Look: here are my hands (nec tibi supplico. uincire uis? em, ostendo manus. Plautus, Epidicus 683).” And a disagreeable status inversion is flagged in Mercator 171 with bitter sarcasm: “Since it looks like I am forced to supplicate my own slave (quandoquidem mihi supplicandum seruolo uideo meo).” 111  On the other hand, all of us are constantly calling one another dominus. It’s no big deal, really: “Characteristic of Martial’s opportunistic attitude to honorifics is his play with the term dominus. During Martial’s time it had become common to greet people as dominus/ domina, a word that continued to have powerful associations with slavery in some contexts, while being more or less equivalent to “sir” in others. It was also common to address or refer to patrons as dominus and rex. But, side by side with this honorific use, which inevitably carried with it slavish associations, were more neutral uses, starting with the habit of addressing a father as dominus . . . Successful manipulation of this world lies in knowing when to take advantage of a meaning and when to let it go unnoticed.” (Fitzgerald, 2007:12–13) 112  Griffin, 2000:81: “The most striking departure from the senatorial ideal of a princeps who was one of them was Domitian’s encouragement of the flattering mode of address ‘dominus et deus.’ Martial, addressing Trajan in the new style of flattery, banishes flattering compliments to the Parthian court . . .”

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94 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature might gloss this by saying, “You gave them life and therefore they will have eternal life.” And that seems fine. But another explanation is also here, “Because they are groveling books, they will get read.” These books have gotten with the Domitianic program, and, accordingly, as officially approved literature, they will get a hearing more broadly, both within the court and beyond it. The letter continues by noting that the book will be full of pietas. As is a good son to his father, so will be this book towards its father. It will be really easy to be such a swell book, you see: no genius required, abundant material is all around (minus itaque ingenio laborandum fuit, in cuius locum materia successerat, 8.pr). Martial will throw in a few pleasant jokes because Caesar’s modesty would feel overburdened by uninterrupted praise, not of course, that one could ever tire of saying nice things about the emperor: “Which indeed I will regularly temper with a mixture of witticisms lest all the poems obtrude their praises upon your heavenly modesty. But these praises would sooner tire you than they would sate us (quam quidem subinde aliqua iocorum mixtura uariare temptauimus, ne caelesti uerecundiae tuae laudes suas, quae facilius te fatigare possint, quam nos satiare, omnis uersus ingereret, 8.pr).”113 The jokes are pleasant distractions from the business at hand. The real point, he pointedly says, is praise. Epigram is panegyric, says the letter.114 Last time we checked in on it, epigram had been “triumphal.” Its saucy wit, when seen in context, could be appreciated for what it was, a celebration of Your Age. But now the focus is “you” and not “your age.” And so the genre itself is dissolving. The jokes are literally throw-­ away jokes but for the fact that they allow Domitian’s modesty a bit of breathing room. When we note that his blushes have subsided sufficiently, then we can return to our insatiable desire to praise. Book 1 excused the “impudence” of dirty verse: don’t mistake pudor-problems in the contents of a poem for anything similar in the life of a poet. Book 8 has deformed all of the terms and re-­focussed them tightly onto a new point. “Life” is not the poet’s life. It is instead the social life that the book itself lives. And the poet really is “shameless” in that he would impudently praise forever were there not a species of shame that

113  See Lorenz, 2002:170–171 on the amusing scholarly pseudo-­controversy in regard to iocorum mixtura: “But only a quarter of the poems are in fact panegyrical . . .” 114 Lorenz,  2002:52: “Doch sind die Kaisergedichte Martials und die lateinische Prosapanegyrik in der Auswahl und der Verwendung ihrer Topoi einander so ähnlich, dass vor einer panegyrischen Tradition ausgegangen werden kann, die für Martial und die Panegyrici gleichermaßen richtungsweisend war.”

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checked him, namely the censor’s blush.115 The jokes emerge at this point where the poet “self-­censors” his shameless adoration for the censor. This is nuts. The space that had been carved out for literature is collapsing. The playful circles that one could inscribe inside the lion’s mouth are short-­circuiting.116 The lion’s jaws are snapping shut. Meanwhile, we are “lying through our teeth” about how very happy we are. But watching Orpheus get eaten is, said this very same bard, all part of the show. After all, Orpheus was always just “Orpheus,” that is, Caesar’s Orpheus. The meta-­joke is that that author of that poem did not yet know that the joke was going to be on Books 1–10, and then on Book 10 all over again. One might laugh were we not preoccupied with telling “truth” to power: “Power, we are truly happy, our gaudia are gaudia uera (7.5.2). It is great to be free to really live real life: uerae uacare uitae (5.20.4).” The letter continues by further qualifying and shaping the way one is asked to read the book. Sure, many leading citizens have written many racy epigrams, but . . . “Even if plenty of epigrams have been written by men of the upmost propriety and high social station that nevertheless appeared to aim at the most vulgar verbal license, nevertheless I have not allowed mine to speak quite so lustily as is their wont (quamuis autem epigrammata a seuerissimis quoque et summae fortunae uiris ita scripta sint, ut mimicam uerborum licentiam adfectasse uideantur, ego tamen illis non permisi tam lasciue loqui quam solent, 8.pr).” But, of course, Martial promised that he was “small” so the “high social station” clause is already off the table. “Nevertheless I . . . (ego tamen)”: though the genre might dictate, I will instead take my marching orders from the censor. The wonted freedom of speech (libertas loquendi) of Roman verse is not for me. Or, rather, political freedom has been cut off in advance, for we do not actually read anything here about libertas loqendi. Tam lasciue loqui names the rhetorical road not taken: “not so lustily.” Again, the potentially political has been converted into the merely sexual. The shameful political question— namely, will we really dare to name the political situation itself?—is

115  Verecund- appears only three times in the Epigrams and all three passages come from this book: 8.pr.7, 8.1.2, and 8.70.4. The third use of uerecund- is in a poem about Nerva. Fortune favors the timid? 116  Žižek, 2007:ix–x: “A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network — faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-­circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? . . . [T]he aim of such an approach is . . . the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed presuppositions and consequences.”

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96 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature modestly cloaked as a pudor problem. An as-­if sexual blush obscures a political scandal. Once again we find ourselves only part of the way into a sentence. We have a “cause” but not the “effect”: “Since the book so full of majesty . . . ” Well, because of this it will remember that one ought not to approach a sacred temple unless one has been ritually purified (religiosa purificatione lustratos).117 Depending on how literally one wants to take the word lustrare, this is the old run-­around all over again: after we have gone in ritual circles, then we make our way up to the home of the gods. Rings, circuits, play, games, shows, sands, rituals: all of this is the before-­which that is preliminary to a towards-­which. It is all also a for-­whom that turns into a towards-­whom. Anxiously, we ascend towards majesty. Desire-­and-­dread washes over the scene where one conjures the turn to the source of power-­and-­poetry. Readers are told to know that Martial has ritually cleansed himself. The book has a threshold, and upon it an epigram is set, one that says just what this letter says. The outside, the inside, and the border are all inscribed with the same message: “Domitian, this is Domitianic literature.” What had been “epigram zero” of Book 1 is Epigram 1 of Book 8: the promise about the contents was appended to the letter. Now the promise about the contents is set inside the contents: “Book soon to enter the laurel-­bedecked home of the master | learn to speak more piously with reverent mouth. | Withdraw naked Venus: this book is not yours. | Come you to me, you Caesar’s Athena (Laurigeros domini, liber, intrature penates | disce uerecundo sanctius ore loqui.| nuda recede Venus; non est tuus iste libellus: | tu mihi, tu Pallas Caesariana, ueni; 8.1) The formatting of the transition between letter and verses may well be an artifact of editorial convention as well as the history of the transmission of the text. Whether or not any first editions were so set off is very much beside the point given that the point is the indeterminacy in practice of where these letters end and where the “proper” book of (proper) epigrams begins. No typographical tricks then or now can overcome this problem of the inside-­out and the outside-­in and the threshold that fails to keep anything either fully in or fully out.

117  In full: “Since the better and more substantial portion of the book is bound to the majesty of your sacred name, it remembers that people ought not approach a temple unless they have first been ritually cleansed (Cum pars libri et maior et melior ad maiestatem sacri nominis tui alligata sit, meminerit non nisi religiosa purificatione lustratos accedere ad templa debere. Martial, Epigrams 8.pr.).”

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If once we said, “Caesar, here is the book” now we say, “Book, here is Caesar.” Formerly Caesar needed to know how to adapt his critical eye in order to accommodate the verse. Now the verse has to alter itself so as to adapt to Caesar. This overstates the situation, but, still, there has been a movement from a position closer to one of these poles and towards the other. Again, the power question is turned into a mere “dirty poem” question: Venus is told to retreat. Athena to come along. To the extent that there is ambiguity woven into the verses, the real difficulty is in deciding just how groveling the second line is supposed to be. Sanctius loqui can indicate either “do not be such a potty-­mouth” or it can be “speak even more reverently about Domitian.” We are free to decide that both meanings are simultaneously present: the two activities are explicitly correlated with one another elsewhere. Meanwhile the “fear” folded into uerecundus as per its derivation from uereor is a mixture of sexual propriety and social submission that acknowledges a quasi-­religious aspect to this same affect. The goddesses addressed in the last couplet are not “real goddesses.” They are instead metonyms: Venus is sex. Pallas is a mix of chastity and literature, depending on how one wants to unpack the allegory. Though such use of these figures is hardly novel or unique to this passage, it nevertheless is part of a broader issue: a practical reverence for the traditional Greco-­ Roman pantheon is more or less lacking in the Epigrams of Martial.118 And, specifically, the retreat of the idea of “our traditional faith” corresponds quite nicely to a promotion of Caesar into the position of king of the gods. The emptiness of Mt Olympus but for a collection of available metonymns leaves the Palatine as the only elevated position that can in practice be filled with anything substantial. Domitian, that is, is the manifestation of both god and the death of god. In fact, his rhetorically constructed godhead is, after its fashion, more real than any Olympian majesty in that, if the latter are mere stories, the former is a force that can be felt everywhere in one’s life. At more than a quarter of the whole, the number of Domitian poems in the book is quite high, and, unlike in previous books, the emperor is not a figure who appears at the opening and the closing with a few mentions in the middle. Instead, there is a constant supply of imperial reminders. And the non-­imperial poems, even if they might be numerically in the majority, really can come to feel more like interludes, as the prefatory letter would have it. But, it will be noted, even the interludes are nevertheless 118  We will spend a fair amount of time exploring this same issue relative to Statius as well.

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98 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature connected to “the show proper.” And the third poem of the eighth book effectively makes the case that Martial as the poet of trifles is the poet of life is the poet of Rome is, of course, the poet of Domitian’s Rome.119 The poem is a sort of manifesto. The poet was, says the poet, about to stop writing. He conjures his own voice: “Surely five books were enough. Six or seven books are too many. What is the point of more games (ludere), Muse? (Quinque satis fuerant: nam sex septemue libelli | est nimium: quid adhuc ludere, Musa, iuuat? 8.3.1–2)” If one were to count De Spectaculis as Book 1, then he might have just said that quitting before he wrote the first “Domitian book” was a good idea. And the last two books were “too much.” But a less forced mathematics nevertheless yields a conclusion that Martial could have ended the Epigrams after that first major yoking of the project to Domitian. But he did not. And maybe he has gone too far. But he is about to go further, because the devil is about to make him do it. The devil in this case being The Muse. When the narrator threatens to leave off versifying given that he may have written more than enough he is thereupon upbraided: the very world of epigram needs Martial. Others will write their tragedies and so forth. But who is going to write charming little verse collections (lepidi libelli) if not Martial? His job is to transcribe Roman customs and Roman life. And then readers read what he wrote and recognize themselves in what he wrote (at tu Romano lepidos sale tinge libellos: agnoscat mores uita legatque suos; 8.3.19–20).120 Pliny insists that the man who praises Caesar is holding up a mirror to the prince, and this mirror will yield an image that can guide that same prince by constraining him to accommodate his practice and so his self-­image to the ideal image presented him.121 But the epigrammatist is the man who holds the mirror up for all of Caesar’s subjects, and it is in this mirror that they can see themselves and thereupon 119  Contrast, then, Horace, Epistles 2.2.141–144 where the narrator calls for an end to poetic play and its trifles as this allows an approach to be made to “real life”: “A serviceable idea indeed: show some sense, set down trifles, leave play suited to boys to them, stop chasing after words suited to the Latin lyre, and instead learn full well the numbers and measures of real life (nimirum sapere est abiectis utile nugis | et tempestiuum pueris concedere ludum | ac non uerba sequi fidibus modulanda Latinis, | sed uerae numerosque modosque ediscere uitae).” Habinek sees here an additional call for autonomy (within Augustan Rome) and liberty (from a quasi-­servile set of associations that cluster around “play”). See Habinek, 2005:145–149. 120  Note that readers are enjoined to see themselves in here. They do not inevitably do so: agnoscat versus agnoscet. 121  See Pliny, Epistulae 3.18.3: “To praise the best prince and thereby transmit to posterity something like a clearly-­illuminated mirror image that they might follow (laudare uero optimum principem ac per hoc posteris uelut e specula lumen quod sequantur ostendere).”

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­ odulate their conduct accordingly. However, the image in the epigramm matic mirror is split: in it we see both a divine Caesar and a collection of cunt-­lickers, nasty buggers, legacy hunters, and bad patrons. The world of the palace is full of gods; the world of men is full of creatures that barely deserve to be called men. The eternal censor needs a Martial who will write and write and write some more, year after year, book after book. Martial is part of “the system” more generally by which representation and social reality mediate one another. His role in this same system is to (re)produce Roman life in its lowly “triflingness” to the extent that that life is divorced from Palatine splendor. There is no free play of images any more than there is a free play of ideas in the senate. One is free to love Caesar. But, then again, how can one not love him? And so one is unfree when it comes to this very same love . . . The poet cannot stop writing. The reasons are multiple and convergent. On the one hand, the poet knows that he is already immortal and that his sway will extend over the globe. But, on the other hand, there is more work to do, more life to represent. This life needs to have its very smallness captured. And, though the poet’s books seem small, and are themselves always referred to in the diminutive, and though the poet’s trifles seem to be inconsequential, this very same poetry “conquers” the clarion calls of the high genres (angusta cantare licet uidearis auena,| dum tua multorum uincat auena tubas; 8.3.21–22). Martial’s epic of miniatures bests epic’s epic.122 And it bests epic by knowing that being a little bunny is now synonymous with literary greatness, at least in the wake of the advent of the massive bulk of Caesar. Literary greatness is very much a dim, derivative greatness. It is the greatness of the mere wordsmith who merely smiths the substance-­less matter that is the word. This word’s chief job is to remain humble in the face of the one thing that most matters, Caesar. One can hypothesize that, for this Muse at least, “epic proper” fails in its task of aggrandizement for a variety of reasons. It is too likely to conjure a 122  A related joke-­image of Martial’s own: he is the first among zeroes (Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus . . . Epigrams 9. pr.11). Compare the poems as “eternal trifles” (Per quem perire non licet meis nugis, 1.113.6, a notion that is itself a reiteration of a Catullan program (Roman,  2001:121). Rimell,  2008:108: “In listing these examples, however, we’ve already begun to see that nihil can often amount to more than nothing in the epigrams. This diminutive, low-­value genre has big ambitions to revalorise the small, even the non-­existent, and to reframe ‘tedious’ enumerations as concentrated, value-for-­money language play.” See Boyle, 1995:85 on “Martial’s Epic-­grammatic Revolution”: the trifles are no mere trifles and “Martial takes over these [lowly] value-­terms and subverts them, setting up criteria (social, human, and commercial) for the inversion of the traditional hierarchy of literary forms.”

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100 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature heroic elsewhere. If it is to be connected to the truly great, that is, to the now, one would have to do so via mere allegory. In failing to directly and regularly address this emperor, epic would always be saying other than the most important thing. “Augustus is like Aeneas” is too oblique, too vague, too ambiguous as a politico-­poetical thesis. But Domitian has outstripped the past and even myth, and when we look at him we ought only to say how faded that past really is relative to our present. Furthermore, the grand language about grand things tends to aggrandize the mouth that utters such words. Again, this is a failure: the speaker is not the one who should seem bigger, the modesty, the uerecundia that his mouth expresses comes in its formal restraint. A poet ought to have only the (in)capacity to articulate Caesar’s bigness. Accordingly, a sort of ostentatious stupidity hovers over these sorts of epigrammatic words. Language displays itself vainly attempting to capture the thing that eludes it. Tiny epigram builds absurd, puffed-­up conceits time and again. But amidst these failures, what also comes crumbling down is any sense of the sublime more generally—both the literary sublime of epic or tragedy and so too the sublimity of the religious domain— when these are contrasted with Caesar. Consider what we see in the very next poem: people are praying for Domitian. No, the gods are too: sed faciunt ipsi nunc, puto, sacra dei (8.4.4). The gods are offering what to whom? Something to themselves that they might do something? The conceit explodes the logic of sacrifice as a whole. In this little “I suppose,” in this puto, we see the epigrammatic voice pop its furry little head out: “I suppose that everything can be treated as a trifle, Caesar, everything but you, of course.”

H.  A poet’s will to power: Epigrams 9.pr And so we turn to Book 9, the last Domitian Book. Domitian is at his biggest.123 And our joy knows no bounds.124 But our horror has also reached new heights. We have crossed the threshold of the temple. We have entered the lion’s mouth. And it is all so wonderful. Instead of just reading for

123 Lorenz,  2002:203–204: “Der liber enthält eine bislang unerreichte Vielfalt an Huldigungsmotiven.” 124 Sullivan,  1991:44: “The tone of the epigrams addressed to the court and his more established friends and patrons indicates that [Martial’s] relations with them were all he could have wished. In retrospect, this must have seemed like the calm before the storm.”

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Caesar in this book, we will look into the various structures of the book somewhat more patiently than we have in the discussion of earlier books.125 This editorial decision will eventuate in a portrait of a book that is much more obviously split in its perspective. But, for all of that, Martial’s relationship to his material has not changed at a fundamental level. Instead, the intensification of certain topics causes affiliated themes to themselves shift. And lines of affiliation that might have been more obscure in earlier books become more obviously present in this one. Old issues like poetry, power, size, and the gods return. But this time we can affirm with much more conviction that the sexual component of the poetry is not some simple alternative to the political content but instead a vital component of the full articulation of the poetic thesis about Domitianic Rome.126 As with Book 1, this book also opens with a letter. The letter also contains an “Epigram 0”. Then the “book proper” begins. And, of course, one might read the structure of the opening of Book 8 as being a strong parallel. As before we seem to be in the presence of “that famous Martial”. The narrator is confident and proud. In the first book the confidence might have been a bit of a posture, but after so many books and so many years, it seems safe enough to say that Martial really must have some sort of stature and that his glory is presently more substantial than it had been. The bold self-­assertion in Book 1 contained a somewhat anxious reference to a censorious reader. Domitian the “forever-­censor,” the censor perpetuus who will never stop taking a good hard look at us, is not conjured as a reader of this opening poem of the ninth book, but the bold self-­assertion this time has to be set against the very strongly felt presence of Caesar in the poems that will follow. In short, the figure of “Martial” again emerges only as part of a dialectical encounter with the portrait of the emperor. 125  Following in the footsteps of Barwick, 1958, Garthwaite, 1993 offers a lengthy appraisal of the Domitian series in Book 9. Garthwaite, 1993:82: “Thus we can see that, despite their variety of theme and tone, and their seemingly random distribution throughout the book, the epigrams of this cycle are not simply an unplanned or unconnected assortment; rather, they follow a consistent scheme with a detailed, programmatic introduction (9.1 and 9.3), a systematic development, and concluding synopsis (9.101).” Of course, Domitian is not the only topic of the book. See, for example, Garthwaite,  1998a on the series of poems about eulogies and literary patronage in this book and Fowler, 1995 on a gift-­giving series. 126  Henriksén,  2012:xvi: “The themes and motifs found in Book 9 are representative of Martial’s works as a whole. What are not representative are the proportions of these motifs in relation to one another: no less than twenty-­six epigrams are devoted to the emperor Domitian.” Henriksén,  2012:xvii: “Book 9 contains relatively more Domitianic poetry than any of its predecessors.” See his graph on the next page: Books 8 and 9 have more than double the rate of Domitianic verses relative to their nearest competitors in the preceding books.

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102 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Martial is a poet of “the monumental.” He is a poet who writes up the story of the inaugural games at the Colosseum, a poet who celebrates the celebrations of Domitian’s Dacian victories. But, as is made strongly evident here, he is also self-­memorializing and keen to assert the “monumental” status of his own poetic trifles. LIBER IX Haue, mi Torani, frater carissime. Epigramma, quod extra ordinem paginarum est, ad Stertinium clarissimum uirum scripsimus, qui imaginem meam ponere in bibliotheca sua uoluit. De quo scribendum tibi putaui, ne ignorares, Auitus iste quis uocaretur. Vale et para hospitium. Note, licet nolis, sublimi pectore uates, cui referet serus praemia digna cinis, hoc tibi sub nostra breue carmen imagine uiuat, quam non obscuris iungis, Auite, uiris: ‘Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus, quem non miraris, sed puto, lector, amas. Maiores maiora sonent: mihi parua locuto sufficit in uestras saepe redire manus.’  

BOOK 9 Torianus, brother most dear, my greetings. There is an epigram that falls outside the normal arrangement of the book. I wrote it to Stertinius, an illustrious man. He wanted to put my likeness in his library. I thought I should write to you about this so you would not be in the dark about who this Avitus fellow is. Farewell. Prepare things for my arrival. Famed, even do you wish it not, bard of the sublime breast, May a late-­coming death pay you your due honors. Let this short poem live beneath my bust, one you associate, Avitus, with men of no small fame: “I am that man second to none in his fame for trifles. Reader, you may not marvel at me, but I suspect you adore me. Grander songs from grander men: I who have said little things am satisfied to return often to your hands.” Martial, Epigrams 9.pr

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This letter that is written as the opening of this book pretends to be something like a real, detachable letter. “Here is an ectopic epigram, my brother . . . ”: extra ordinem paginarum. The epigram here is not just an Epigram 0 placed at the head of a set of epigrams, but it also floats away from the book, leading a second and even third life. The threshold marked out by our textual limes is very difficult to determine, and that, yet again, is one of the points.127 This epigram enclosed in this letter is supposed to be one that was sent to Lucius Stertinius Avitus, the suffect consul three years ago in 92 CE, and, axiomatically, he is someone who is very much on the emperor’s good side. But here we address him only as a poet, as a poet destined for literary immortality. Torianus, one might as well note, is not literally Martial’s brother. He is just a friend, and not even an especially prominent one given that he appears only here and in 5.78, a pleasant but by no means especially memorable dinner-­party poem. We are asked to understand a little social drama of sorts. Stertinius has built a library. In this library he hoped to set up a likeness of Martial. It may be a painting, it may be a bust: imago is ambiguous. Statues and paintings often have epigrams set upon their bases. The “enclosed” epigram is the epigram of Martial that was offered as something to adorn an imago of Martial the epigrammatist. This letter glosses the “extraordinary” epigram by explaining who Avitus is for Martial’s reader-­at-­a-­distance, a reader whom he is nevertheless rapidly approaching—“Prepare things for my arrival . . . (para hospitium).” Enclosed with the text that looks like a letter but is in fact something inscribed at the head of a book-­roll is an out-­of-­place epigram which is itself constructed as a quasi-­epistle with an epigrammatic enclosure. The first half of this embedded poem is a “Letter to Avitus” about the bust and its inscription, the second half is the inscription itself that is to be affixed to the bust. There is, then a mise en abîme game afoot. But the endless spiral of representations of representation is not a single looping motion. The 127  A much more concrete and practical attempt at a portrait of the situation is offered by Henriksén,  2012:5–6 who attempts to reconstruct the normative lay-­out of a book of verses. There is a preface. Then there is a first page. The ordo paginarum indicates running columns. And, therefore, in this case, the poem written “extra ordinem paginarum might have been written at the beginning of the roll in such a way that, when the preface or prologue was inscribed, the rest of the column was left blank. The proper text of the book was then begun in a new column, and the columns then ran uninterrupted throughout the roll.”

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104 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature infinite regress of literary objects is also an infinite collection of collections of genre-­objects: the as-­if letter, the epigrammatic letter, the epigram at the head of a book of epigrams, the epigram as letter attached to another epigram, the epigram attached to a bust, . . . Meanwhile we see a chain of persons: the reader of this book, the friend-­as-­brother who reads this letter, Avitus who reads the epigram (but not the book), the visitor to the library that reads the epigram at the base of the imago, the visitor to a library who reads this epigram in a book, . . . The concatenation of persons connects the generic reader to the special reader. And this “specialness” is doubly determined as social intimacy and political potency. Frame and fame are put into an alignment. If you are out of the frame, whether socially or hermeneutically, something very important escapes you: specifically, calibrated meaning-­and-­being. The letter-­epigram is sent by a living author who has been reduced to/ honored by a (dead) image/imago. The letter-­epigram is addressed to a will-­one-­day-­be dead author who is, nevertheless, not yet dead and who will, one hopes, live on forever precisely because of “art.” Martial’s art as well as Avitus’ art is “well-­positioned” art: to an important man, placed in an important library, next to other luminaries. In fact, all parties are represented as obsessed in multiple simultaneous dimensions and narrative levels with positioning, with self-­ positioning and relative-­ positioning, with questions that need answers: where do I stand now, where will I stand tomorrow, what afterlife will my likeness lead . . . ? But there is one important twist within this schema. Stertinius’ exact social position has been left strategically unclear. Clarissimum uirum can mean more than one thing. It literally means only “very prominent individual.” In practice it will tend to designate senators. But Stertinius is not just another senator. And, in any case, the whole passage is pointedly aesthetic instead of political. And that, of itself, is a quietly political move to make. The frame epigram exposes the dissimulations of the inset epigram, an epigram that is full of images we have seen before about the epigrams and the hierarchy of genres. “Me and my trifles” has just been hyper-­positioned by its frame: now when you hear epigrams about trifling epigrams, you ought to think not of trifles but of busts, libraries, social networks, and concatenated self-­aware semiotic structures. Meanwhile, while underscoring the falsity of the little-­ol’-­me claims made by the poem-­destined-­for-­ the-­imago, this same frame is itself manifestly not saying exactly what it means. The Martial presented by the Epigrams has typically been a man who loves being famous. World-­famous Martial was someone we met on the

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first page of our first book of epigrams. Here the narrative voice is pretending that a fame for trifles is perhaps a trifling thing: you do not, it says, really marvel at me (as you really should marvel at, say, Domitian). And so this voice is deploying some sort of analog of that uerecundo ore from 8.1.2 where a “modest mouth” also disavowed the author’s desire for fame. Instead, says the narrator, you “love” him. This is a poetry of affective intimacy and tight social connections. It is a poetry of private life and ­personal feelings.128 The marvels are reserved for somewhere else and someone else. The bright and cozy light of claritudo illuminates a library full of friends while the marvelous claritas of imperial power is kept clear of the scene. Stertinius, a public-­and-­private figure, stands at the border of the two spaces and perhaps is the source of illumination for this warm library, but he is also positioned so as to block any lines of sight that lead out from it. Meanwhile, the likeness of Martial, his imago is a mediator between verses unseen and the verses that are written underneath it. By means of verse itself Martial can and will offer “life” to the likeness: uiuat. The dead likeness of Martial gains vitality from living verse. The words are not dependent upon the life-­like images. “Martial himself ” lives in the epigram, not in the image-­of-­Martial. The preceding claim immediately complicates our running narratological sense that for the reader “Martial” is just a sort of word-­image, a narrator-­figure produced by an author. Whatever life I do have, says Martial/“Martial” is lived in/as verses. All images-­of-­me are as nothing relative to the “living voice” of inscribed epigrammatic verse. There is an ironic invocation of the strong connection between epigrams and tombstones here. Whatever is inside the tomb or whatever image of the departed is set upon it should not distract us from the fact that the “trivial nothingness” of verse is nevertheless something alive: nugae uiuunt, as it were. Nugae uiuent. “I am that man . . . ”, says the text at the base of the image: ille ego sum . . . “I am my (dead) image,” is the lie that the verse tells us. But another verse frames this line of poetry and tells us that where there is verse, there is life. Believe not your eye; listen to your ears. The image needs a verbal supplement. Do not think you know what it was you saw in Caesar’s Rome until you have heard Martial sing about the same. And so there is a way to sneak back up out of the library after all. And the actual contents of Book 9 will show us once again just how this is done. 128  Adorno, 1981a:30: “The illusory importance and autonomy of private life conceals the fact that private life drags on only as an appendage of the social process.”

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106 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Representation, immortality, scale, dissimulation, short circuits: we have seen it all before, and we will see it again. But this set of issues is more usually associated with Caesar in the Epigrams, not the poet himself. But, as has also been the case before, we cannot actually divide in any neat sense the poet from the prince. How Martial works with and around the question of word-­power inevitably yields effects that are felt at both the level of political power and poetic composition. Caesar’s big-­marvels and the narrator’s miniatures at which you do not marvel are coordinated. Famous Martial momentarily got smaller in this preface. He also at first glance looks like he might be turning into the image of an image of an image of a man. But that is only the first glance. Martial has also been getting bigger and he is getting closer and closer to us. And this letter stages the impacted physical/textual/social spaces of his approach to us, their logic, their reading-­and-­writing games, and their desire for immortality. But what has been hidden is the way that Ceasar is “behind” all of this “behind the scenes” material. Avitus is Stertinius. Stertinius is consul. Domitian made him consul . . . The inset poem is coy relative to “greatness.” It is proud and dismissive, ambitious and humble. We see an ostentatious dismissal of “epic” as something admired but not lived. Yet there is in fact no strong antithesis between the great things and the little things. Indeed, Martial’s epigrams have been little takes on big themes with some regularity. They are bite-­ sized takes whose littleness makes everything “graspable”: little poems for little readers; little poems that teach small men how to live amidst greatness. A score of snapshots of the Colosseum taken from slightly different angles provides the best way to really capture what is essential about it. The reader loves to get his hands on Martial/“Martial” because these small things “suffice,” whether the trifles are Caesar’s bunnies or denunciations of people who fuck like rabbits. The complex medley of short-­takes gives us an imago uitae that is, as the poems have claimed before, an imago uitae nostrae. And yet, even if the images may well be small and humble, and “not really alive,” a pulsing, red-­blooded will to greatness is nevertheless readily detected. At other junctures in the epigrams one might claim that “deep down” Martial wants fame and loves being world-­famous. But here all we have to do is shift up a narrative level and we can see the same. “Avitus” who is “really”, says the letter, Stertinius is famous “like it or no” (but he does like it . . . ). But he is aesthetically famous, you see, this uir clarissimus and former consul. He is famous for his soaring genius and  lofty inspiration (sublimi pectore uate). And it is important that

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friend-­and-­brother know how to “decode” an epigram inside an epigram inside a letter inside a book inside a . . . in order to see within them life, glory, sublimity, genius, and well deserved deserts. Brother to brother, poet to poet, Domitianic subject to Domitianic subject, we all need to be in this library together. We lead a sufficient (sufficit) private life if we just keep reading our books (about books) and staring at our imagines (of imagines). And in so doing we are going to get our due when that final, revelatory day comes (quibus referet serus praemia digna cinis). Our trifling little images-­of-­life and faux-­humble epigrams are the means by which we accumulate whatever it is we will be due when the tardy flame finally catches up with us. And what will we be due? Well, immortality, of course. What else might our activities have merited? But that last is a question one will need to ask of Books 10–12.

I.  Agony, ecstasy, and emperor: Epigrams 9.1–4 And so, this so very Domitianic Book 9 has begun/is ready to begin. We pivot—without, that is, actually pivoting—from the humblebrag of poetic narcissism to imperial megalomania. After speaking of poetic immortality within a public man’s private library in Epigrams 9.0, Martial presents a Domitian who swallows up the cosmic order in the next poem. And it is wonderful. Epigrams 9.1 is structured around an anaphora of dum . . . dum . . . dum . . . : “So long as . . . ” As long as there is a January and a Germanicus . . . Contingency has been mingled with eternity: we are celebrating the recent renaming of September and October to Germanicus and Domitianus. So too are new-­but-­eternal divinities celebrated: as long as freshly deified Julia is worshiped  .  .  .  The rhetorical climax arrives and announces that Rome’s eternity is bound up with the glory of the Flavian house: “The lofty glory of the Flavian Family will abide | along with sun, stars, and the Roman Light (manebit altum Flauiae decus gentis | cum sole et astris cumque luce Romana; 9.1.8–9).” Then there is a one-­line “epigrammatic” summary that closes the poem: “Whatever the unconquered hand has established, this belongs to heaven (inuicta quidquid condidit manus, caeli est).” The poem effectively celebrates—while it also, presumably, at some level laments—the ability of power to rewrite our relationship to time and space. On the one hand we have the question of the “old” quality of our relationship to the “traditional calendar” and “traditional religion.” But, on the other, these same traditions show us that it is possible for insertions to

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108 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature be made into the traditional. And the openness of those traditions to such interventions is being celebrated here. Augustus named a month after himself, why should Domitian not rename two months? A new Rome has been founded if we pick up on the Livian echo in the last line: Roma condita est. The power that lays down and sets aside (condere) does not, though, just “archive” a few names in a few dusty libraries. It rewrites the calendar. It builds temples. It sacks, plunders, and then re-­founds the heavens themselves. The last line is incredibly impious even as/precisely because it celebrates the ability of might to make right. Hoc caeli est: “This is the domain of the heavens.” And this domain has been put in order by a conquering hand. Welcome to the new heavenly order. Again, it is easy enough to imagine a bitter, forced quality to a verse like this: this hyperbole is patently insincere, etc. But positing a “resistant” Martial makes everything too easy. First, the preceding poem was about a man’s contingent arrival onto the world-­historical stage that nevertheless can and should yield eternal results. That man was Martial. Given that this Domitian poem shares a certain core logic with that Martial poem, one should not immediately decide that the second poem is obviously hollow and false. In fact, the ironic, joking qualities of 9.0 connive with the hyperbole of 9.1: word-­play and power-­play delight in “rewrites” that reconfigure the established order of things and make room for the will-­to-­power of the recent arrival. Martial is the doubly self-­made sublimi pectore uates in 9.0: he is both really a bard and he is writing himself up as a bard with a “heavenly breast” even as he is deflecting and saying that, no, it is his (consular) friend who is the heavenly bard.129 And this same self-­sublimating bard of 9.0 celebrates in 9.1 the newly sublime Julia as well at the more general sense that “everything Flavian is heavenly”: haec caeli sunt. Even if Domitian’s poetry—that is, his collection of poetic makings of a new Rome—is itself ultimately “trivial” and nugatory, to what extent is there a radical critique of the same on Martial’s part? Martial’s Cato is nothing but a metonym: he is not a man with a history and a political program. Martial’s old republic is more or less undetectable as anything other

129  Horace had said, “Wouldn’t it be heavenly, Mr Big Shot, if I were thought of as a sublime genius by the likes of you?” We have pushed past that sort of polite self-­deprecating-­ while-­self-­serving schema. Poet and second-­to-­the-­prince is displaced by poet-­as-­prince. The Horace in question: Carmina 1.1: “Maecenas born of regal ancestors, my sweet succor and glory . . . If you will set me in the number of the lyric bards, I will knock my lofty noggin on heaven’s vault and so see stars. (Maecenas atauis edite regibus, | o et praesidium et dulce decus meum: . . . quodsi me lyricis uatibus inseres, | sublimi feriam sidera uertice (1.1.1–2 and 1.1.35–36).)”

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than a vague idea about a remote past.130 Instead Martial’s poetry is all situated in “the current imperial period,” a period that has swapped out one royal house and installed another house. Do the poems evince Julio-­ Claudian nostalgia? What is the alternative program that the Epigrams espouse? It is far easier to say that there is no comprehensive alternative political philosophy on offer in Martial. In which case there is a de facto political philosophy that entails a rather facile oscillation between the poles of complicity-­and-­resistance. And such an oscillation does not radically challenge power if it has little to say beyond the fact that one is not always as happy as one pretends to be. At the moment, though, one is pretending to be very happy indeed. And the structure of this celebration matches up well with the self-­ celebration that the poet offers to his own imago. And yet, so far as celebrations go, much like the triumph proper, it is quite possible to feel a shudder of horror amidst all of the joy.131 The poems of Book 9 evince an unusual pattern that regularly juxtaposes contrasting ideas that end up in dialog with one another because of this very juxtaposition.132 Specifically there is a relatively quick oscillation between ecstatic imperial poems and poems about humiliation. The ecstasy can cover both power in general as well as “the sublime” more generally. That is, Caesar and “the beautiful” are a pair that we can aggregate under the first branch. Meanwhile “humiliation” is very strongly associated with sexual humiliation and, more specifically still, castration. The collection of poems, then, keeps on cycling around Caesar, beauty, and castration. But, significantly, there is an instability in the play of motifs, and “the sublime beauty of being castrated by Caesar” in fact constitutes one of the moments of purported joy. The self-­aggrandizing celebration of harmless

130  A vague concept can nevertheless be a significant one. The Epigrams as a whole do start with a meditation on their relationship to Republican Latin, after all. See Fitzgerald, 2007:72–73. Nevertheless, note that a Republican topography of the city itself is basically wanting: “Less central to the urban narrative poems of Martial were the traditional political public spaces of Rome . . . The Republican forum received little attention except as a way station on a trip to someplace else . . .” (Dyson and Prior, 1995:253). 131  Compare Newlands, 2002:71 on Siluae 1.1: “Gazing at the colossal statue [of Domitian], [Curtius] reacts with both fear and pleasure, trepidans, laetus (73).” 132  Fitzgerald, 2007:5: “The most useful term we can enlist for the formal principle of a sequence of short but highly closed poems is juxtaposition, a term that suggests both closeness and separation.” See also his remarks on the “urban” quality of “vicinity.” Here we are thinking of a “Caesarean” Rome. Sullivan,  1991:219: “This unifying principle [sc. of epigrammatic cycles] is supplemented by two other principles of arrangement: variatio and juxtaposition . . . Such relatively simple structural devices make the books something more than ad hoc or ad hominem miscellanies.”

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110 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature “mereness” morphs into something frightening and self-­nullifying.133 The bunny will be replaced by a self-­castrating beaver that grins and sings, “The show must go on, folks, forever and ever!” A very rough table of contents for the first ten-­plus-­one poems might run as follows:134 9.0: Martial’s eternity; 9.1: Caesar and time; 9.2: Fucking and clients; 9.3: Caesar as creditor to the gods; 9.4: More money for grosser sex; 9.5: Caesar as defender of chastity; 9.6: Patrons avoiding clients; 9.7: The end of castrated child prostitutes thanks to Caesar; 9.8: Legacy hunting; 9.9: Parasites and compliance; 9.10: Non-­marriage. There is a pool of issues in here that communicate with one another across the borders of individual poems, and this intercommunication broadcasts a message that can diverge from the simple, direct message of any one poem. So, for example, if “blowjobs will cost you more” is what one poem says, it falls amidst a field of verses where we are interested in how people connect with one another. Money and power affect everything in this domain. And social hierarchy and sexual hierarchy each speak to one another. But Caesar . . . But, what about Caesar? Here is where the messages really start mixing the most vigorously.135 Caesar prevented castration. That sounds nice. But Caesar is also a castrating figure. But we do not want to put things quite like that. Instead, we celebrate both the way he prevents castration and the way castration is so wonderful when it is Caesarean castration. Accordingly, 9.7 needs to be borne in mind when we look at the “cycle” of poems that comes in 9.11–13 and celebrates the lovely, castrated boyfriend of Caesar. This cycle will itself be interrupted by a pair of poems. We will read one about parasitism (9.14) and then one about a murderous wife (9.15). After that we return to the sublime boy for two poems (9.16–17). Then we talk about poet-­and-­prince (9.18).136 133  Themes in the Epigrams evolve. They have histories. The difficulty of the opening of Book 2 has become the trauma of the opening of Book 9: “Epigram 2.2 expands and contracts repeatedly as we read it, mirroring this book’s tension between progressive ambition and the drive to shrink back to the more bashful identity of its forerunner – a singularity which at the same time contains the ideas of originality and autocracy.” (Rimell, 2008:129) 134  Note that the printed order and the manuscript order diverge. 135 Remember, though, that “mixing” is one of the essential features of the Epigrams. Fitzgerald, 2007:90: “As far as mixing is concerned, poems are not like wines: to mix them, it seems, is always to their advantage.” For fluidity as a master-­metaphor for the Epigrams as a literary project see Rimell,  2008:88: “Martial hints frequently at a (pseudo-)Callimachean poetics of water, but also experiments with bigger, epic rivers and oceans, as well as mixing his drinks. He produces hybrid books that can’t be pinned down to one element or the other, even though they are also engaged in doing just that.” 136 See Barwick,  1958:284 on the non-­ contiguity of poetic cycles in Martial. See Barwick, 1958:287–289 on the Caesar cycle of Book 9. Garthwaite, 2001:49 notes the complexity of cycles and their capacity for mutual interaction.

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This same mix-­and-­match deployment of Caesar persists as the book goes on. We see a little poem about big dicks (9.33). Then we read about gods who are mindful of Caesar (9.34). Then we read about the way crafty ars can feed a man willing to say anything to get a dinner (9.35). Then we see Caesar’s lovely (castrated) boyfriend again (9.36). Then we look with loathing at the vile body of an old woman (9.37). Then we word-­juggle to praise the shield-­juggler who puts on a good show (9.38). Then there is a birthday poem to a wife lucky enough to share a birthday with Caesar (9.39). Then we read about a (good) wife who has promised a (very naughty) blowjob (9.40). It is not as if there have not been plenty of poems about dicks in Martial before Book 9. And there have been plenty of Caesar poems as well. But they used to be kept ostentatiously separate. The degree of actual separation in those earlier books deserves closer inspection, but, in the case of Book 9, the lack of distance is palpable. If Martial says that his apartment is so close to his neighbor’s that he can reach out and touch him, then the palace is so close to the brothel in these poems that the two spaces become a quasi-­shared space.137 And it does not seem to be the case that “the message” of putting a naughty poem next to Caesar is a simple case of blowing a raspberry at the censor. Nor are we simply calling Caesar a dick. Instead, the patterns we see in here are much more complex than that. Mouths, gratification, humiliation, self-­subjection, fear, ugly bodies: these items form the nebulous environs through which the shining light—or, at least, one says that the light is shining . . . —of Caesar can be seen. Epigrams 9.2 is a portrait of social collapse in the wake of sexual impropriety. Much of what follows in the book is contained in it, but, since that subsequent material has yet to arrive, one cannot initially see just how programmatic the poem is. It seems only episodic at first blush. But its episodes concatenate both directly and obliquely the major themes of the Caesar-­sex-­society constellation. Pauper amicitiae cum sis, Lupe, non es amicae, et queritur de te mentula sola nihil. Illa siligineis pinguescit adultera cunnis, conuiuam pascit nigra farina tuum;

137  The neighbor poem is Martial, Epigrams 1.86.

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112 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature incensura niues dominae Setina liquantur, nos bibimus Corsi pulla uenena cadi; empta tibi nox est fundis non tota paternis, non sua desertus rura sodalis arat; splendet Erythraeis perlucida moecha lapillis, ducitur addictus, te futuente, cliens; octo Syris suffulta datur lectica puellae, nudum sandapilae pondus amicus erit. I nunc et miseros, Cybele, praecide cinaedos: haec erat, haec cultris mentula digna tuis.   Lupus, you are a pauper when it comes to friendship, but not to your girlfriend: Your dick is the only thing with no complaint against you. That adulteress of yours grows fat on cunt-­shaped loaves. Black meal feeds your dinner guest. Choice Sentine wine for your lady is strained: the snow will glow. But WE drink the black poison of a Corsican cask. Your paternal estate buys you not even the whole of the night. Your abandoned comrade plows fields that are not his own. The adultère is resplendent with her diaphanous dress and pearls. While you are fucking, your client is hauled off by his creditors. A litter supported by eight Syrian slaves is given to your girl. Your friend will lie naked, a dead weight on a pauper’s bier. Cybele, feel free to castrate wretched sodomites, but THIS was the dick that deserved your blade. Martial, Epigrams 9.2

The addressee Lupus is keen about having sex with his amica, his girlfriend. And, because of this, the client suffers. The situation is filtered around a conflict between genitals and dinner tables. Lupus is a wolf to his fellow man because he is busy feeding cunt-­shaped loaves to his girl: good times are in the offing for his cock.138

138  Compare Plautus, Asinaria 495: “Man is no man but a wolf to his fellow man when he knows him not (lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non nouit).”

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While it might be bad enough if one said that Lupus spent it all on sex with a woman instead of male society, the situation is much more pointedly awful. The party-­goer gets a disagreeable version of everything she gets. She eats well. The conuiua eats poorly. But, it will be noted, the conuiua should in some ways be happy to eat black bread instead of an obscene loaf. The “nice” things are sexually disgusting. And the “not nice things” are socially disgusting. The paternal estate is sold for a bit of sex. Things are falling apart fast. Whatever is good here is unsustainable. Still, the girl really does look hot with her diaphanous clothes and expensive earrings. So, the patron fucks her. The client is meanwhile hauled off as a slave to his creditor.139 The amica is carried around in high style and at great expense. The amicus will be a naked corpse on a bare pallet. The final narrative outburst gives you the Aufschluß after all of that Erwartung: “A dick like this should lose his dick lest he be able to make all of us men feel so dickless.” There you have it: a joke explained. Funny, right? The poem is not a Caesar poem, but it contains all of the elements of the Caesar constellation.140 We have the sublime object of desire. We have social hierarchy. We have castration. But here we can see the doubleness of the terms. The amica should not displace the amicus. She is disgusting even though she is treated as if she were wondrous by the socio-­sexual predator Lupus. Social forms are recognized, but only long enough to accentuate our sense of despair when they end up trampled. The big-­man should be chopped down to size: off with his cock, Cybele. A Domitian poem would put everything similarly but also most differently. For example: Domitian’s dinner is spectacular. The boyfriend is beautiful. The boy is castrated, and that is good. The man is all-­powerful, and that is good. The dinner guest is self-­abasing, and that same self-­submission is what ties society together. Caesar does appear in the next poem (9.3). This is a “joke” poem that is not exactly joking. The emperor has spent so much on temples and religious matters that the gods owe him. And did Domitian call in his debts, 139  Addicti, that is, debt-­bondsmen, are an archaic institution, though. This is hyperbolic. 140  Garthwaite, 1993:99 argues that in hindsight we should see Domitian in Lupus. Thus, the re-­reader can discover malice towards the emperor and a suggestion that he is the one who deserves castration. This is smart, but it is not the direction I take things.

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114 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Jove would be unable to repay. The gods tend not to seem especially god-­ like when the emperor is around. Caesar disappears in the poem after that (9.4). But an ear sensitive to allegory worries if he is really completely absent. This is a slut-­ shaming epigram, of which there are many in Martial.141 Someone paid Galla a lot of money. Given that the more shameful a sexual service is the more it costs, one has to be concerned. The narrator’s final conceit: “You were buying her silence.” (Non fellat tanti Galla. Quid ergo? Tacet. 9.4.4) The poem’s logic rhymes with the verse-­world of the book as a whole, but we do not quite have a sense of the shape of the limerick: we know that there is someone from Nantucket. Eventually we will hear about a bucket. And then . . . something something . . . suck it. Galla is a prostitute. But her name sounds more than a bit like galli, that is, the castrated priests of Cybele. If the amica in 9.2 works as a displaced stand-­in for the emperor’s boyfriend who has yet to arrive, Galla reminds us—without reminding us, of course . . . —of not-Gallus, the not-­castrated wolf Lupus. And so we can turn to the “criminal silence” of Galla’s customer Aeschylus. This is a Greek customer of a French prostitute, if names mean anything. But names mean nothing and are mere playthings.142 If there is no depth to a name, there assuredly is a surface to it. “The call-­girl called the Gaul” did something for “The Guy who is not the Greek Tragic Poet but who shares a name with him.” Aeschylus knows that the deed done was wrong. She has been paid to say nothing. Martial earns his dinners by pretending that there are such people out there and by “exposing” them. Martial the poetic persona says that that quasi-­poet was after something worse-­than-­the-­worst, something so shameful that you would have to pay top dollar to keep it quiet. The poem is filling our heads with a variety of distinct possibilities. But let us hold on to the collection of indistinct generalities in them: “don’t speak,” “castration,” “shame,” “poetry,” “tragedy,” “displaced persons,” “here-­and-­there,” “deniability.”143 A poem such as 9.4 141  Sullivan, 1991:191: “Martial’s attitude to women in general and female sexual mores is consistent both with his predominantly pederastic orientation and also his patriarchal and hierarchical view of Roman society. Predictably he divides women into the good and the bad.” 142  See Martial, Epigrams 3.11.5: “Let’s swap out the name of the lover . . . (mutemus nomen amantis . . .)” 143  Compare Garthwaite, 1993:85 on the very odd role that “hypocrisy” plays in the book in as much as it readily turns into a self-­critique and not just an emperor-­critique or even a simple other-­critique: “Thus, each of these three epigrams (9.27, 47, 70) presents an individual who poses as a watchdog of public morality whilst practising the very vices he condemns. Indeed, with their thematic and verbal interplays they seem to form a unified group which is no less consciously linked with the poems on Domitian’s moral leadership. Significantly also—and perhaps surprisingly, since it might be considered a common theme in

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is all about “impregnating silence,” about filling up a null space with “something shameful.” But this whole book is bursting at the seams with a scandalous, unspeakable emptiness that occasions dread. The heavenly palace, though, is chock full of wonders. Or so we say.

J.  Managing to both hit and miss the mark: anxiety and Epigrams 9.5 If 9.4 is a tale of silent, private shame surrounding bodies and pleasures and money, the very next poem is an ecstatic expression of public joy celebrating an imperial economy of bodies and pleasures that puts an end to shame. The poem’s first word is an emphatic tibi: “For you!” The vocative has a military emphasis, at least at first glance: “greatest conqueror of the Rhine and father of the world” (summe Rheni domitor et parens orbis; 9.5.1). It turns out that “father” will be the most relevant word in that phrase relative to the rest of the poem’s economy. The second line brings a second and alliterative vocative: pudice princeps. The first citizen is a chaste one. He cares about chastity. He guarantees it. This is what the poem is about, and this, we will discover, is why “the cities of the empire offer him thanks (pudice princeps, gratias agunt urbes; 9.5.2). Because “chaste father of the globe” is in charge, the cities will have citizens. It will no longer be a crime to give birth (populos habebunt; parere iam scelus non est; 9.5.3). The poem is unpacking its universe as we move through it. We soon enough realize that this poem is celebrating a decree that forbids the castration of youths with an eye to selling them on the lucrative boy-­toy market. I say celebrating, but the tonality of the whole is slippery. The poem is one of only six in choliambics in Book 9. Hipponactean invective can be imagined, but whom does it target? Not the emperor, “of course.” The rhetoric and conceits are hyperbolic, but, “of course” we are not being ironic about the decree.144 Populos habebunt is a Martial—this motif of hypocrisy and double standards in morality is voiced more often in Book 9 than in any other.” Note, though, that Garthwaite does not explore the issue of “self-­critique.” 144  Watson, 2006:287: “The traditional association with invective is maintained by Martial in the majority of his choliambic epigrams.” Watson,  2006:288: “The choliambic poems of Martial are, then, for the most part, concerned with abuse or bitter complaint. But there are exceptions to this pattern, and on occasion the metre is employed in unexpected places.” Watson,  2006:291: “In 9.5, where Martial praises two of Domitian’s pieces of legislation directed against castration and child prostitution, there is a note of invective directed at those who have profited from these practices: the auarus mango, ‘greedy slave-­dealer’ (4), through

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116 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature clever enough conceit, but, in a sense, it is absurd: do cities really think that their populus is threatened by whether or not slave women in them are hesitant to give birth? Since when do we care about how that sort of woman feels about her own body—which is not her own—and the body of her child—which is likewise just another piece of property? The boys who are castrated are slave boys, not free ones. To the extent cities do fear for this sort of member of the populus, this is an atypical fear, an “extra-­ constitutional” fear, even. What is, though, “typical” is a fear of castration. This specific fear has managed to promote in social rank a set of people who suddenly become “one of us” precisely to the extent that we can sympathize with a specific sexual dread, and it is just this dread that enables us to jump over the usually secure boundary between the free population and the slaves. Hyperbole, as a trope, overshoots the mark. In this poem, we have hyperbole, but we have difficulty discerning exactly what “the mark” might be. The manifest discourse of the poem directs our inferences to a target that does not seem to be shared by the latent logic of the situation, and, indeed, we are pointed towards a collection of sociological surprises. Take, for example, the way that the poem closes with the assertion that this bit of moral legislation is a moment where the emperor’s passion for pudor is outdoing itself. If the renewal of the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis on the part of Domitian was impressive and something that restored pudor to the (marital) bedchamber, all the more astounding is the advent of pudor in a brothel (qui nec cubili fuerat ante te quondam,| pudor esse per te coepit et lupanari; 9.5.8–9). Brothel is the poem’s last word, the rhetorical and conceptual climax, the surprise we have been building to: “Wow, Martial. Wow, Domitian. Cleverly done. Well done.”145 Anti-­adultery legislation is the sort of thing that is typically spoken of as securing populos for urbes: legitimate children will be born into the families of the free citizens. But here that logic has been transferred over into the unfree members of the community. Domitian does more by aiming lower. Another item that is a little bit askew when we take a second look: parere iam scelus non est. “It is now not a shame to give birth.” Owing to the meter, the word has to be parere with a short a and not parere with a

whom a boy uirilitatis damna maeret ereptae, ‘laments the loss of his manhood which has been snatched away’ (5), and the superbus leno, ‘haughty pimp,’ who takes away a ‘prostituted infant’ from its wretched mother.” 145  The super-­sensitive ear might note that lupanar here vaguely echoes Lupus in 9.2. The two passages would be in (non-)communication.

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long a. That is, the verb we are hearing is a form of pario and not of pareo. Owing to the surprise meter of this poem with a surprising message we are saved from the surprise of hearing something that would be scandalous if we heard it and thought it through. Namely, the line almost says, “It is now not a shame to yield.” But that word is not in this line. Nor is Parrhasia to be confused with παρρηϲία: “imperial” and “free-­speech” abut without intersecting. As long as you sing the song the way it is supposed to be sung, as long as you obey the laws of meter, you will never hear this “illegal” message. But, as a matter of fact and not of meter, we are still yielding, and it is still a shame. Similarly, our passivity is a lot like castration. If only someone would put an end to it all. Unfortunately, the person who saved the slave bodies from literal castration is exactly the man who is imposing a metaphorical castration upon the psyches of the free. Rather than positing a species of double-­speak on the part of Martial— such is possible, of course—we can perhaps meditate on the problems that have infested the sign system more generally rather than deciding whether or not a hyperbolic poem “really means what it says.” Hyperbole never means only and exactly what it says. Unlike irony which says less but means more, this trope says more but, in the end, has to be reduced to less: “This is the best show ever” means “This is a really great show.” But ironic hyperbole, to give a name to a curious sort of trope, says more but is then reduced to some heterogenous less: “This is the best show ever” means something like “It is scary to be a rabbit.” This odd trope characterizes much of Martial’s discourse. It is also not clear that it is a conscious, canny trope rather than something that emerges as a function of the inner logic of the discourse itself. Amidst the excess about one referent, a deficit arises inside the sign system. But this is a fecund hollowness in that the Books cohere—to the extent that they do cohere—as books and not mere collections of 100 poems specifically because they circulate around a hollowed out space that is not occupied by some simple message like, “Domitian is bad, even though I am saying he is good.”146 This void arises because of the “inhuman” stumbling block of castrated speech and not just because of a simple, censorious prohibition emerging on the part of a man who has the power to say “no.” The void is Martial’s void because Domitian did not tell him to write any of this. It was Martial who chose to work with and work through 146  Another take on the question of Martial’s coherence: “I hope to show that the book has a coherence (though not a unity), which emerges from the overlapping themes of the book as they constellate in their shifting configurations.” (Fitzgerald, 2007:69)

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118 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Domitianic Rome. Within such a configuration the censor is only the fantasy of censorship, not a concrete reality of The Censor Perpetuus. The imago of the censor subsists as a functional element embedded in the Epigrams by their author, an author who is obsessed with his own imago and who knows that the fate of the latter is bound up with the fortunes of the former. “Domitian” hereby only names a function. This function is intimately bound up with Martial’s power/poetry project. Power/poetry animates the verse world. And Dicks-­and-­Domitian™ provides the label for the epiphenomena that emerge in the wake of this quickening. Castration anxiety generates a misplaced affect in 9.5. Specifically, why do we care about slave boys? Martial has never shown a warm sympathy for the unfree and their fates. But he has been writing rather over-­heated poems of late, and “dicklessness” keeps on returning to them. Moreover, the way one will speak of having/not-­having is itself full of ambivalence. The obvious “destination” of this inchoate discourse of castration in Book 9 is Earinus. He is a slave. He is lovely. He is Domitian’s pet. But we have not met him yet. Here we think of the ugliness of prostitution, the pain of castration, and we celebrate the notion that “that’s all over now.” We can go back to bed, back to the cubile. Giving birth (to verses about giving birth) is no longer a problem. Of course, yielding still is. Earinus is still a few poems off. We talk about a few other things first before reaching him. But the nature of that talk, even if it is not castration talk, nevertheless betrays signs of anxiousness. Furthermore, one will note that the non-­Domitian poems are nevertheless filled with motifs that are relevant to the emperor poems. And, further, they are all short. Martial gets in, makes his joke, then gets out. Then we get back to the emperor. The three little poems that keep us from Earinus are, then, throw-­away poems in more than one sense. They make familiar jokes about familiar topics. They are brief. They are “interruptions.” But we can’t throw them away for all of that. 9.8 is about legacy hunting. Here the problem is that someone gave and gave in order to win a legacy, but the intended victim never gave back. The poem is about vain expenditure and cleverness that is not as clever as it thinks. But the clever capstone is that the death of Fabius really does mean that we turn a profit: now one no longer has to give to him. The profit comes in the form of the lack of loss. You do not have to humiliate yourself any longer, Bithynicus. Epigrams 9.9 works within this same zone. It comes “before” 9.8 in a conceptual sense: dining out entails a lot of self-­ abasement. You can’t be both a glutton and a free man, says the poem’s last

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verse: liber non potes et gulosus esse. The freedom he has had to surrender in the course of his self-­interested enterprise is the freedom to be angry, the freedom to complain. Epigrams 9.10 is about “priority” and about “marriage.” Paula wants to marry Priscus, Mr Old-­Timer. But Priscus does not want to get married. Each party is sage. If we read these three poems in reverse order we can tell a different story. Chapter  1: it is not safe to marry and have children. The adultery laws should be consulted, at a minimum. Chapter 2: there is a lot to get mad about, but you can’t be free if you want to get heard by power. Chapter 3: when power dies, we will be enriched by the very fact that we no longer have to curry its favor. That is, the inverted narrative works with several of the themes already found in the book, but it also makes a promise: a sensible man will be able to express his rage if and when he is finally free to do so.147 This “inverted” message, though, is very much not the message of the Book proper. And, worse still, our trajectory is taking us right back to castration and Caesar. When we reach our destination, we talk about how wonderful everything is.

K.  Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not i.  Unspeakably something: the Earinus cycle begins (Epigrams 9.11–13) And so, meet Earinus. Or, rather, meet “Someone special.”148 Earinus is never in fact named. Instead, one plays with his “unnamability.” Henriksén introduces these poems as follows: “There are six epigrams in Book 9 occasioned by a hair-­offering by the eunuch Earinus, Domitian’s favourite. The epigrams principally fall into two subdivisions: nos. 11-­13 celebrate the name Earinus and nos. 16-­17 consider the actual offering.”149 Since Statius also writes about Earinus, we are in a position where we can 147  One could also note that a forced reading of the Latin of the last line of 9.9 also said, sotto voce, “You can’t be a book and go hungry.” 148  White, 1975:292: “The six pieces relating to Earinus’ haircut constitute the most striking example [of the duplication of epigrams on the same theme]. . . . The desire ultimately to present the poems in a small brochure probably accounts for this phenomenon of variation. The preparation of a small text of select poems prior to publication was the most elaborate way of approaching a patron, and complements the formality of the poems involved.” 149 Henriksén, 2012:53.

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120 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature construct a narrative about “the facts of the situation.”150 But any narrative of empirical reconstruction inevitably stands at a distance from the poetic narrative that emerges about Earinus in Epigrams 9.151 As things stand in the Book, Earinus arrives in the middle of a collection of meditations about power, sex, and freedom, and this para-­narrative affects the way one appreciates the narrative that is “properly his.”152 Earinus, Ἐαρινόϲ: “Le Printemps.” It is a pretty name for a pretty boy. But the name Earinus presents technical difficulties for a poet who would versify it. Earinus/Ἐαρινόϲ contains a run of four short vowels, and, unless one is going to take metrical licenses, this is a Spring that will never arrive. The obstacle acts as the grain of sand around which a pearl can form. But, given that Book 9 contains a fundamentally riven relationship to the signifier, this pearl is both precious and a piece of costume jewelry. Spring is also the winter of our discontent. And the name that is too soft and delicate for verse is also a name that grates upon our ears when we imagine saying it. The absent name of the man whose genitals are absent reminds us of a whole set of structuring absences . . . and this is awesome. Nomen cum uiolis rosisque natum, quo pars optima nominatur anni, Hyblam quod sapit Atticosque flores, quod nidos olet alitis superbae; nomen nectare dulcius beato, quo mallet Cybeles puer uocari et qui pocula temperat Tonanti, quod si Parrhasia sones in aula, respondent Veneres Cupidinesque; nomen nobile, molle, delicatum uersu dicere non rudi uolebam: sed tu syllaba contumax rebellas. Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetae, 150  See Henriksén,  2012:54–56. 151  See also Henriksén,  2012:56–57 on whether or not Martial was asked to write these poems. The answer is a function of what assumptions one makes about all of the relevant parties. There is no concrete evidence. One proceeds via a collection of suspicions and inferences. 152  Is any given sub-­set of the poems in fact a closed-­off unit relative to the whole?

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Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not  121 Sed Graeci, quibus est nihil negatum et quos Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ decet sonare: nobis non licet esse tam disertis, qui Musas colimus seueriores.   A NAME born along with violets and roses, wherewith is named the year’s best part, tasting like honeyed Hybla and Attic flowers, smelling like the nest of the proud phoenix, A NAME more sweet than blessed nectar, which Cybele’s boy would prefer as his own and so too he who mixes the Thunderer’s drinks, which did you call it out in the Parrhasian court, Venuses and Cupids would give answer, A NAME noble, soft, delicate I was keen to speak in a poem not unrefined. But, obstinate syllable, you rebel. Poets will nevertheless say “Eiarinos,” but they are Greeks, and nothing is denied them. It even sounds good when they call out “Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ.” We are not allowed such eloquence, we who cultivate sterner Muses. Martial, Epigrams 9.11

Epigrams 9.11 opens with a run of riddling lines that all have the same answer: all interpretive paths head towards Earinus, the castrated thing that sits next to the omnipotent thing that sits in the ectopic “center” of Rome, namely Domitian’s Alban estate which is the de facto heart of a Rome-­away-­from-­itself. Nomen—“name” and also “noun”—begins three of the verses of this poem. It is also the first word of the first verse. This same set of facts holds true for 9.12 as well. The poems are about “the noun,” the word that stands in for the thing. The word never gets heard, and the thing is never really seen in its traumatic aspect. The metonymic quality of “the name” is itself a stand-­in that (un)names a broader obsession with forever swapping out one thought and replacing it with another. Castrated Earinus is not the raped son of a weeping mother, a mother sad to have done her part to add to the populus of the urbs. There

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122 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature is no brothel, no lupanar. There is only chaste verse. There is not even any castration.153 The thing that is cut off is a lock of hair.154 The high, florid style of the poem “names” Earinus by performing an “Earinan aesthetic,” namely it names him by identifying him with the high art of poetic tradition. This act of naming bodies forth that tradition as a means of capturing the ambrosial scent of the fair boy himself. But the sublimation of the boy, as with so many of Martial’s moments of “raising up,” involves a lowering down as well. The divine realm is yet again figured as self-­abasing relative to the here and now of Caesarism. Statius’ Siluae also routinely deploy exactly this trope. The boy is superlative because all of the sexy stories of myth know that they are not quite so sexy as all that. Attis and Ganymede would prefer to be called by his name instead of by their own. The poem is escorting us away from our recollection that Cybele in 9.2 was bloody, bloodthirsty, castrating, and punishing (i nunc et miseros, Cybele, praecide cinaedos; 9.2.13). She has become here a mere possessive genitive, someone who appears long enough to give us another hidden name of another castrated male, Attis who is the Cybeles puer. The disgusting cinaedi have been swapped for a beautiful boy who himself thinks only of a boy more beautiful still. Attis and Ganymede tell themselves, “If only I could be more like Domitian’s boyfriend . . . ”155 The “original” longs to be more like the “copy”: this usurpation of the hierarchy of model and copy is in fact typical of Martial’s Domitianic discourse. One is free to imagine a historical, empirical Domitian who is modeling himself after Jove and Hercules, but in Martial’s verse we regularly read instead about a heavenly order that is failing to keep pace with a mortal “copy” that is figured as having a primacy even if it does not come chronologically first.156 153 Lorenz,  2002:191: “In Martials Earinusgedichten wird zwar nie explizit von einer Kastration gesprochen, aber auch hier weisen erotische Doppeldeutigkeiten darauf hin, dass Earinus ein Kastrat ist und ein sexuelles Verhältnis zwischen Mundschenk und Kaiser besteht.” 154  This substitute-­castration that swaps out one cut for another will be explored at length in the discussion of Statius. See pages 323–44. 155  Note that this is by no means the first time the mortal boy has been compared to Ganymede. In the Xenia (from 84–85CE) we see the same. See Lorenz,  2002:95–96 on Caesar-­and-­sex in Epigrams 13.108 and its related poems. 156  Sullivan, 1991:142: “The comparison of a ruler with Hercules goes back to Hellenistic times, so Martial found this assimilation tempting also, not least in preempting opposition claims to Hercules as their particular deity. Augustus had been flattered likewise by Horace (Carm. 3.14.1–4).” See Feeney, 2007 for a discussion of “politics and time” at Rome. “Golden ages,” “unbridgeable divides,” and other such Caesarean chronotopes preoccupied poets before Martial and Statius.

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This is all just a precious poetic conceit, of course. But it is, nevertheless, possible to view it as complicit with a programmatic attack on the “foundational values” of Roman culture. The gods have been killed off and reduced to mere figures of thought rather than repositories of numinous dread. To the extent that the latter category still abides, the dread has all been transferred over into the imperial account. And so any and all impieties, especially flippant ones, really do redound to the emperor’s credit. Dread of The Roman Thunderer becomes much more real than any awe one might feel for the Olympian one. The “charming” assault on the vault of heaven continues in the next two lines: “A name that, were you heard in the Parrhasian palace, | Venuses and Cupids would make reply.” The instability of names and things multiplies in a line like this. First, we can note again the “frank speech” issue tucked into the folds of the adjective Parrhasia. Parrhasia means Arcadia and it “stands in” for Rome. But as a near homonymn Parrhasia also displaces the word for “forthrightness.” Most obviously we are not frankly stating what is a good Republican truth: an aula is a foreign seat of tyranny, and not a Roman space. But, in this period and in this poet especially, an aula is no longer a Greek seat of power, much as the there of Arcadia has become a here.157 Meanwhile the Venuses and Cupids strategically arrogate for themselves “the wrong name.” If you call out “Earinus” when you are in the palace, a bunch of grubby little Desires will come running. Any and every Cupid either mistakes himself for the singular Earinus or hopes to be mistaken for him. When one pauses over the collocation Veneres Cupidinesque another splitting takes place. Indeed, splits insides of splits emerge. Henriksén asserts that “this is first and foremost an allusion to Catullus’ 3.1.”158 There the Venuses and Cupids are weeping for a dead bird. Henriksén cleverly suggests that passer is penis for Martial and so we have an allusion to Earinus’ castration. This is in its own way too clever, or, rather, it is a bit too quick. It is too quick because Henriksén uses the categories of “surface” and “depth” where one image is a “cover” for another image. This is

157  Wallace-­Hadrill,  1996:283: “Aula, a direct derivative of the Greek aule, the standard term in the hellenistic world for the courts of oriental and Greek kings, is almost unknown to republican literature (including Livy); but rapidly establishes itself under the early Empire (notably in the writings of Seneca under Nero) to refer both to the physical location of imperial power and to the type of power, the personnel, and the perilous way of life that were associated with it.” 158 Henriksén, 2012:62–63.

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124 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature fine so far as it goes, but it is also too limited since it eliminates as additional factors: ambiguity, simultaneity, and ambivalence. The collection of associations and substitutions needs to be followed through more carefully.159 The “happy” reaction of this poem swaps out the “sadness” from Catullus’ poem. And the epigram is about hair, and not a penis. And, of course, the hair is not even in the poem yet: it needs to be added before it can be subtracted, so this substitution of the missing lost thing is all the more interesting. If the hair-­cutting ceremony is a moment where a young person “comes into his own,” then it is a loss that ought to entail self-­possession: “Today I am a man.” But for an Earinus, such a ceremony can quickly shift its valence: “Today I am reminded that I will never be a man.” The missing name that “desire” is keen to arrogate for itself marks out while also standing in for a whole legion of things that are “missing,” and it is precisely “as missing” that they have their meaning. The second half of the poem shifts away from the “thing behind the name,” namely the lovely Earinus. The focus is now squarely on the letters E, A, R, I, N, V, and S. And, in retrospect, this second half of this poem even gives us occasion to wonder if we ever should have thought about Earinus himself rather than the-­name-­Earinus. Maybe Ganymede did not want to be Earinus, maybe the nothing-­but-­a-­name Ganymede wanted— to the extent that mere names “want” anything—to get closer to reality by acquiring the name Earinus instead. This would be a preferable state of non-­being even though there is no Earinus proper and there is only a noun Earinus that is super-­charged with a certain configuration of imperial affect. That’s rather too recherché to be a literal reading of the poem, but as a reading it nevertheless emphasizes all over again the fact that the poem is resolutely about the “word for thing,” namely about nomen. It is not a poem about the-­thing-­itself.

159 Remember, though, that “substitution” is one of the axial themes of Martial’s wit-­ machine. See Grewing, 1998:322–327 for a collection of examples of adnominatio, additio, and commutatio. Poems put praedium next to prandium, cenaturit next to cacaturit, odore next to colore, and culum next to cunnos. See also Freud on wit, propinquity, and substitution. The “mixing” emphasized by Freud is useful for our own project of thinking about the deadly serious precipitate that emerges when the nebulous potentiality of poetry-­and-­power comes to condense in the here and now of a verse. Freud, 2001a:19 gives the mere starting point: “[The joke-­technique] in this instance [sc., the word famillionär] might be described as ‘condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute.’ ” See also Lacan, 1998b. His starting point is Freud’s same joke: “[I]l y a deux lignes, et que les choses circulent en même temps sur la ligne de la chaîne signifiante. De par la mystérieuse propriété de phonèmes qui sont dans l’un et l’autre mots, quelque chose corrélativement s’émeut dans le signifiant, il y a ébranlement de la chaîne signifiante élémentaire comme telle.”

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The name/noun is noble, mobile, and soft (9.11.10). The poet wanted to capture it in gentle verse, but it escaped. Sublime meters cannot really capture in their net of words a word that is too fair still for them. Well, that’s the way Epigrams 9.11.10–11 works. In the next verse the imagery shifts: a (tragically?) stubborn syllable “contumaciously” resists versification (sed tu syllaba contumax rebellas). There is a sort of political revolt against submitting to the poetic process. Meanwhile, the poet has to ask if he himself will yield as the name will not. Perhaps some shameless Greekisms in his prosody would allow him to put this name in verse. But Roman poetic “severity” forbids such, affirms the last line. Hereupon we tumble into a bathos of technical linguistic issues.160 And these same are figured via a collection of ethnic clichés. “As a good Roman poet, I can’t . . . ”161 But is he really such a good poet? Or is he a “severe” one to the extent that he takes Domitian as his censorious model? The Greek “poetic license” consists, it will be noted, of being able to say Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ (9.11.15). A prosody “at war with itself ” can use two words for the same thing and sound good doing it. But the example is itself a frightening one. If you want to be able to talk about Earinus, you need to be the sort of guy who is ready to talk about the horrors of blood-­stained, murderous Ares. The full line in Homer is Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ βροτολοιγὲ μιαιφόνε τειχεϲιπλῆτα: “Ares, Ares, plague of man,  bloodthirsty stormer of cities (Homer, Iliad 5.31 and 5.455).” The  next political generation will speak of Domitian himself in these very terms. An epic poet might be able to “capture” Earinus and so insert his name into a verse, but Martial is a “small poet” and so Earinus “escapes him.” What looks like poetic cowardice is instead presented as Roman severity: only soft Greeks—like Homer . . . —would ever say something as effete as Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ. Or maybe it was Lucilius who said it. See his Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ Graeci ut faciunt.162 That is, Lucilius has already offered a version of Martial’s point. Then again, maybe Martial is thinking about some other epigrammatist who himself said Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ.163 Martial’s verse makes multiple allusions simultaneously: it is erudite; it is pedantic; it is a satire; it is a 160  Note, though, that technical linguistic issues can be a source of verbal pleasure elsewhere. See Grewing, 1998:318–322 on the deployment of grammatici and their learning in the Epigrams. 161  Fitzgerald, 2007:29 provides a different but perhaps overlapping observation: “Indirect evidence of the activity of Greek epigrammatists at the court of Domitian is provided by Martial 9.11.14–17 which suggests that his poems celebrating the hair-­offering of Domitian’s delicatus, the eunuch Earinus, may have met with competition from Greek epigrammatists.” 162 Lucilius, Saturae 9.355 Marx = Grammatici Latini 7.18K. 163 See Anthologia Graeca 11.191.1.

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126 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature defanged satire of a satire; it is a pointed epigram; it is just another ­epigram . . . A clever bunny is giving us the bibliographic run-­around. The full force of the passage does not appear when you “unveil” some one true meaning that has been covered up or when you find that one key antecedent cross-­reference. Instead, the complex, impacted meaning of the passage arises from its ostentatious embrace of semiotic proliferation and substitution as the core of meaning-­making activity qua activity.164 That is, semiotic play is meaning-­full, and “filling with meaning” is another way of designating poiesis itself and its special version of making-­and-­ doing. But this same semiotic lusus as a concrete ideologically inflected practice encourages us to forget about the time that Athena told Ares to leave the mortals to their mutual slaughter. Martial’s “severe muse” both points at the Homeric battlefield and then escorts us away from it, much as Athena had escorted Ares away from the fray.165 The depth conjured at the surface of the poem says something very different indeed: “down there” is Caesar and pleasure and plenitude and “the thing behind the mere name”; “up here” we have mere words merely playing around, skimming over this specific surface of that specific depth. The next poem is the same poem, but also a different poem. There are so very many ways to not say “Earinus.” There are so many meters into which his name cannot fit. The conceits are highly convergent between 9.11 and 9.12. But the second draft is less frightening, less edgy. As with so many of the internal movements of the poems, we start with the more agitating notions, but then we push forward with a “more refined,” more polished, version of the same. “Progress” through the book accordingly brings with it a certain kind of strategic forgetting. Cybele cuts off dicks (9.2). Cybele loves a pretty boy, Attis (9.11). After that, there is no Attis and no Cybele, just a pretty boy . . . The poem likewise subtracts the Ares who has had his bloodlust subtracted from him in 9.11 and instead inserts the goddess of lust, Venus.

164  Note, then, that my version of “indeterminacy” is not that of Lorenz. For Lorenz we will just never know what the historical Martial really thought. And one can read these poems as praise or as blame. Perhaps the Kaiserkritik thesis is right, perhaps it is not. See Lorenz, 2002:193–194. These observations are accurate, but they also evade the thorny question of signification as such and its painful mechanisms. 165 Martial, Epigrams 9.11.16–17: “Such eloquence is denied those of us who cultivate more serious Muses (nobis non licet esse tam disertis, | qui Musas colimus seueriores).” Recall as well the way that Athena is presented as Domitian’s favorite goddess by Martial.

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Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not  127 Nomen habes teneri quod tempora nuncupat anni, cum breue Cecropiae uer populantur apes; nomen Acidalia meruit quod harundine pingi, quod Cytherea sua scribere gaudet acu; nomen Erythraeis quod littera facta lapillis, gemma quod Heliadum pollice trita notet; quod pinna scribente grues ad sidera tollant; quod decet in sola Caesaris esse domo.   A name you have that announces the year’s soft season, when the Attic bees despoil the fleeting spring, a name that deserves to be painted with a Boetian reed, which Venus delights to write into her embroidery, a name whose letters should be rendered by pearls, which amber that perfumes hands should mark out, which cranes writing with their wings would raise to the stars, something that appropriately exists in Caesar’s home alone. Martial, Epigrams 9.12

Precious words for precious things abound in Epigrams 9.12. One pauses at least momentarily at one of the precious things: the last time we saw pearls they were in the ears of that girlfriend whose presence was a threat to homosociality in Epigrams 9.2. Nevertheless, this poem celebrates a boy, poetry, and, most emphatically, writing as a species of celebration. This poem also obsessively celebrates metonymy as an infinitely fertile poetic operation. Like some glorious spring, the missing name plants a seed from which grows a variegated bouquet of further swapped names. Earinus is not just “another luxury item” that has been added to a familiar list. Instead, his non-­naming inspires the sort of non-­naming that gives us High Art as such. In the course of almost giving Earinus’ name but never giving it in its impossibility, Martial swaps out other names time and again. What is translated as “Attic” above is Cecropiae in the original. “Boetian” is Alcidalia. Venus is Cytherea. The pearls are “the Erythraean stones.” Amber is “the gem of the daughters of the Sun.” None of this is new or even surprising. Any old poet does this all of the time. But in this specific context, the figure and its dense deployment signifies something more than the same old word-­play. Or, rather, it shows something important about all of that word-­play more generally, about the “essence of metonymy” within the praxis of poiesis.

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128 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature As in Epigrams 9.11 the word-­for-­word, nomen, is repeatedly hammered by the verse. The goddess of love would delight to weave the boy’s name into some fine textile. And she is not alone. The poem even prays that geese might bear the name-­of-­the-­boy aloft to heaven and therewith to write a new myth for the sky with their wings (pinna scribente). That would make the Earinus-nomen like the boy named Ganymede, someone who was borne off by a bird and so became famous. The last line is, though, a declaration, and not a prayer: “It is proper that this name be in Caesar’s house alone (quod decet in sola Caesaris esse domo; 9.12.8).” The poem “means to say” something like, “I pray for good things for Earinus.” But the poem is obsessed by letters and, taken to the letter, it says instead, “Listen to my mythic prayers for the fate of a name.” This species of writing “captures” time and again what the verses in front of us cannot: specifically, a set of letters. Amidst all of the celebration, we have let the boy’s name become the point of affective attachment and mythical investment. The (castrated) boy himself has long since gone missing. We are representing the representations of a representation. Caesar’s palace alone deserves to house such a . . . noun. The noun stands in as a substitute for the sublimely beautiful/mutilated boy. Poetic effusions circle around the noun-­system and eschew the thingishness of the Thing, a thing that we name as unnameable. The name’s very beauty qua name is a precious textile that is used to cover over the body of the boy who reminds us of Cybele’s boy. Inside the palace and up in the sky there is a wonderful . . . word. And this word is so wonderful that it cannot be spoken. Of course, the excessively delicate/indelicate might let it slip: if Παρραϲία suddenly became παρρηϲία one might hear something that sounded a bit like Ἆρεϲ Ἄρεϲ. We could hear the minimal difference that makes no difference and yet all of the difference in the phonetic world. A Lucilius would be happy to name the name, adduce the thing, and then sneer something like, “What sort of Spring has had its seed-­sack sacked?” But we are not writing that sort of poetry. Instead of “hearing the word” and so being led to the thing, the poem celebrates yet again the pleasure of deferring an encounter. And one puts off an encounter not just with the thing but even with the name of the thing. It is not so much that “Earinus” is an answer to a riddle as it is the case that he serves as an occasion for a fetishistic investment in riddling itself. And so, see the short poem that ends this run of “Earinus” poems, 9.13. This poem is a four-­liner that is unambiguously structured as a riddle:

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“This is not something that is not a riddle.”166 The poem’s last words are “If you wanted to name him, who is he?” (quis est?). The high-­style treatments of the previous two poems give way to the dinner-­party game of puzzle-­ solving. And this puzzle is exceptionally easy to solve: “Please complete the following sequence. Autumn : Oporinos :: winter : Chimerinos :: summer : Therinos :: spring : X.” Any guesses? It would be so painfully easy to just say the word. And yet, the word will never get said. One claims that it is “impossible” for poetry to sing this name, but the very poems that say they can’t also show that one could, if one was shameless enough. Self-­censorship prevents one from praising the censor’s boyfriend. And these poems are about the many modes/meters that spring up surrounding the unspoken and the unspeakable substitute for a substitute. And so a self-­censorship that is coordinated with the censor himself gives you another sort of name, the name of “Domitianic poetics” more generally, a poetics whose concrete metonymous designation in the verse word of the Epigrams is Earinus.

ii.  Everybody loves the Ausonian Father. But why? (Epigrams 9.7) Let us return briefly to Caesar’s moral legislation and his decree ending castration. And after that we can finish the Earinus cycle with a look at the hair poems.167 After the climax of Epigrams 9.5 that heralds the advent of modesty in the brothel, we find a small patron/client joke poem in Epigrams 9.6: it’s a bust; there’s no access to the patron; say farewell to the man who won’t even let you tell him hello. Then the moral intervention of the princeps is celebrated anew in 9.7.168 166 Martial, Epigrams 9.13: “Did the autumn give me my name I would be Oporinos. Were it the shivering stars of winter, Chimerinos. Named for a summer’s month, I would be Therinos, of course. One to whom the springtime gives him his name: who is he? (Si daret autumnus mihi nomen, Oporinos essem, | Horrida si brumae sidera, Chimerinos; | Dictus ab aestiuo Therinos tibi mense uocarer: | Tempora cui nomen uerna dedere, quis est?)” 167  Garthwaite, 1993:87: “[T]he epigrams for Domitian are designed from their very outset also to incorporate the Earinus poems.” 168  Or should we write “celebrated” with scare-­quotes instead? Boyle, 1995:97: “It is difficult not to construe the close proximity of these two poems [i.e., 9.5 and 9.7] and two blocks of poems on Earinus’ ‘delicate’ beauty (mollis, delicatus), his Attis-­like emasculation and his paradoxical association with fertile spring (note the irony of felix at 9.16.5 and 17.6), as not only profoundly ironic but index of the gap between profession and practice which is a prominent theme of this book (e.g., 9.47, 70)”. Garthwaite, 1993:90: “Thus, while these analogies with regeneration and the fertility of spring may harmonise with his name, they are singularly inappropriate, if not cruelly sarcastic, when applied to the person [of Earinus].”

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130 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Tamquam parua foret sexus iniuria nostri foedandos populo prostituisse mares, iam cunae lenonis erant, ut ab ubere raptus sordida uagitu posceret aera puer: inmatura dabant infandas corpora poenas. Non tulit Ausonius talia monstra pater, idem qui teneris nuper succurrit ephebis, ne faceret steriles saeua libido uiros. Dilexere prius pueri iuuenesque senesque, at nunc infantes te quoque, Caesar, amant.   As if meager were the injury done to our sex – To have prostituted males for the people to sully! – The cradle so belonged to the pimp that snatched from the breast a baby would solicit with his cry a filthy penny. Unripe bodies were paying unspeakable penalties. The Ausonian Father did not endure such monstrosities, the same who did lately come to the aid of tender ephebes lest savage lust should make them barren men. Formerly children, youths, and old men esteemed you, But now infants also, Caesar, love you. Martial, Epigrams 9.7

Again, we have to remark with mild surprise the fact that legislation protecting the unfree is attracting so much notice. And, again, the narrator enforces a sympathetic identification between the reader and the servile victim. The last word of the first verse is nostri: “We are all in this together.” The community that is forged around this “us” is one of gender, “us men,” or, more specifically, “us men as victims.” We also celebrate “the future” by saying that, finally, the populus will be free from gross sexuality. See again Epigrams 6.2 and 6.7 in addition to the present passage. The presentation of “the people” is riven by a psycho-­ sexual cleft. The people are filthy. The people will have been made pure. Domitianic “censorship” offers the means of making the jump between senses of community and chronological registers. That is, “the Domitianic” is the figure of a glorious present-­ and-­ future in which all is well. Conversely, the space that is not occupied by the imperial presence is a

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squalid past-­and-­present full of humiliations of various kinds and degrees: bad dinners, shiftless patrons, faithless wives, ugly old women, and, time and again, castrated males. But Epigrams 9.7 is not even really about the end put to male prostitution. Instead that is nothing but the first branch of a comparison. As Domitian fixed that problem, so he fixed another. This second problem was the question of babies snatched from their mother’s breasts (à la Vergil and Ovid)169 and turned into beggars as part of a pity-­inducing money-­ making scheme (not as per Vergil and Ovid). As in 9.5 “Daddy Domitian” comes to the rescue and inserts himself as the solution to the disruption in the logic of family-­and-­society: “The Ausonian Father did not endure such monstrosities . . . (non tulit Ausonius talia monstra pater . . . ; 9.7.6)” And we explicitly correlate this gesture with that one: “the same who did lately come to the aid of tender ephebes . . . (idem qui teneris nuper succurrit ephebis . . . ; 9.7.7).” The anti-­castration campaign and this one are undertaken by “the very same father.” Saeua libido, “savage lust,” was castrating, but dominatio/domination heals the wound.170 One pointedly omits the possibility of a phrase like dominandi cupido, “lust for power.”171 In fact, one does not say dominatio of Domitian: that ugly word is replaced by a near cousin that is somehow not supposed to be ugly at all, dominus, a life-­giving word, a fatherly word.172 Desire is only sexual desire. Power, like a good censor, “cleans up” desire. Power is not itself shot through with ugly desires. And, as the last word of the last line of this poem asserts, “love” is a chaste, social thing. It unites everyone by giving them a shared object of affection: “you, Caesar.” We already knew that boys, youths, and old men loved you, but now the non-­speakers, the in-­ fantes, love you too (at nunc infantes te quoque, Caesar, amant; 9.7.10). What gets said by those who can’t speak? “I love you, Domitian.” 169  “Snatched from his mother’s breast (ab ubere raptus)”: Vergil, Aeneid 6.428 and 7.484. Ovid, Fasti 4.459. 170  Garthwaite, 1993:85: “But perhaps we should instead question the motivation for 9.5 and 9.7. For in contrast to the topicality of the imperial motifs in 9.1 and 9.3, the law against castration was over ten years old.” 171 See Cicero, De Re Publica 1.50, Cicero, Philippicae 2.117 and, more to the point, Tacitus, Annales 15.53: “Unless, of course, a lust for dominion burns hotter than all other passions (nisi si cupido dominandi cunctis adfectibus flagrantior est).” 172  See again the opening of Book 8: “All my books indeed, lord, to whom you gave fame, that is life (Omnes quidem libelli mei, domine, quibus tu famam, id est uitam, dedisti).”

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132 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature That power might be perverse is the “unspeakable” message that gets unsaid time and again, much like the name “Earinus” also gets not-­spoken repeatedly. Everyone says how much they love the fact that Caesar saves them from shame and humiliation, but in the case of Epigrams 9.5 and 9.7 this “everyone” is a strange “us” given that it is not “we, free citizens” but the group includes especially “we dominated bodies, we slaves.” If the difference between Jove and Domitian has been blurring, so too is the distinction between slave and free too porous.173 The free are celebrating not just imperial freedmen, but even imperial slaves. And these high-­status slaves are celebrated as themselves god-­like. Meanwhile the free identify with under-­privileged slaves. But the celebrated slave is castrated. And yet we avoid talking about that. Instead, we talk about how a castration that befalls slaves haunts us and makes us identify with the normally abject figure of the boy born into slavery. Everyone’s role is unstable and impossible to pin down, everyone, of course but for the nomen that sits in the middle of it all, the nomen we can, will, and must say over and over again: Caesar. The name may remain the same, but its self-­sameness is a political construct: there have been Caesars, there will be Caesars. And the reality of “Caesar” is that his name is fixed, but he is not self-­identical. Different men occupy the name. And the role itself is simultaneously stabilizing and destabilizing. It holds everything together by enforcing a rigid hierarchy that is, at least from the standpoint of the typical aristocrat, frequently humiliating. Caesar is destined to name the good father and the obscene father simultaneously. But our self-­ censorship papers over the latter with a variety of texts on which are written a variety of little poems that exalt one of the Janus faces while forever stumbling up against the notion of the other face that is hidden. And it is hidden in the same way that the emperor’s nakedness is hidden in the Hans Christian Andersen story. That is, it is hidden only as a matter of convention, (not-)hidden, indeed, precisely so that the power that props up convention itself might be upheld.174

173  But a provocative identification with the figure of the slave is more generally available in the Epigrams. Fitzgerald, 2007:104: “ The slave, figure or individual, stands at the center of a connected set of themes having to do with the relation between the poet and his poems, collected in a book that circulates as a commodity under his name.” 174  Žižek, 1991:12 on the new clothes: “This is why, perhaps, the time has come to abandon the usual praise of the child’s gesture and rather to conceive it as the prototype of the innocent chatterbox who — by blurting out what should remain unspoken if the exiting intersubjective network is to retain its consistency — unknowingly and involuntarily sets off the catastrophe.”

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iii.  The kindest cut: Epigrams 9.16–17 The Earinus story continues with two poems about a hair offering made to Aesculapius. Further details of the moment can be derived by a careful examination of Statius’ Siluae 3.4. And we will ourselves be reading that poem later. But for present purposes we can rely on Henriksén’s thoughtful and concise summary of the situation: “[F]rom Statius it is quite clear that Earinus, had he not been a eunuch, would now have been a young man . . . [T]he hair-­offering thus corresponds to the depositio barbae, which was impossible in the case of a eunuch. He would now have been 16–18 years old . . . and eagerly awaited the release from boyhood.”175 We are celebrating the “coming into manhood” of an unmanned man, of a man who will never be “a real man.” In fact, one is free to doubt that this particular rite of passage will change anything at all. The castration was meant to keep him forever boyish. A man who has a eunuch in his bedroom need not consult the calendar in order to determine when it will be time for this dalliance to end. He can ignore the problem of the advent of manhood for the junior partner within the normative paradigms of pederasty. And so, should Caesar wish it, this moment need not have to be anything other than something like a particularly lavish birthday party. We are presented with a celebration that hides its own backstory. The party hats and streamers are out, but all of the noise and hoopla is doing as much to conceal a situation as it is to reveal one. The emperor forbade castration, and we celebrated that decree repeatedly. But here we have a castrated person in the emperor’s bedroom. And this person is celebrating “becoming a man.” But he will never become a man. He cannot offer both beard and locks, just locks. And it is awesome. “We are all Earinus” is another way of exploring the moment. That is, it is great to be part of Domitian’s world and we are lucky to be his subjects. But, simultaneously, as subjected subjects, we have been castrated. All questions about beautiful heads of hair (caesaries) are to be referred back to Caesar, the head of state. We celebrate our happiness and our freedom and moments where something new and different happens, but we are not exactly happy or free and nothing much is going to change unless and until Domitian says so. And, in that sense, even if Domitian “frees” Earinus/us from a particularly humiliating kind of service, that does not really change the fact that we are still, basically, unfree. This painful 175 Henriksén, 2012:55.

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134 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature problematic in its own way helps to explain why Martial spends extra time and energy on the haircut and “chops off ” the scene of more relevant celebration within the psychic economy I have just outlined. Specifically, Earinus does seem to have become a freedman. But one has to infer this. Martial’s “poetics of jubilation”—a rather dolorous poetics, when one looks closely at it—never makes it to “the real party” where Earinus really becomes “his own man”. Instead, we celebrate the “castration party” that constantly reminds us of cutting and chopping and powerlessness even as it claims that something heavenly is going on. Consilium formae, speculum, dulcisque capillos Pergameo posuit dona sacrata deo ille puer tota domino gratissimus aula, nomine qui signat tempora uerna suo. Felix, quae tali censetur munere tellus! Nec Ganymedeas mallet habere comas.   Mirror, beauty’s counsel, and sweet tresses did deposit as gifts sacred to Pergamum’s god THAT BOY most pleasing to the lord in the whole court, he whose name signs the vernal times with his own name. Blessed land that wins its rank with such a gift! Nor would it rather have the locks of Ganymede. Martial, Epigrams 9.16

The “sweet tresses” are sent, along with a mirror, to Aesculapius. In Statius, this same god is said to have supervised the castration of Earinus.176 Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug: the cause is the cure (is the cause). The gifts complete a circuit in which the subject is swept into a Domitianic configuration that “makes him who he is” while also unmaking him. And, meanwhile, the surface of the text and, presumably, of the mirror, celebrates the shimmering beauty of the process and product. The remainder of the poem consists of the sort of panegyrical nonsense that has by now become familiar. And by nonsense I am not being dismissive: if you get rid of the nonsense and the trifles, you get rid of that which 176  See Statius, Siluae 3.4.69–70.

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is most essential about the project as a whole, namely the little bit of signification that exceeds the simple “message” of the poetry. The next couplet has as the opening words of each line ille and nomine: “that one” is “the guy with the name” (as before). “That one” is the favorite boy in the master’s palace: ille puer tota domino gratissimus aula (9.16.3). Every word is a problem, many of them are old problems for us by now. Aula might be a normal contemporary use, but previous generations would balk. Dominus is done from the perspective of the boy, but it is also “our” perspective too in a moment like this: Domitian is “the Master” of the slave-­boy, of servile Romans.177 Gratissimus indicates that the palace is full of pretty boys. One is prettiest. And this is our fate too, a striving to be the most pleasing to the master among his many subjects? There are other possible horizons for human striving, but not at this juncture in this poem. Puer: yes, yes, and no. He is a boy. He is a slave. He is also not a boy any longer if he is cutting off his hair. The word undoes the hair-­cut and reminds us that there is another cut which cuts deeper and whose effects cannot be remedied at the barber’s shop. The next line tells us who the boy is—as if we could not guess already . . . —by turning the name into the old riddle: “Spring.” He is the one “who puts his seal on the spring with his name.” The perspective is forced, and pointedly so: the emperor’s boyfriend is the one who gives spring its name. This is a “bold” poetic move only to the extent that flattery is brave. But it is not mere, incidental flattery since it reproduces a structure upon which Martial regularly relies. Poetic making and imperial making converge: making, remaking, writing, these all conspire to produce a “springtime for Rome.”178 What we see here we will see again in Statius’ Siluae. In this hyper-­vivid present, what had been effects are now primary causes. And if imperial power can rework the world, we are also celebrating a contagiousness of that same power: the subjected subjects of power turn into new mini-­ causes in their own right. Because there is a Domitian, someone else is able to be in a position to give spring its (unmetrical) name. The bent syntax of the opening pair of words returns: Earinos means spring-­like, “of spring.” But the adjective determines the  noun in this verse: “spring” is signed, sealed, and delivered in its 177  The issue is more general and by no means affects just this passage. “As dominus the emperor puts his subjects in the position of slaves, a position they can mitigate only by reminding themselves that they are masters of slaves themselves.” (Fitzgerald, 2007:131) 178  “Winter for Poland and France . . .”

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136 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature radical-­self-­identity as a function of the signet ring worn by the lovely boy who goes by the name “Springy.” “Spring” is so called because the boy signs it with “his own name” (nomine . . . suo). But the suo that has been held off until the end is another absurdity at which one absolutely must not laugh. The name is not really “his own”: it is a pet name, a name that effectively marks him as the pet he is, a eunuch for whom life will ever be “spring like” because his body will not be allowed to mature. The bitter ironies that are sung so vociferously continue in the next and final couplet: “Lucky the land . . . ” Felix when used of tellus means fertile. We are claiming that a thing cut off from a castrato is going to be fruitful for the land.179 Meanwhile censetur is related to censor.180 Domitian, whose moral legislation forbade castration and therewith guaranteed the births of many crops of children in many cities is the censor behind this verb both literally and figuratively. But we are also censoring the very idea of castration throughout even as this repressed sense—viz., the obscene father wants to destroy my genitals . . . —returns most insistently. It returns, indeed, as a celebration of the punishment as seen reflected in the left-­ right swap of a mirror image. The punishment is a reward. Compulsively, repetitively, the same traumatic happy scenes, all over again: Epigrams 9.17.181 The same elements are assembled and the story is retold in even higher style. Latonae uenerande nepos, qui mitibus herbis Parcarum exoras pensa breuesque colos, hos tibi laudatos domino, rata uota, capillos ille tuus Latia misit ab urbe puer; Addidit et nitidum sacratis crinibus orbem, quo felix facies iudice tuta fuit. 179  Garthwaite, 1993:92: “[T]hus, in its repeated use, first describing the land that receives Earinus’ gift (felix . . . tellus, ‘fortunate the land’, 9.16.5), and then the beauty of the boy himself (felix facies, ‘fortunate appearance,’ 9.17.6), we may again detect an ironic contrast between the symbolic significance of Earinus’ name and the sterility of the person himself.” 180  Lewis and Short: “I To tax, assess, rate, estimate. A In reference to the census (v. census). 1 Of the censor (v. censor).” 181  Rimell, 2008:11: “[A]n important marker of Martial’s aesthetic is the repetition of a few key words within the same book, often but not always between poems that are obviously linked in some way, in different contexts and to different effect, so that the word might mean something else entirely from what it started out meaning. In this way, epigrammatic miscellany and fragmentation are held and focused in a single signifier, itself split by repetition and repositioning – a defining shrinking down or concentration.”

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Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not  137 Tu iuuenale decus serua, ne pulchrior ille in longa fuerit quam breuiore coma. August grandchild of Latona, you who with healing herbs prevail upon the Fates, their wool, their short threads, To you, lord (dominus), his celebrated tresses, a prayer granted, that boy of yours sends them from Rome. He offers as well as his sacred locks a mirror’s gleaming circle: It approved, and so his blessed good looks were preserved. Do you save as well his youthful splendor: let not his beauty have been greater with long rather than short hair. Martial, Epigrams 9.17

Aesculapius is addressed. He is described as one who wins longer lives from the Fates. We can gloss the somewhat rarified sentiment and replace it with the more banal notion of a request for a long, healthy life for all concerned. More of the same, more of the wonderful, exquisite sameness, please. After the “to whom” we get the “what” in the next two couplets: the hair and the mirror. The poem notionally accompanies the tresses themselves: hos . . . capillos . . . Here they are, look at them, right here in (far off) Pergamum. The boy is more remote and (back there) in Rome: ille tuus puer. That boy of yours, you remember him . . . The hair is an offering for a wish fulfilled and a boon granted: rata uota. The hair is also described as laudatos: it’s much-­praised, just see the previous poem, for example. And it is sent to you, lord: Hos tibi laudatos domino, rata uota, capillos . . .  (9.17.3). Aesculapius as dominus as Caesar “works” within this matrix as another token of the identity that precludes difference, and the signet ring that seals shut the open, blooming possibilities of the world.182 Aesculapius “heals,” but Aesculapius was also there for the first castrating cut. Aesculapius saw the loss of manhood. Aesculapius now sees the (false)

182  Domino is tricky enough here to induce Ker, 1920 to render the line as, “These locks by his master praised” even though laudatus + ablative would be abstract cause (“owing to . . .”) where laudatus + ab + ablative gives agency. But Ker’s embrace of a “grammatical error” captures something accurate about the situation: Caesar is here even if he isn’t here and the god-­talk is always also emperor-­talk.

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138 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature token of (a never-­to-­come) maturity return to him. The boy is cut for Caesar—even though Caesar is the one who will prohibit cutting—and Caesar allows the boy to cut his hair. The “wish granted” and “vow fulfilled” of rata uota is left quite opaque. He hoped not to die young? Fair enough, given the high mortality rates of the age. But, because opaque, the contents of the wish start overflowing with meaning. The rata uota that Aesculapius usually hears and fulfills would relate to recovery from illness. But, who could offer a fresher, healthier face than Earinus? Just ask the mirror that comes along with the locks. An obvious—and obviously unnameable “illness” is the castration. But one absolutely cannot say that this is an illness: it is a blessing. Instead, one (almost) says, “Thank you for the cut and for the cut. Thank you for making me what I am and for keeping me what I am.” Something like this prayer can be found in Petronius, but it reads very differently there: “Thank you for enabling me to survive long enough to get a haircut that frees me from sexual tyranny. Today I am too old to be a man’s plaything any longer.”183 A prayer of this sort may well have been on the lips of the historical individual named Earinus, but his poetic double crafted by Martial is conjured as someone who is glad to have made it this far and thrilled to still be inside the orbit of a symbolic system in which being dominated is a lovely thing and the answer to one’s prayers. The mirror that came first and slipped past us in the previous poem gets a longer take in this poem.184 This time felix does not describe the happy/fertile land of Pergamum which is so blessed because of the gift of the hair. Instead, the happiness/fecundity is “embodied” by the imago of the fair face of Earinus. The mirror “judged” him and allowed him to judge himself and so to please Domitian (quo iudice). And so everyone was happy: boy and Caesar (and poet). The reflection enables self-­ coordination and self-­subjection. It is worth recalling at this juncture that the “out of place” epigram at the head of the whole of Book 9 was itself interested in epigram-­and-­imago, aesthetic value, and the coordination of social possibilities. When one reflects upon oneself, one ideally sees oneself being seen by Caesar and appraised/censored (censere) by him. Our joy, our felicitas can 183  See Petronius, Satyricon 75: “In order to get a bearded beak the swifter, I would rub oil on my lips by lamplight (et ut celerius rostrum barbatum haberem, labra de lucerna ungebam).” Earinus’ castration guarantees that he will never grow this beard. 184 Martial, Epigrams 9.17.5–6: “In addition to the consecrated locks was a gleaming circle: its judgement secured the face’s felicity (addidit et nitidum sacratis crinibus orbem, | quo felix facies iudice tuta fuit).”

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be indexed by the degree to which our self-­indexing succeeds. Not coincidentally, Martial’s poems see themselves being seen by Dominus Domitian. The shiny orb of verses always reveals a healthy glow when it is a matter of showing oneself showing the palace to the lord. Happy happy joy joy. The more that things do not change, the more they ought to stay the same. Something like that is the message of the poem’s final couplet. The rata uota that occasioned the gift are supplanted by a new prayer to the god. It is a bit stronger than a prayer, it is a command. The god is enjoined by the poet who is giving orders on behalf of the (multiply) speculative pleasures of Domitian: “Preserve the boy’s good looks!” Of course, Earinus would never lose that first bloom. He is forever fair and forever young. The god’s job is to make sure that he is his prettiest and not merely pretty. The poet holds up a sort of mirror to the god and bids the divinity to “compose himself ” according to a strictly circumscribed radiant circle of possibilities: “Be yourself by making sure that the boy stays his best self.” Self-­identity via self-­limitation: boy, poet, and god are all figured as the subjected subjects of the Domitianic eye for pleasure. And Domitian never had to command anything. Poets will order themselves to produce joyous poetry in which gods are ordered to produce joy and mirrors reflect only the smiling face of a boy who got his wish . . . Castration: just what the poet ordered of the doctor.

iv.  The poetry of (ir)reverence: Epigrams 9.36 and its environs There will be a gap before we catch sight of Earinus again and for the last time. The tone has shifted. This is an ironic, humorous episode set in heaven. Jove and Ganymede are in dialogue, and Earinus’ hair occasions their banter. The heavenly dialogue is “too earthy,” and this is played for comic effect.185 Perhaps a comic desublimation of the gods is exactly the place we should end up after all of the over-­the-­top praise of Domitian that has come before. We observe at one and the same time a hyperbolic earthly discourse and a deprecatory relationship to the heavenly: “I already have a Jove, why would I need another?” The Olympians have  been rendered very vulnerable to this sort of talk. Nevertheless, 185  Lorenz,  2002:136 on Epigrams 4.3: “Dass derselbe Vorfall in zwei gänzlich verschiedenen Epigrammen behandelt wird, ist typisch für Martial, der in den Kaisergedichten mehrfach komische Szenen mit erhabener Panegyrik verbindet.”

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140 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature the joking tone should not distract us from a number of shared conceits that concern power and pleasure. And this comic poem even helps to flesh out some of the elements of this discourse. But the discourse has only swapped out its mask, not its structure. The censored message beneath the joke is no different from the censored message beneath the panegyric. Viderat Ausonium posito modo crine ministrum Phryx puer, alterius gaudia nota Iouis: ‘Quod tuus, ecce, suo Caesar permisit ephebo, tu permitte tuo, maxime rector’ ait; ‘Iam mihi prima latet longis lanugo capillis, iam tua me ridet Iuno uocatque uirum.’ Cui pater aetherius ‘Puer o dulcissime,’ dixit, ‘non ego, quod poscis, res negat ipsa tibi: Caesar habet noster similis tibi mille ministros tantaque sidereos uix capit aula mares; at tibi si dederit uultus coma tonsa uiriles, quis mihi, qui nectar misceat, alter erit?’ The Ausonian steward lately seen, his locks just set down, Ganymede, the Phrygian youth and famed delight of the Other Jove says, “Oh see what your Caesar allows to his young fellow! Do allow the same to yours, governor supreme. Now my cheeks’ first down lays hidden only by long locks. Now your Juno mocks me and calls me a man (uir).” To him the heavenly father says: “O sweetest boy, Don’t blame me. The situation itself denies your demand. Our Caesar has a thousand stewards that are your match, and so great a palace can hardly hold so many heavenly fellows. But if a haircut should give you a manly mien, who will I have to mix my ambrosia as your replacement?” Martial, Epigrams 9.36

We have advanced in narrative time from Epigrams 9.17, but perhaps not so very much. In the first line we have a someone who catches sight of the recently deposited hair offering made by Earinus. We then learn that this

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observer is Ganymede, the famous—and infamous—plaything of “the other Jove” (alterius gaudia nota Iouis; 9.36.2). The narrator has turned “the original Jove” into “the other Jove.” The idea that “Domitian is a lot like Jupiter” has been pushed so far towards its limit that we now have trouble looking at Jupiter himself without thinking that he sure is reminiscent of Domitian. The free swapping between vehicle and tenor may well be “comic,” but the politics of the joke and the politics of the earnest version converge: there is nothing outside of or beyond Domitian. If you look past Domitian or beyond him—but why would you ever want to do that . . . ?—you will only find another version of him waiting for you: alter idem. The second is the same. The determination is also a negation: the same, but not exactly the same. The god is Caesar sublated, and only then become himself. Ganymede knows in his heart that one might wish instead to be down there instead of up here. For, it turns out, that Ganymede is a bit past it and everyone is letting him know it too. He’s got down on his cheeks. Juno jeers. She taunts him by hurling a slur at him and calling him a man (9.36.6). Every male youth, at least in Martial’s normalizing poetic universe, would like to grow up to be a man. But for castration, one stands a decent chance of succeeding, as well. The problem being, naturally, that so few of us can actually keep our balls, if we ever had them to begin with. Ganymede, who is on the threshold of escaping his terrible wonderful lot, is perhaps wondering if he will be allowed finally to grow up. One way to read this: “Please, can I cut my hair and shave my beard and so be done with your pederastic predation?” But the “proper” conceit of the verses, insists the narrative flow of the poem, is the following instead: a naive god has just envied a fortunate mortal. The poem veers away from the psychic life of Ganymede and the sort of emotions a person in his position might feel by placing a new witticism on the surface of the text instead. Jove says, “Sorry, no can do.” There is only one Ganymede up here in heaven, but Domitian’s palace has a thousand like him: similis tibi mille. Ouch. The unique, precious world of myth is turned into a collection of mass-­ produced consumables for princes. If you were lucky enough to be in the palace instead of up in heaven you would see one thousand silver cups with the Ganymede story embossed on them. And each cup would be carried by a Phryx puer, a Ganymede alter, as it were. It’s a heavenly collection of beauties, after all

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142 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature (sidereos mares). Each mortal cup-­bearer is substitute that Domitian has in spades but one that “the Other Jove” nevertheless lacks. But, in contradistinction to the thousand Ganymedes in the palace and the thousand-­and-­ first up in heaven, there is one and only one Earinus, the copy that is more original than the original. The “punchline” to the poem goes like this: “If you cut your hair, where would I get another boy to mix my ambrosia?” This is a deeply depressing climax to a thoroughly depressing poem, “light touch” or no. Ganymede finds himself trapped in the glorious realm of myth. Ganymede is on the threshold of becoming a normal, autonomous member of the community. He is becoming a man, and a haircut might well let him manifest his new virility and claim to autonomy. But Ganymede will be dominated forever because Jove feels like dominating him forever, even though, as time goes on, this seems all the more stupid and ridiculous. Juno laughs harder and harder (because she too is angrier and angrier). Meanwhile, back on earth, Earinus got his haircut, but nobody is going to call him uir. If Ganymede is hoping that “someday soon” he can escape—but that day will never come  .  .  .  —Earinus got what Ganymede can never have—because Ganymede is, after all, no Earinus . . . —only to learn what was obvious already: Earinus himself is trapped in an endless, sterile Spring. The poem will make you laugh until you cry. Let us look at the poems that cluster around our last glimpse of Earinus. As a collection they touch upon many of the chief topics that we have explored relative to Book 9 as a whole and so, accordingly, of the Epigrams as a whole. Poetry, power, and the “playful” intersection of the two are emphasized. But the play is no mere play, and the poems sing of the beauty-­and-­horror of this game upon which the epigrammatic (nugatory) everything has been staked. If we begin in medias res at 9.33 we will find Not-­Martial joking with Not-­Horace about Not-­Vergil’s dick. “If you hear a burst of applause, Flaccus, in some bath, | know for a certainty that there is to be found Maro’s cock (Audieris in quo, Flacce, balneo plausum, | Maronis illic esse mentulam scito.).” Little epigram mocks an epic penis while middle-­man of many modes is invited to look on with a laugh. It’s all ribald fun, a fun predicated on playing the high-­and-­low game. But the game itself is rather static: the base body referent is presupposed, it is really the players who are the mobile tokens. Today you are singing of arms and a man, tomorrow you are a well-­armed man. That’s what all the fuss is about: “Dude, you should have seen the thing, it was EPIC!” The mentula of itself as either word or thing is shameful, and of itself, as either word or thing, it can drag anyone down into the muck. And, laughs the narrator,

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“We’re all in this together, my fellow bards.” Orpheus, prepare to get eaten by a bear. In Epigrams 9.34 Jove looks down at the earth and laughs. Jupiter and the gods are enjoying themselves at a party with nectar and all. Ganymede is surely just outside the frame. The king of the gods laughs at “Ida’s lying tomb.”186 Out with the old as well as with the old lies: the Flavian temple to Jupiter makes a mockery of tradition, says this mocking poem about a mocker. The devil is again in the complicit details. Iuppiter Idaei risit mendacia busti,| dum uidet Augusti Flauia templa poli: “Jove laughed at Ida’s lying tomb | when he looks upon the Flavian temple of the Augustan heaven.” (9.34.1–2). Whatever epigrammatic inscription might have been on Zeus’ Tomb, this epigram effaces it and effectively mocks it as an “empty epigram.” Jove lives, and he lives more or less precisely because Caesar lives. The temple is not Jove’s temple but rather “the Flavian temple” (to Jove, sotto voce). We are looking at the “Flavian temple of the Augustan god.”187 Jupiter is laughing at the lying Cretans for burying him, but the Flavian joke is on the god if he thinks he can escape Caesarian power-­plays: the “august” qualities of the king of the gods only accrue to him because Flavian power gestures towards the self-­siring power-­plays of Octavian. “The vault of heaven” is an arc under which lies Roman imperial history. And this history is self-­mythologizing. And, given that the imperial myth that has real power behind it, “myth proper” has been put on notice: new gods are headed for heaven. There is no mountain higher than the Palatine hill, Olympians. The poem itself is constructed around the empty tomb of Graeco-­ Roman religion. This is “funny.” The formal emptiness of the domain beyond Flavian immanence allows us to play with the gods. Big dicks, little dicks, no dicks: what’s in a nomen, Vergil? What do you say, Earinus? Anything from you, Jove? Martial’s verses play the run-­around game of hollowing out the world so that the self-­serving and self-­siring discourse of Caesarean omnipotence can be free to play its game. This is the poetic munus offered to the editor of the munera: gifts, giving, and showing are all

186  Henriksén, 2012:150 directs us to Callimachus’ In Iouem 8–9: ‘Κρῆτεϲ ἀεὶ ψεῦϲται’· καὶ γὰρ τάφον, ὦ ἄνα, ϲεῖο|Κρῆτεϲ ἐτεκτήναντο· ϲὺ δ’ οὐ θάνεϲ, ἐϲϲὶ γὰρ αἰεί. Here one sees the requisite ingredients to appreciate “the lie”: Zeus is eternal; the Cretans are liars; they lied when they said he died and was buried in their land. 187  Says Henriksén,  2012:33 of this use of polus here, “The expression is unparalleled, but cf. 9.34.2 . . . The context requires polus not to be understood as the usual metonymy for the abode of the gods (like, e.g., 5.56.1), but as metonymy for those abiding there.”

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144 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature multiply impacted terms. The epigrammatic quip that closes the poem seals the deal: only a blind man would not want to be father to an Oedipal son. Or as Jove puts it, “‘You gave me a monument at Knossos | but look at how much better it is to be Caesar’s father.’ (‘Gnosia uos’ inquit ‘nobis monumenta dedistis: | cernite, quam plus sit, Caesaris esse patrem.’ 9.34.6–7).” How much better it is to lose one’s name entirely in the last line. How much better it is to have it doubly disappear in the second line. Jupiter is lucky that his name is the first word in the poem, because, after that he becomes laughably small: a little man at a party chuckling at others’ vacuous lies, the very lies that undermine his own stature. Sandwiched between two divine dinner parties we find Epigrams 9.35, a dinner-­poem done in the narrator’s voice. Philomusus is invited to dinner on the following conditions . . . . As Henriksén points out, this is a familiar type of poem in Martial and in other poets.188 This jocular poem insists that the friend is welcome only if he will stop inventing fictions. And so we are playing a real-­and-­fake game again. The poem is not really about a real meal, but you can “really have” the poem-­meal if you, fake name and all, will stop loving the muses long enough to dispense with your artes and just shut up and eat: tolle tuas artes . . . . (9.35.12). The last words give the punchline: nil, Philomuse, noui. Nothing new from the Muse-­ lover! Nothing revolutionary, poets: no res nouae.189 Do not use your imaginations to cook up stories, and you can taste some fine cookin.’ Too much musing in Philomusus’ case entails a specific collection of “novelties” that he likes to recount: he claims to be exceptionally well informed about the empire, especially when it comes to Rome’s enemies, their plans and troop movements, as well as the results of Roman battles against them. He also likes to pretend to be “in the know” relative to the emperor’s cultural plans as well. Obviously, we are talking about a self-­important know-­it-­all of the sort that is not necessarily unfamiliar in the present world. And, really, most dinner parties are better without them. But, nevertheless, this poem keeps very specific company in Book 9 and its message cannot be confined to the 188  Henriksén, 2012:155. Similarly, we seem to be specifically thinking about Anthologia Graeca 11.44, a relatively straight-­laced invitation poem and addressed to L. Calpurnius Piso who is called a μουϲοφιλὴϲ ἕταροϲ. Μουϲοφιλήϲ is a hapax, so, yes, we do have to think about that poem. 189  The thematic conspectus of topics of rumor presented by Greenwood, 1998:302–303 is striking for a specific omission. Martial may traffic in all sorts of gossip, but political gossip is not really his thing.

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narrow articulation of a joke: “Shut up about politics, already. You are making most of it up anyway!” The thing is, if Philomusus is not making quite all of it up, then he is exposing himself as an independent political thinker. The more sensible thing to do, by inference, is to keep quiet and to wait for Caesar to tell us “something new,” which, real or fake, will turn into the kernel of our various stories about the empire. Artes ought to come second, not first. And this is what the narrator says: if you want to eat, learn how and when to be a real Muse-­Lover. Narres nil noui, no novel tales, please. Meanwhile “novelties” are in fact afoot right about now in the really real Rome: Parthenius, Maximus, and Stephanus will soon enough cook up the res nouae of assassination and that will be the end of Our Jove. The next poem is our last view of Earinus. So, the order of topics in 9.34–36 is Caesar’s party, Martial’s party, and then Jove’s party. “The party’s over, folks” when we get to Epigrams 9.37, a poem that wheels us in the opposite direction from the sorts of warm, fuzzy association we are expected to have when we think about pretty Earinus. After three loosely coordinated portraits of male homosociality, we see an attack on a woman and her body. This is a sort of after-­dinner aperitif that is quite bitter to the taste. The narrator addresses “Galla.” We have already seen a “Galla” above. In Epigrams 9.4 somebody had bought her silence. This seems to be a different (generic) woman since now she is old and disgusting, and she is the sort who would need to pay for pleasure rather than being a potential source of pleasures for another.190 After our meditations on the eternal spring of Earinus, we catalog a woman in winter. The boy’s hair was put in a box and shipped off to a god. The old woman’s hair lives in a box, and perhaps only Pluto would be interested in it. She is bald. She is toothless. She does not even have her own eyebrows. It takes an entire cosmetics counter to get her made up to leave the house. The narrator is shaming and scolding her: “I see who and what you are, and it is disgusting. You cannot hide from me.” A not so innocent point of comparison: see the way that Caesar can see into all of us: “that god looks deep into our hearts (interius mentes inspicit ille deus, Epigrams 9.28.8).” Martial’s narrator has the same power. The abuse has up to this point been of the public surface of the woman which is false, and it is the product of the sorts of artes that Ovid’s

190 There are plenty of addresses to Gallae in Martial: 2.25, 2.35, 3.51, 3.54, 3.90, 4.38, 4.58 . . . 

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146 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature cosmetological poems inculcate.191 But then the narrator makes a moral attack on her private person: “Where is your reverence for your cunt?!” (et te nulla mouet cani reuerentia cunni; 9.37.7). Henricksén suggests that what might otherwise have been a “distinguished” white-­haired thing has been plucked for the sake of decadent pleasure. No matter what the specific “joke” about sex and age might be in this line, I want to linger with the word reuerentia. It is not at all common in Martial’s poems. When we see the word, it clusters around Caesar. And, similarly, it is the sort of word that attaches itself to the ethical self-­defense of the epigrams themselves.192 Why should one show reuerentia to a cunnus anyway? The word cunnus of itself is “irreverent.” Whenever it is heard, reuerentia has likely just flown out the window. That is exactly the issue that the preface to the first book addresses: “If I say cunnus, please don’t think that I have somehow violated the reuerentia personarum, not even in the case of the lowliest personae.” The problem here is that Galla’s self-­relation to her own body destroys the reuerentia that she should be showing towards her own persona. If she respected herself, she would not . . . what? She would not have a cunt, presumably.193 Whether or not she is depilating it is somewhat to the side of the question. The situation is a trap: if this word exists for her body, then there is no reuerentia. A “proper lady” plays the part/wears the mask of a woman without a cunt. Reuerentia is a Caesar-­and-­poetry word. And this particular poem comes at the end of a cluster of poems about Caesar and poetry. The same poems are obsessed with proper society. They also celebrate youthful

191  See Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.209–3.210: “Let the lover not catch the cosmetics kit set out on the table. A dissimulated art is the face’s friend (non tamen expositas mensa deprendat amator | pyxidas: ars faciem dissimulata iuuat).” Galla has plenty of cosmetics (pyxides), but Martial as anti-­lover has caught her (deprendere). 192  The passages: the poetic apology from the preface that said “no harm done to real people” (cum salua infimarum quoque personarum reuerentia ludant; 1.pr); thank you for reading me, I feel reuerentia towards you (7.52); Caesar, you revere what is right (11.5.1); and, a poem we will look at soon enough, Caesar’s courtiers evince reuerentia nostri in 9.79. See pages 148–49. 193  Sullivan, 1991:202: “Humour is a way of venting anxiety and aggression; it is difficult to overlook in the epigrams a pervasive fear and resentment of female sexuality.” Sullivan, 1991:203: “Martial reads the female body as a text, looking for codes of subversion and negative messages about the eternal female within.” Sullivan,  1991:209: “A more enlightening . . . approach would be to interpret Martial’s attacks on women in general as a form of political pornography. Martial, like Juvenal, is concerned with power and therefore with the fear of losing it.” Sullivan, 1991:210: “Martial’s sexual attitudes then, at least as they are expressed in his epigrams, are to be regarded as part and parcel of his hierarchical vision of Roman society.”

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bodies. Galla serves as the abject antithesis to all of this: reuerentia is gone, her body is disgusting, her artes do not celebrate something wonderful, instead these arts barely paint over a bodily catastrophe. Throughout the book we have been revering Earinus’ castration, while also avoiding talking about his castration, while also talking about how horrible the castration of young boys is . . . Suddenly we are loathing Galla’s horrible genitals. Were there any reverence, we would not hear about them at all. Reverence, then, hides the fact of castration, it celebrates it even. Reverence is the art that is deaf to the ugliness of the horrors of the material world. It is deaf to the idea that something traumatic might have already occurred within it. It is deaf to the idea that anything new might happen in it. And so, the poem’s “climax.” A reverent cock is deaf to an irreverent cunt: “You can promise me enough money to buy my way into the aristocracy, but my dick can’t hear you. | It may be one-­eyed, but it can still see you (Promittis sescenta tamen; sed mentula surda est, | et sit lusca licet, te tamen illa uidet; 9.37.9–10).” The narrator has his dick, you see, and so, real man that he is, he can rely on his dick and his dickish integrity to keep him from selling out, making a fortune, and losing his own reuerentia mentulae by sleeping with someone ugly. It’s messy. It’s illogical. It’s pornographic. And the combination of the three things is “her fault.” In Epigrams 9.4 something so disgusting happened with someone named Galla that we had to buy her silence. Now something revolting might happen, but no amount of money can make it happen. The narrator will never be complicit in his own humiliation. The stupid phrase reuerentia cunni embodies/bodies forth our very inability to really say what is on our mind. The wrong noun modifies reuerentia: the genitive that follows should be a person, not a person’s genitals.194 But a reductive, obscene pars pro toto logic structures our relationship to personhood when it comes to Galla, and, worse, when it comes to persons in the book more generally. The genital problem is the person problem is the political problem. And Earinus is the wonderful creature he is because he is who he isn’t, viz., “a real man.” The problem that hovers over Book 9 is Domitianic agony-­as-­ecstasy. We are living in an endless (and ossified) “revolutionary present” that overtops the dreary past with its unimpressive fictions about Mt. Olympus and its inhabitants. The year bears the emperor’s names in its months, the 194  Alternatively, the genitive should come from an abstract noun that embodies social values. Compare reuerentia recti, “esteem for what is right and proper,” in Epigrams 11.5.1.

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148 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature spring is named Earinus, and the winter is called Galla. What looks like frank speech aimed at Galla is in fact Parrhasian speech that crushes and so renders impotent the disgusting fact that Caesar has bought us body and soul, and he demands that we be blind to the fact that we are revering something that we would ordinarily think to be vile, namely the ugly old “cuntishness” of the whole fucking situation that our great grandfathers would never have stood for. But, fortunately, the situation is not so dire that a few hundred paint-­pots full of fair verses can’t slap a good face on it. Just think about how pretty and happy that Earinus is. But the poetry says none of this. Instead, one reads, “Galla, you’re the worst!”

v.  The poetry of reverence: Epigrams 9.79 and its affines Reuerentia will make one more appearance in Book 9. We celebrate the Domitianic age in Epigrams 9.79. Like a number of the poems in this book, the very thing we say is great is precisely the thing we should be worried about. The celebration in Epigrams 9.79 arises out of the happy fact that in today’s Rome Domitian’s high-­placed slaves, his famuli, are not odious jerks. If we are to believe this poem, Rome used to hate the servile horde of imperial courtiers, but today things are different: “Rome formerly loathed the leaders’ throng of servants | and the palace’s haughty brow (Oderat ante ducum famulos turbamque priorem | et Palatinum Roma supercilium; 9.79.1–2).” In famuli and “throng” (turba) we have the hatred itself as well as an evasion of the same. That is, one does not declare a hate for imperial freedmen, the liberti of Nero. One instead hates a turba where the word libertorum has been suppressed. A direct discussion of imperial freedmen and other “low” types who had found themselves to be quite high because of their specific attachment to the imperial house would force us to linger with endless painful social paradoxes. That sort of conversation would involve too frank an appraisal of the actual social situation at Rome. One does not want to talk about how free men—including senators—at times have to yield the very sort of persons that, were the world as it should be, they could thrash with impunity. The thing is, the basic logic of this sociologically topsy-­turvey palace power structure remains utterly unchanged now that Nero is gone and will remain unchanged. This configuration describes imperial administration as such, an administration predicated

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upon the transfer of the functions of the state away from the senate and into the palace. Odi has become, amo, says this second Catullus: “But now all of your people feel such great love . . . (at nunc tantus amor cunctis, Auguste, tuorum est . . . ).” We all used to hate the members of the House of Caesar, but now we love everyone in the August House. In fact, we care more about Caesar’s house than we do about our own home (tantus amor . . . ut sit cuique suae cura secunda domus). This exercise in strained logic that strains credulity will continue. We love Caesar’s house more than our nearest and dearest because all of these people are so “reverent” of us. The next couplet is full of our “programmatic language,” but the program has been shifted away from Martial-­ and-­ the-­ emperor and over into the domain of Rome-­and-­the-­Palace: “So pacific are their hearts, such is their reverence for us, they are so peacefully calm, such modesty (pudor) can be seen on their faces (tam placidae mentes, tanta est reuerentia nostri,| tam pacata quies, tantus in ore pudor; 9.79.5–6).” Reverence and chastity and “interiority” all line up, as well they should, given what is posited about these terms in other passages. This poem offers a broader political statement than those others, though, because it does not assert that there is a good emperor who is seen in the mirror held up to him by the good poet, but instead there is one Good House that sees itself reflected in the Love that all of the other little houses feel for it. And people feel this love for The House because it sees us and recognizes us for who and what we are. Try not to think too hard about precisely what it sees—that is, us groveling like a turba and like famuli at the feet of the emperor and his minions—and this might almost work as a political philosophy. This political philosophy of seeping Caesarean affect is a more or less complete fiction. And as a fiction its job is to make sure that a discussion of the practical sociology of imperial adminstration does not break out. Instead, a poetic flight of fancy that includes an ostentatiously implausible collection of psychological assertions gives us our stand-­in for frank political speech. Poetry is feeding power by falling all over itself to lie so cleverly and so shamelessly about the modest pudor that is seen on the faces of the imperial staff. And this reverential regard of their reverence for us in the here and now exposes a cunt’s reverence as well as our bitter loathing in one and the same moment. But the poetry says none of this. Instead, one reads, “They used to hate us . . . ”

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L.  Oops: Book 10 i.  Forgetting how to count in Epigrams 10.1–2 The narrator had had it all sorted. He at least knew how to keep up appearances and say nice things to big people. But then Domitian died. Thereupon a big re-­sorting needs to be effected by one and all if the show is going to go on. And the man who epigrammatically celebrates this show is going to need to make sure he can keep on deriving benefits from singing the praises of the same old glorious principate that has lately become different.195 And yet Martial—that famous poet who celebrates life at Rome and is read throughout the empire—will end up leaving Rome. Martial’s tenth book is also his eleventh (or maybe it’s his twelfth . . . ). The book that we can read today tells us that we may have seen something that called itself Book 10, but that that book was not the official, legitimate Book 10. The thing you hold in your hands is the real deal.196 This “revise and resubmit” motif will prove to be a useful way of approaching the new poetic project that dares not to announce its newness.197 Instead we are told that what we have is a refined and improved project. The only thing that has happened of late, it would seem, is that a book got better. The death of a god goes unmentioned.198 Where once we lingered with politics and aesthetics, now we see just aesthetics. And this same “just aesthetics” emerges specifically because of an altered political situation.199 It is not the case that the artist is now free to indulge in “pure art” after the tyranny of the tyrant has ended. One is definitely invited to make a flattering inference of that sort. But we are not in the presence of a career that is about to be reborn. Instead we see one that is drawing to a close: Palatine Jupiter’s death will have done the poet few favors. 195  Geyssen, 1996:6: Martial’s “recantation” is in fact nothing so much as “subtle praise for another autocrat”. 196  This is a permutation on an older issue for the whole collection: which version of which text do you have? See Fitzgerald, 2007:143–146 (i.e., “How did you get your copy (and when do you read it)?”). 197  Rimell, 2008:65: “Epigrams 10 is in at the deep end, a fault line in Martial’s twelve-­book epic tome which teaches us to keep looking backwards and forwards, to (re)read everything differently.” Rimell, 2008:66–67: “While the ex-­tyrant’s existence is being erased from public monuments, Martial implicitly edits out his Domitian poems, backtracking and excising all that filthy flattery.” 198 Sullivan,  1991:45: “The assassination was a bungled and bloody affair . . . Of this ­treasonous event there is not a trace in Martial’s writings.” 199  Sullivan,  1991:58: “Book  X . . . contains some of Martial’s most mature and elaborate poetry. It is the book that justifies most succinctly his poetic revolution, which is nothing less than the elevation of the epigram, or rather the short poem, to a more valued place in the literary hierarchy.”

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Oops: Book 10  151

The economy of the project shifts. It will also end up reverting to older patterns. The first poem of the tenth book announces as much while also not announcing it. We do not have a letter to the emperor. We do not see a poem to the emperor. We do not address a friend. We find no claims about poetic immortality. Instead, we just talk about the materiality of the book in our hands. One will note that the second book opened similarly, but the second poem of that same book is full of praises for the Flavian era. Conversely this book will not attempt to explicitly situate itself vis à vis Roman power structures for quite some time. And wishing Trajan a northern triumph is about as far as we will ever go. One needs to wait until Epigrams 10.6 to find a Caesar poem. In Books 11 and 12 we will also find structures that remind us more of Books 1 and 2 and “Good Old Martial.” That is, there are a few early positive notices about the emperor, then the book gets down to work. The political winds have shifted quite significantly, but, as of the tenth book, Martial seems to be a bit slow in doing anything other than furling the old sails. Although we have yet to be informed that this Book 10 is really Book 10 v. 2.0, Epigrams 10.1 will invite us to generate any number of custom versions of this book that we wish. The net result would be a thorough obfuscation of the already indistinct issue of that first version of the book: there will be a proliferation of “other” versions and custom edits. The poem itself is a brief little joke poem: “If I as a book (liber) seem to be too long and the end is too late in coming, just read a few of the poems. That will turn me into a booklet (libellus). Three or four times my pages end with a short poem. Make me as brief as you please (si nimius uideor seraque coronide longus | esse liber, legito pauca: libellus ero. | terque quaterque mihi finitur carmine paruo | pagina: fac tibi me quam cupis ipse breuem; 10.1).” The narrator is the book itself, not “that famous Martial.” In fact, “that famous Martial,” or at least his books, may have gotten too big for himself or, at any rate, too big for our tastes. And so we are free to cut him down to size. It’s all about you, the reader, and “doing as you please” and “consulting your own interests” (fac tibi) rather than the mastery of a master craftsman. Naturally, authorial self-­assertion will appear before too long, but that is not where we start. We start with this teasing invitation to “make your own libellus.”200 Even the initial designation of the book as liber sticks out a bit for those with Alexandrian tastes. The self-­introduction in Epigrams 1.1 strongly fused 200  Fitzgerald,  2007:157: “Book 10 is ‘dedicated’ not to an emperor, but to the lector.” Fitzgerald, 2007:158: “Having hitched his name to a fallen star, Martial will survive through his readers, rather than by virtue of the association with Domitian which he vaunts

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152 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature the name Martial with the word libellus: “Here he is, the man you are looking for, world-­famous Martial, renowned for his eloquent little books of epigrams . . . (Hic est quem legis | ille, quem requiris, | toto notus in orbe Martialis | argutis epigrammaton libellis . . . )” Now we are reading “a book” and not “Martial.” It is also not clear that we sought this book out as we once upon a time were keen to get our hands on libelli of that famous author. And, now that it is in our hands, we are perhaps feeling a bit of regret for whatever efforts we did put forth: “You seem rather long, Mr Book. And, as I read you, the coronis that lets me know that this is all over seems to be very late in coming . . . ” Martial is shrinking back down to epigrammatic size. He is ostentatiously doing so, giving pride of place to a claim of humility. Let us start with a little joke about a little ol’ book. The hand that polished off the poem that opened Book 9 by closing it with the turgid phrase inuicta quidquid condidit manus, caeli est (“whatever the unconquered hand establishes belongs to heaven”) seems to itself have been lopped off. The second poem of the tenth book tells us that this is the second version of the tenth book. Again, the emphasis is resolutely literary and aesthetic.201 Festinata prior, decimi mihi cura libelli elapsum manibus nunc reuocauit opus. Nota leges quaedam, sed lima rasa recenti; pars noua maior erit: lector, utrique faue, lector, opes nostrae: quem cum mihi Roma dedisset, ‘Nil tibi quod demus maius habemus’ ait. ‘Pigra per hunc fugies ingratae flumina Lethes et meliore tui parte superstes eris. elsewhere.” But, as Borgo, 2003:27–28 stresses, the concrete dedicatee (“il destinario ufficiale”) had always also been a means of structuring a relationship relative to the anonymous reader. 201  See Rimell, 2008:68–76: there is a lot of Ovid in this poem and in Epigrams 10.5. And this definitely includes “exilic Ovid.” So, we are political all over again. In general, the frequent re-­appropriation of Ovidian exile poetry is much less charged for Fitzgerald who is content to follow Roman: the dissonance is not really a political issue. See Fitzgerald, 2007:186 and Roman, 2001:124.

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Oops: Book 10  153 Marmora Messallae findit caprificus, et audax dimidios Crispi mulio ridet equos: at chartis nec furta nocent et saecula prosunt, solaque non norunt haec monumenta mori.’   Initially over-­hasty, my care for my tenth libellus has now called back a work that slipped from my hands. You will read some familiar verses, but they are freshly polished. The new part is the bigger bit. Reader, be kind to each. Reader, you are my riches. When Rome gave you to me she said, “I have nothing greater to give you. The reader will let you escape the river of thankless Forgetfulness, and you will be survived by the better part of yourself. The wild fig splits Messala’s marble monuments, and boldly does the mule-­driver laugh at Crispus’ horses cleft in two. BUT thefts do no harm to writings and the passing of time does them good. Only these monuments do not know death.” Martial, Epigrams 10.2

A political choice has been made to elide the political dimension of the first edition of the tenth book. Martial cared too much, you see . . . This is a paradoxical, self-­defeating cura: care cared too carefully and so cared too hastily and so fumbled and slipped and then, in that fervent moment of solicitous artistry, the book got away. Please be careful not to read too carefully, then. The “malevolent reader” from the preface to Book 1 exercised his own genius in scrounging up alleged subtexts that might get a man in trouble. Now the benevolent reader is the one who both turns a blind eye to the existence of actual texts and is likewise kind enough not to care that a word like cura is being ostentatiously abused. In fact, the malevolent-­because-­too-­mindful reader might compare the fate of Martial to that of Martial’s Caelius in Epigrams 7.39. That fellow feigned gout for the sake of avoiding social obligations, but he took such efforts over his own fictions that he wound up genuinely gouty by the end of it (quantum cura potest et ars doloris!— | desît fingere Caelius podagram, 7.39.9). Martial took so much care over being a Flavian Martial that he

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154 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature ended up in a position where he was no longer faking it, or, at a minimum, he wound up so placed that he could no longer simply claim that he was merely faking it without anticipating the possibility of some sort of push-­ back. Accordingly, if you think you see in the earlier books some sort of subtextual ars doloris—“crafty woe” and “art of misery”—this does not change the fact that cura and ars nevertheless effected something. The man who was only dressed up as Orpheus really did get eaten by a bear in the Flavian amphitheater because what happens there is not a mere show, even if it is also “just a show.” And Martial’s retrospective portrait of careless carefulness arises because of moments like the ones we saw in Book 9. For example, the last time the bard artfully sang of cura, he was saying that nobody could possibly care more about himself than he cared about Domitian (at nunc tantus amor cunctis, Auguste, tuorum est,| ut sit cuique suae cura secunda domus; 9.79.3–4). And moments like this one from a non-­retracted book do look a bit “over-­hasty” in the wake of Domitian’s death. One assumes that the first version of Book 10 was full of similar “cares” that, when the new “but now” (at nunc) arrived, looked a lot like lapses. In any case, the offending qualities of the old version are never described as political offenses. We are told that many poems have been retained, but that they are freshly polished. So not only have the “bad” poems been dropped, the good ones are better. Meanwhile most of this is new, we are told. Then the reader is addressed and enjoined to show favor to both Old Martial and New Martial: lector, utrique faue. It will also be noted that “Old Martial” is not, you know, that Old Martial, that old Flavian Martial, he is instead the revised version of Old Martial who is accompanied by New Martial. Old old Martial has gone missing. The same sleight of hand will be deployed by the likes of Pliny.202 One of the key moves of the transition to the new Caesar is the fabrication of a new story of the old version of the political self that is well suited to the new story of the political self. The inconvenient older old story is supposed to get lost in the shuffle, provided, of course, the reader is so kind as to allow this to happen: “Let’s strike a deal. You don’t read too carefully, and I will say that I did not write too carefully. Do it for me and I’ll do the same for you. Manus manum lauat: one furtively careless hand washes the other.” Or, if we resume the image of Epigrams 10.1, the reader might well be a benevolent editor in his own right: “Chop off the ‘tedious’ and 202 When speaking of his career, Pliny hides his Domitianic service. See Gibson and Morello, 2012:34–35.

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Oops: Book 10  155

‘superfluous’ and ‘insincere’ panegyrical heads and tails, and maybe we can work with what remains, namely a libellus proper and not some Domitian-­made-­me-­do-­it turgid liber.” A community of readers who themselves have their own old stories from their days in the old regime might be keen to make what was in fact just yesterday’s news into “such very old news” as soon as is possible, for everyone’s sake. And so, the reader is asked to do “me” a favor by doing the book a favor. Then the poem shifts into a complex high-­style conceit that forges a novel logic of fame as well as a number of illogical means to attaining that end. These are new, disavowed rules of what purports to be an old game. The reader is called opes nostrae. “You,” dear reader, constitute Martial’s wealth-­ and-­resources. Without you, he is nothing. A new point is inserted and becomes the apex of a triangle. Rome arrives and addresses the poet about the reader. That is, the third term that holds it all together and gives it all meaning is now Rome itself and not Caesar. The new vertex of the triangle is the old, proper vertex. It is also a self-­erasing vertex because Rome emerges only and precisely so that she can say that what matters is “the reader” and not some sort of political community. The not so secretly political imago of a library that could coordinate friend-­ as-­ brother Torianus, (political and) poetical genius Stertinius, and famous trifler Martial has been supplanted by a collection of pointed abstractions: the absolute reader, Rome Herself, and recently edited/improved Martial. Immortality is literary immortality and the politics of literature is a diffuse question. If we tell the story this way, then we can make sure that it ends well, that is harmlessly, for this rabbit who worries he is about to be fed to the dogs. Rome has given to Martial the best thing it can give him in giving him readers. And one excuses oneself before them: please try to forgive my . . . care. Please try not to remember the bad poems. Please edit the book down to the right size. In fact, though this poem is all about future memory, the very emphasis on that sort of memory arises out of an elision on the part of all parties of the memories of the recent past. Rome tells the poet that because of the reader “you will flee the rivers of ungrateful forgetfulness (fugies ingratae flumina Lethes).” What Martial “will have been” is up to the reading community. What Martial “was” had all been staked on Domitianic Martial. But now it is time to look ahead and not to look back. Besides, if you look back (to Book 10, not Book 9 . . . ) you will only see a bunch of slip-­ups that have been remedied. Be so good as to forget. Forget the past that Martial might be never forgotten. That is a curious message. And the curiosities naturally just keep compounding themselves.

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156 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Rome’s message is by no means finished. The sentence continues, “and you will survive yourself in your better part” (et meliore tui parte superstes eris).203 This is the project of the hour and not just of eternity: how can we be self-­survivors as we transition from Domitian’s Rome to . . . somebody else’s Rome. In this poem it is “Rome’s Rome” and a Rome full of earnest readers of quality literature. This is not a Rome full of hand-­picked consuls, disgraced clients, theater-­goers, and pretty boys. It is a newly abstract Rome that is ready to consider everything sub specie aeternitatis. The long view into the distance is the safe one. We self-­survive, and we do so because of “our better selves,” the melior pars nostri. And these same “better selves” emerge owing to the “cooked books” of our carefully re-­edited recent literary history. Adducing the notion of the erudite file of Alexandrian polish has never looked quite so manifestly cynical and self-­serving. A collective amnesia about our worse selves as well as a certain amount of editorial activity and a dash of aesthetic self-­flagellation enables the production of Authorship and Readership v.2.0. More care, more polish, better parts, best bits: this is the recipe. The concrete monuments of the world crumble, but paper is eternal and paper produces deathless monuments: see Epigrams 10.2.9–12. As one still reads Vergil, so will one still read Martial. It is all very easy, once you make sure that the crimes against the new propriety that were on the old chartae get edited out of the record and are replaced by New and Improved Epigrams.™ That is, “thefts do poems no harm” (at chartis nec furta nocent; 10.2.11) is multiply nonsensical given that we know both that poems do in fact go missing from manuscripts in the general course of things and that for Martial in particular it would be very advantageous if certain embarrassing verses happened to go missing. In fact, previously in the Epigrams literary furtum designated “plagiarism.” See Epigrams 1.53. And if we think back on that poem we will recall that the indelible stamp of authorial genius was supposed to be a sure safeguard against theft. That is, poem-­and-­author (allegedly) can’t be sundered: “Only Martial could have penned such a verse!”204 And yet, a 203  The image has multiple Ovidian histories. See also Amores 1.15.41–42, that is the final verses of the last poem of the first book. See also the end of the last poem of the last book, that is Amores 3.15.19-­20. But then we have Tristia 3.7.50 as well. Ovid as well as the better bit of Ovid that will last forever is different each time. 204  Statements of this stamp really do seem to have been important to ancient readers who wanted to demonstrate the virtuosity of their erudite ear. The “this is by Plautus, this is not by Plautus” game was played by these very rules. See the first chapter of Gunderson, 2015b.

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decade later one realizes that poetic genius can do harm (nocere), a harm that only a timely editorial bit of plunder can remedy. In any case, we need readers who let a man get away with laying up in the archives revised and expanded editions: “I will be survived by my supposititious children . . . ” The saecula will be the writer’s friend: deathless will be the memory of the revised edition of what actually got said. Similarly, the reference to saecula that were going to be swallowed up by Domitian and his posterity in Epigrams 6.3, were we to recall those verses, would do our deathless poet no good. Instead “time will be on your side” (et saecula prosunt) if and only if this age/saeculum cannily forgets about that age and its talk about what a fine age it was. Strategic plunder also benefits poetry: et furta prosunt. Welcome to the rewritten world of post-­Domitianic literature.

ii.  Dichtung und Wahrheit: further autobiographical fictions (Epigrams 10.3–5) The third poem of the tenth book is all about fake poems. Somebody is circulating verses under Martial’s name. They are ugly, déclassé wares. Whoever is doing this also doesn’t himself want to be known: he is a poeta clancularius. “Can you believe it, Priscus?” Mr. Yesterday is asked to look back into his memories. If you compare the Martial stored up there, does it at all match this pseudo-­Martial? Of course not. Vernaculorum dicta, sordidum dentem, et foeda linguae probra circulatricis, quae sulphurato nolit empta ramento Vatiniorum proxeneta fractorum, poeta quidam clancularius spargit et uolt uideri nostra. Credis hoc, Prisce? Voce ut loquatur psittacus coturnicis et concupiscat esse Canus ascaules? Procul a libellis nigra sit meis fama, quos rumor alba gemmeus uehit pinna: cur ego laborem notus esse tam praue, constare gratis cum silentium possit?   Servile witticisms, a grubby guffaw, the ugly abuses of a peddler’s tongue, stuff that would not fetch a match stick in exchange

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158 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature from a fellow trafficking in broken beakers: that’s what a certain shady somebody spatters about. And he’d have it be thought to be mine. Can you believe it, Priscus? Imagine if a parrot spoke with a quail’s voice, if a noted flautist longed to play the bag-­pipes. Keep a fame so black far from my books! A glistening report carries them on white wing. Why would I toil to become famous in so depraved a manner when silence can be gotten for nothing. Martial, Epigrams 10.3

The ostensible argument is merely stylistic: fair versus foul, good versus bad, quails versus parrots.205 Bad poetry is written only by pseudo-­Martial. The political analog remains unarticulated: embarrassing poetry circulating under my name is not really real either. This poem works quite well as an oblique companion to the preceding one. The narrator is apologizing without apologizing. If you read a poem that you do not like, then it was either a hasty mistake or it is not really by Martial. In both cases we only say that there is material of inferior quality out there, but in neither case is it suggested that the transgressions are against anything other than literary good taste.206 The whole scenario described by the poem is vaguely incoherent as described. Somebody is publishing under Martial’s name. These poems are a bid for fame. But the person who would become famous for this—­ aesthetically and just aesthetically . . . —inferior poetry is Martial himself, not the anonymous poet. Martial’s opening verses perform “the authentic voice” of “the one and only Martial” by offering an artful way of talking about the base without actually being base. Martial reasserts his own voice by offering a strategically distanced portrait of “him pretending to be me.” Nevertheless, the poem’s outline makes a different sort of sense if we subtract the aesthetic limitation: “Somebody says I said something that had a certain socio-­political content. I would never say anything like that.

205  Compare another poem from the same book: 10.100. This begins quid, stulte, nostris uersibus tuos misces? And it too has a bird comparison: aquilisque similes facere noctuas quaeris? (10.100.4) 206  Damschen and Heil,  2004:46: “Den Fälschungen fehlt vor allem die urbanitas, der ‘feine, gehobene Witz.’ ” And, as they note on the next page, the idioms of the passage are redolent of Hellenistic literature and literary criticism.

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That is a terrible way to get famous.” The dark fame and white wing, the nigra fama and the alba pinna that Martial describes as the poem ends in fact do more than denote formal qualities, they also suggest contents as well. And this hint grows stronger, without, though, ever breaking out into a direct statement, with the final couplet of the poem: “Why would I toil to become famous in so depraved a manner | when silence can be gotten for nothing?” The ostensible joke is that there is no need to do the hard work of winning infamy by writing bad verse when you would come out ahead if you just did nothing and had no reputation at all. But this line echoes one of the very first things we heard from Martial: “I will not pursue fame at any price (Mihi fama uilius constet; Epigrams 1.pr).” That was, it will be remembered, the bit where he disavowed critiques of the powerful. And so the interest one might take in the collection of ideas bundled therein is by no means exhausted by unpacking the witticism. In the last position of the penultimate verse praue evokes something like a cynical calculus whereby one tells oneself, “It may be disgusting to do this in the name of fame, but I want to be famous.” Book 10 disavows that logic, but what if some of the earlier books participated in it? Martial’s world has always been full of people who have been willing to do what it takes to get what they want even if that means “depravity” ensues. And so the odd narrative economy of this poem ties in rather well with a pattern that emerges if we track down things that “cost nothing” in Book 10 as per the hypothetical silence on the part of the poet that would “cost nothing” in Epigrams 10.3.12, the poem’s last line. In Epigrams 10.75 we meet another Galla.207 Galla and the narrator are arranging how much it will cost him to have sex with her. The poem moves forward in time. At each stage she asks for a sum, but the narrator is only willing to pay a fraction of that sum. Her value is in fact collapsing precipitously. At first, we need a king’s ransom to buy her favors, and by the penultimate couplet a few coppers would buy her, had they not been given to a slave first. The scolding, punishing final couplet reads, “Could she really sink any lower? She did. | She offers herself for free. Galla spontaneously gives herself to me. I refuse. (inferius numquid potuit descendere? fecit. | dat gratis, ultro dat mihi Galla: nego. 10.75.5).” 207  Or maybe this has always been the same Galla. Note that this is also a “Martial question”: how many Martials are there? Are they static? We are constantly worried about getting our numbers sorted in the Epigrams. See the third chapter of Rimell, 2008.

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160 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Aesthetics, value, and speech are all here as they were in Epigrams 10.3. And the poet is “too good” to get himself tangled up with anything base and ugly. The infamous Galla will do anything for cash; Martial won’t stoop to any old thing just to get famous. In fact, he is snide about the very idea that one might associate a man like him with anything like what Galla is up to. But, in this “costs nothing” story, one can hear an echo of a different scenario. In this case we recall that there has been a recent economic collapse in another quarter. Domitian was infinitely precious. Now he is worth nothing. The narrator used to claim that Domitian was worth twice as much as anything Caesar himself might suggest as his own value. But this time we say that the girl was good, but not that good. Witty, ironic, and exculpatory verses hum some of the old tune and distract us from the way the song used to work. The careless old draft has been replaced by new polish: “Nah, I was never that into it, I was just playing along . . . ” Pay-­and-­ play costs too much, and it is disgusting. The narrator just stands back and adds snarky commentary. He’s not really a customer, not really part of that depraved economy, at least, not at those prices. Well, at least that’s what he’d have you believe. The poems are constantly talking about the relationship between speech and recognition, and they are keen to depict a mercantile world of ­ambitions.208 The narrative tries to keep clear of and to soar over the grubby economies of other exchanges, but it is difficult to truly exempt these verses from the more general economy of speech and values. In fact, the poems are very much aware that their readers will assimilate poet and project into some sort of value system or other, and so these same poems insert various rubrics for their own reception. The non-­apologies of the opening poems of Book 10 refuse to ask but nevertheless evoke questions such as: “What was I willing to do and say for fame? What did getting ahead cost me? Am I even ahead any longer? Am I fucked?”209 208  Fitzgerald,  2007:11: “The circulation of Martial’s books of epigrams also reflects the impinging of economistic understandings of social relationships on more deeply entrenched habits of gift exchange and reciprocity. Martial makes much of the fact that ‘he’ is available at the bookstore, that those who want to read his works need form no relationship with the author himself, but can simply buy the book. He both celebrates and deplores this fact.” 209  “Nothing” (nihil) is a way of talking about the entanglements of reciprocity and sociality: “We get the sense that Martial is trying to liberate himself from the pressures of literary and social exchange, as though coming to nothing is a way of halting the infinite pattern of recycling and debt, a declaration of bankruptcy. When all gifts are hooks, when giving in  general is never an altruistic gesture, it is much more generous to donate nothing.” (Rimell, 2008:105)

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As we continue our appraisal of the opening of Book 10, we note that the very next poem is also about poetry and truth. In Epigrams 10.4 the narrator is snide about the reader of mythological verses. “Who are you that you want to read about Oedipus, Thyestes, Hylas, Attis et al.?” One notes that many of these myths have been adduced by our earlier poems, sometimes mockingly, but sometimes as part of an affirmation that Domitian’s reign was the match of the world of myth. But this poem disavows all of that content: “This book? It’s all real, really it is.” Non hic Centauros, non Gorgonas Harpyiasque Inuenies: hominem pagina nostra sapit. Sed non uis, Mamurra, tuos cognoscere mores Nec te scire: legas Aetia Callimachi.   Here it is not Centaurs, Gorgons, and Harpies that you will find. Our page smacks of man. But, Mamurra, you do not want to know your own ways nor to know yourself: you should read Callimachus’ Aetia. Martial, Epigrams 10.4.9–12

This is the poetry of life itself. These are men as they are. Here we hold a mirror up to everyday man and enable him to see himself and so to know himself.210 In a collocation like te scire we hear a familiar philosophical nobility of purpose: “know thyself.”211 But we are just dodging all over again the question of just who this fellow is who is speaking to us. By holding up a mirror to us, he hides himself behind the same reflective panel. All we can make out are some fingers grasping the edges and a few flashes of a smirking face that pops out. Hominem sapit is “deliciously clever” in that sapere can mean to taste or to smell as well as to know. The page joins 210  But please don’t take the anti-­Callimachean pose too seriously. See Neger on “Martial’s poetics of contradiction,” something that is “a prominent feature of the epigrammatist’s negotiation with the Greek tradition of his genre: often something which is either not mentioned at all or even explicitly denied by the poet himself or the poet’s spokesperson (like Hercules in 9.44), will nevertheless indirectly appear in the corpus through an intertextual allusion.” (Neger,  2014:328) “Martial’s epigram ends with a para prosdokian: by citing Callimachus’ Aetia as an example of literary pomposity within his recusatio [in Epigrams 10.4], Martial launches a polemic against the very text whose prologue has formed the chief model for the topos of recusatio in Latin literature.” (Neger, 2014:336) 211  Compare Seneca, Epistuale Morales 94.28.

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162 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature “human wisdom” and “yummy humanity.” But it also serves up a faux-­ humble dish that has been prepared in a specific style. And if we deign to take this meal from this patron, we are consenting to a new and revised social contract v2.0 that effaces whatever slip-­ups might have been present in the old version.212 Book 10 refuses to shut up about how to write poetry, but the rules never quite make sense. In Epigrams 10.5 we read a long curse. If someone shows scorn for the elite with his verse and harms those whom he should cultivate, then let him wander . . . (Quisquis stolaeue purpuraeue contemptor,| quos colere debet, laesit impio uersu,| erret per urbem pontis exul et cliui, . . . 10.5.1–3) The curse ends by sending the dead poet into the underworld and cataloging his sufferings there: “Now weighted down by unresting Sisyphus’s massive mass . . . ” (nunc inquieti monte Sisyphi pressus, . . . 10.5.15) And this poet meets up with the very sorts of stories that were deprecated in the previous poem. While Sisyphus may not be on the list of names from Epigrams 10.4, he would not be out of place if Thyestes is there. The climax of the poem snaps us onto the point: “And when the Fury commands him to confess the truth | let him cry out as his conscience betrays him: ‘I wrote it!’ (et cum fateri Furia iusserit uerum, | prodente clamet conscientia ‘Scripsi.’ 10.5.18–19)” What exactly he wrote is not clear. But whom he offended is clear: he assailed the powerful. So where do we stand? A quick review is in order. Epigrams 10.2 cries out: “I wrote it, but I didn’t mean it.” Epigrams 10.3 cries out, “I didn’t write it.” Epigrams 10.4 cries out, “I wrote about you, the real you!” Epigrams 10.5 imagines a man who wrote something that power did not like and then is forced to suffer for it until he confesses. This non-­confession distorts all of the terms. Instead of saying “I praised Domitian” it says, “Somebody might have offended the elite in general.”213 Instead of saying, “I was on the wrong side politically,” this says, “Someone might damage the social hierarchy.” And instead of saying, “The poems reflected our characters” as per Epigrams 10.4.11 we veer off into the world of Callimachean fables, the very things about which the narrator of Epigrams 10.4 said non scripsi, “I did not write that.” And so, yet again, we have all of the ingredients, but we 212  Compare the dinner party at Martial, Epigrams 10.48.21–22: “There will be bile-­free jokes and a not-­to-­be-­feared on the morrow | Liberty and nothing that you would prefer to have kept quiet (accedent sine felle ioci nec mane timenda | libertas et nil quod tacuisse uelis).” 213  Sullivan, 1991:46: “[I]t may be deduced that approximately twenty-­five, perhaps thirty, epigrams [praising Domitian] had to be replaced.”

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see a skewed mixture of them. The surface of the text says something simple enough, but the depths are evasive. We keep on feeling that there is something “deeper” happening, but we are constantly pulled away from a certain set of questions and answers even as we constantly return to a relatively circumscribed set of topics and themes.

iii.  The (new) new start ends: Trajan (Epigrams 10.6) The overture to Book 10—or Book 10B, or Book 12, or Book 12A, or whatever you want to call this thing in your hands . . . —can be said to close with Epigrams 10.6. This poem also ends with a single word sentence. Epigrams 10.5 concludes by saying scripsi even as we assuredly know that the ego who says that is not the same ego as that of the author of 10.5: “Let him say, ‘I wrote it.’ I assuredly did not write it.” The final word of Epigrams 10.6 is uenit, and it too is in someone’s mouth, or, rather, everyone’s: “He has arrived.” This poem celebrates the prospect of Trajan’s return from the Rhine in 98ce. And, accordingly, we know that this poem is not part of the original Book 10 since that collection would have appeared in 95ce or 96ce when Domitian was still reigning. Felices, quibus urna dedit spectare coruscum solibus Arctois sideribusque ducem. Quando erit ille dies, quo campus et arbor et omnis lucebit Latia culta fenestra nuru? Quando morae dulces longusque a Caesare puluis totaque Flaminia Roma uidenda uia? Quando eques et picti tunica Nilotide Mauri ibitis, et populi uox erit una ‘Venit’?   Fortunate are they whose lot it is to behold the flash of the leader radiant with northern suns and stars. WHEN will that day come on which every field, tree, and sill made fair with Latin lass will be aglow? WHEN that day of sweet delay and far-­off dust – it’s Caesar! – and all of Rome to be seen on the Flaminian Way?

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164 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature WHEN, knights and Moors colorful in your Egyptian dress, will you pass by and the voice of the People will be One: “He has come”? Martial, Epigrams 10.6

The opening of the revised book has a new point of focus and closure. Another conquering emperor is returning. The radiant suns and stars evoke the ornaments of a toga picta worn by a triumphal Trajan.214 The remaining imagery is adapted to the day of the big parade. A triumphal return is an old idea, though, and one we have celebrated before. The opening of Book 7 was perhaps the most sustained version take on the “triumphal return” motif. But when Trajan comes, the moment of glorious arrival will be differently identical to that of Domitian’s return. This will be version 2.0, revised, resubmitted, exculpated, forward-­looking, new, improved . . . The poem’s last three couplets each begin with quando: “When . . . ?” When will the new beginning have begun? And the last words of the last verse are: “When will the people be able to say with a single voice, ‘He has arrived’?” Book 10 will have happened and it will have its unified voice when Trajan will have arrived. This too is a key to unlock the world of Trajanic literature, a world that is specifically post-­Domitianic. When he arrives, we will generate our one, forward-­ looking voice: “Triumphal tomorrow is here. Forget yesterday.” Yesterday we said nothing. Yesterday we said something else. Yesterday someone said something and then said I said it. What a mess. But soon that will all be cleared up, cleared up when . . . when . . . when . . . Trajan.

iv. I  am not going to say, “Master and God”: Epigrams 10.72 We have to wait until Epigrams 10.72 to get a prolix statement of what the new speech of the new age looks like in contradistinction to the old language of yesterday. This poem says that Martial is not going to write the sorts of poems that sound exactly like the poems that we have seen in the earlier books of Epigrams: “That ain’t me. Well, not any more . . . ” Frustra, Blanditiae, uenitis ad me attritis miserabiles labellis: 214  See Damschen and Heil, 2004:60.

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Oops: Book 10  165 dicturus dominum deumque non sum. Iam non est locus hac in urbe uobis; ad Parthos procul ite pilleatos et turpes humilesque supplicesque pictorum sola basiate regum. Non est hic dominus, sed imperator, sed iustissimus omnium senator, per quem de Stygia domo reducta est siccis rustica Veritas capillis. Hoc sub principe, si sapis, caueto, uerbis, Roma, prioribus loquaris.   In vain, Flattery, do you approach me, pitiful with your worn-­out lips: I am not going to say, “Master and God.” Now there is no place for you in this city. Head far away to the Parthians with their caps, and, foul, lowly, submissive, kiss the thrones of the painted kings. There is no master here, instead there’s a commander, instead the most just senator of all, and thanks to him, back from the underworld comes rustic Truth, not a drop in her locks. ’Neath this princeps, if you have any sense, beware, Rome, of using the language you used to use. Martial, Epigrams 10.72

Of the eleven times one will see “in vain” (frustra) in Martial, nine of the citations come from books ten through twelve. And five of those citations come from Book 10. Obviously there is a positive valence to the use of the word here and indeed in most of those other passages, nevertheless, there remains a deeper association between “failure” and Martial’s final epigrams even though these same epigrams are celebrating a socio-­political renaissance. In this poem the narrator stages himself as someone who is being tempted by flattery, but he resists. And he also chides Rome for a kind of speech that is no longer appropriate. But, really, both gestures are deflections. We can put the situation much more bluntly: Book 10 may say, “Don’t do that . . . ” but Books 1–9 in fact did it. The speaker of this poem

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166 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature in this book effectively asks us to imagine that “this famous Martial” is not the same person as “that famous Martial”: “Martial v. 2.0 will not use the words that Martial v. 1.0 used.” The social space of Rome does not have a place for the word “master.” But it used to. And, by the way, when the word was used, you might remember that someone with my name was using it. That was the poetry of pseudo-­Martial, I suppose. One notes that the poem never says, “A tyrant imposed himself upon us, and, constrained, we said things we were forced to say.” Instead the poem says that flattery teaches you a certain kind of language. And it also says that the city has places for various words. We are told of the words used in the past. We are given stable things that are here in the present. But are those things really things or are they just new, flattering labels? Orpheus-­like Trajan has restored Truth from Pluto’s house? This bard is singing a strange song about his princeps. Humble and suppliant: this is how one approaches a foreign king. But the poem is, after its urbane fashion, humble and suppliant in its approach to the new princeps. It assures power that it knows just how power wants to be addressed. If power today insists that you call it by one name, then Martial will use that name, just as yesterday he also addressed power in the terms that he assumed power wanted to hear. In that sense the thing that “Rome” needs to look out for is not so much flattery as it is gauche anachronisms: “Is this 98ce? Then I am supposed to say imperator, not dominus.” This is a snide, snarky way to read Martial. But, does he deserve better from us? He dished out the snark, and he knows he dished it out: “Look at that withered old cunt!” This poem knows that the new regime has new words, and that it may well want new poets to sing them. Martial is caught up in a city-­wide recalibration wherein everyone both has to generate a story about their past and also has to generate a story about the present. And the two narratives are necessarily coordinated. That is, princeps today only means what it means precisely because yesterday one heard dominus. Pliny very much agrees with this stance. The problem is that old Domitianic types need to approach Trajan with blandishments and humility in order to get him to hear their not entirely plausible stories about the bad old days of groveling blandishments. People who do this sort of thing inevitably come across as looking suspect. It is very much up to power to decide whether or not to pretend not to see the sort of person that is making this approach for who he is, namely a patched-­together new-­and-­improved man pretending to be the real-­deal

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that had been kept down by power instead of raised up by power. Fortunately, Nerva and Trajan cannot themselves become imperatores-­ instead-­of-­domini unless and until they let people call them as much. So Martial at least stands a chance. But not every chancer wins when he rolls the dice. Book 10 v. 2.0. is the second roll of the bones. Maybe his hands won’t slip this time. Contemporary readers know that things are not going to work out for Martial. He might not be persecuted or abused, but his stock is falling and not rising. And Epigrams 10 seems to encode into its own text both the recipe for potential success and the script for the poet’s own failure. As the book closes we are celebrating the best of times. Of course, this is not the first time it has been the best of times. Nevertheless, if we can forget the assurances of Books 1–10 and just focus on Book 10 v.2.0, then this is the best of times. The final poem of the book, Epigrams 10.104, is a poem addressed to a book of poems as it is sent off over the seas as a gift to Flavus. Flavus is told to find a nice place for Martial himself: he is ready to withdraw from Rome and to go back to Spain. After thirty-­four years at Rome, the poet is, says the narrator, ready to spend lazy days of retirement. If epigram, reading, and journeys are an important generic triad,215 then we have reached an odd crossroads where author, narrator, reader, and project seem set to wind up along new, divergent routes. The book is told to tell Flavus that the author is ready to make a rustic of himself. Get on board, little book, the captain is ready to weigh anchor: “Farewell, book: a ship, as I suppose you know, waits for nobody (uale, libelle: | nauem, scis puto, non moratur unus 10.104.18–19).”216 We were preparing a space for ourselves in the New Rome when Book 10 opened. As it closes, we are getting a place ready for ourselves elsewhere. The ship will go where it goes. It is the passenger’s job to be on board before it heads off to wherever the helmsman will steer it.

215  See Höschele, 2007. 216  Rimell, 2008:79–82: there is a lot of engagement with Ovid happening in this poem, especially Tristia 1.1. Compare Pitcher, 1998:62–64 on Tristia 1.1 and Epigrams 12.2. See also Hinds, 2007:131: “Martial’s books are programmatically obsessed, especially in their openings and closings, with the book-­poetics of Ovid’s exile, and especially with the personifications of the book in the balancing preface-­poems of Tristia 1 and 3.” Note, though, that the engagement is usually part of a self-­confident narrative pose. By the time we get to Book 10, though, the joke seems a lot less funny and the bold pose of yesteryear can no longer be struck.

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M.  The new beginning as the end: Books 11 and 12 i.  Approaching the palace, or not (Epigrams 11.1) Book 11, as is clear, comes both before and after Book 10. In the discussion of Epigrams 10.5 above the basic outline of the political recalibration can be discerned. The narrator celebrates life under Nerva, but this same celebration is done in relatively subdued tones if we are to compare the effusions of this book to earlier books.217 The historical situation is sufficiently complicated to warrant caution on the part of a poet who is faced with a new Caesar. Nerva himself had participated in the reigns of the Flavians, yes, but he had also been a loyal Neronian. He was more of a compromised survivor than a radical revolutionary who ascended because of a vocal fidelity to a cause or to principle. Domitian’s death at the hands of assassins who were not part of a broader political program means that his successor is there more by accident than by design. And fortuitous configurations tend not to be the most stable ones. That, at least, is the sort of calculus that a calculating sort of man might deploy in 97ce, even if old hands at the game know that succession is full of surprises. For example, Domitian himself was surprised to end up emperor, but his reign was one of the longer ones.218 The narrator of these poems to Nerva shows little sign that he is ready to commit enthusiastically to this emperor. Instead Nerva is a kindly Numa. He is a remote father-­like figure about whom pleasant myth-­like histories are spun. Bad dad Domitian has been replaced by affable dad Nerva. In point of fact, Nerva is also the best sort of ready-­made father for an unsettled

217  On the sexual-­aesthetic plane, though, “things have never been better”: “In the programmatic sequence of epigrams which opens his eleventh book, Martial welcomes and eulogizes the new government of Nerva; and he associates Nervan liberalization with the programme which he announces for his book, a programme which will indeed dominate it: a new accession of obscenity and uninhibited bawdiness (i.e. uninhibited even for Martial), for which the poet claims specifically Saturnalian licence.” (Hinds, 1997:193). Nerva has helped us to be able to “get it up again” and “feel like a real man,” it would seem. “One cannot read far in Martial’s erotic epigrams without noticing his general fixation on the phallus, along with his repeated mobilization of the figure of Priapus to preside over a poetic of penile sexuality and aggression.” (Hinds, 2007:122) “Early in Book 11, [Martial] celebrates the elevation of a less repressive figure to the principate by advertising an intensification of his usual sexual explicitness (11.15.3–10).” (Hinds, 2007:123) 218  See the opening paragraph of Suetonius’ Domitian.

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fatherland. Nerva is old and childless. Everyone knows that some other future is coming, and soon. A quick glance back at Epigrams 5.28 reveals that our author almost certainly did not expect Nerva to become emperor: there Nerva was exemplary of quies, i.e., political non-­participation.219 But, as Epigrams 11.5 makes clear, the narrator is happy enough to rewrite the history in such a way that it facilitates a smooth transition to “Nerva-­ism,” the last being more an indistinct and fuzzy label that one might affix to any number of specific imperial contents. What is made clear by the narrator, though, is that Nerva opens the door to new possibilities and new freedoms. Epigrams 11.1 re-­situates the poet and his poems. The book itself is addressed. Maybe it is going to visit Caesar’s man Parthenius. Already we are stepping away from the inner chamber of power. Or, are we? Parthenius had been Domitian’s chamberlain. We have written to him before.220 Parthenius is currently a leading figure in Nerva’s court. Parthenius might have been instrumental in Domitian’s death. Parthenius will soon be killed because of his past.221 The poem is sensitive to topographies of power and seems to be aware of the very sort of gossip that Philomusus was chided for collecting in Epigrams 9.35. The address is calculating, but, even so, it is also not placing bets that are going to pay off in the long run. Quo tu, quo, liber otiose, tendis cultus Sidone non cotidiana? Numquid Parthenium uidere? Certe: uadas et redeas ineuolutus: libros non legit ille, sed libellos; nec Musis uacat, aut suis uacaret. Ecquid te satis aestimas beatum, contingunt tibi si manus minores? Vicini pete porticum Quirini: turbam non habet otiosiorem Pompeius uel Agenoris puella, 219 Martial, Epigrams 5.28.3–5: “I don’t care if you are more solicitous that the Curvii brothers, more pacific than Nerva, more affable than the Rusones, more upright than the Macri, more just than the Maruci . . . (pietate fratres Curuios licet uincas,|quiete Neruas, comitate Rusones,|probitate Macros, aequitate Mauricos, . .)” And see again Syme, 1997:1. 220  See an early poem from Book 5: “If it is not a bother or too much a burden, Muses, do ask your Parthenius . . . (si non est graue nec nimis molestum, | Musae, Parthenium rogate uestrum: . . . 5.6.1–2).” 221 See Joannes Antiochenus, Fragmenta 110. Compare Cassius Dio, Historiae Romanae 68.3.

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170 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature uel primae dominus leuis carinae. Sunt illic duo tresue, qui reuoluant nostrarum tineas ineptiarum, sed cum sponsio fabulaeque lassae de Scorpo fuerint et Incitato.   Idle book, where oh where are you heading, all dressed up in purple? Don’t see that every day. I suppose you are off to see Parthenius? Yes, indeed. Feel free to go and come back unread: No reader of books he, but of petitions (libelli). He’s got no time for the Muses. If he does, it’s for his own. Can you think yourself blessed enough if you fall into lesser hands? Seek out the nearby Colonnade of Quirinus: a more idle mob you will not find chez Pompey or Agenor’s daughter, or the fickle lord of the first boat. There are there two or three who might unroll the book-­worms of my trifles, but only after the bet has been made and the big talk has worn itself out: tales of Scorpus and Incitatus. Martial, Epigrams 11.1

Parthenius is busy, says the narrator, and the book might go and return unread. In many ways this is what we are asking from Parthenius. If one sends something to the palace, it does not make it to Caesar, it does not even make it past Caesar’s secretary. As in the very first books of the Epigrams, there is something almost comforting in the idea that power knows about our books but does not care to know too too much about them. Instead, a book comes back unread, but, precisely because it was unread there, it can then circulate around the public spaces of Rome: the Porticus Pompeii, the Porticus Europae and the Porticus Argonautarum. And as it circulates it will get unread all over again. Maybe one or two people will unroll the book, but only after they are done worrying about the races and whether or not they won their bets. Falling in with “lesser hands” ought to make the book happy. And so we have a praise of “smallness” that reminds us of Book 1. As in that case, so in this: we are conjuring a politics of the small, and the space for smallness can and will always

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be referred back to the center of power. We spring again into the lion’s mouth, or at least we attempt to. And we are doing so even before we are certain that he is a lion. That last paragraph made things seem rather simple. But, when we recall who the historical Parthenius is, we have trouble believing that the poet’s hands are quite so pure as all that. Parthenius is specifically figured as a writer. And so the man who stands between the poem and Caesar is himself a poet. Or, as the poem itself puts it: to the extent that Parthenius has time for poetry, it is for his own poetry (nec Musis uacat, aut suis uacaret; 11.1.6). This alternate dyadic closed-­circuit of poet-­and-­Caesar locks epigram out: the poet is Parthenius, the Caesar is Nerva. And maybe that is a good thing. But is epigram really and truly locked out? This gets us to the line before the line where we learn that Parthenius does not read poems not authored by Parthenius: libros non legit ille, sed libellos (11.1.5). I suppose that we are expected to translate this as “He does not read books, he reads petitions.” Or perhaps for “petitions” we would substitute “memoranda.” Libelli can be any number of things at Rome, and the word is very much a part of administrative life. Nevertheless, one has little choice but to remember all of the other books of epigrams that themselves spent so much time talking—and often ambiguously— about what it is to be a liber and what it is to be a libellus and how the latter word in particular is one that epigram wants to claim for itself. Parthenius is not reading Martial because he is reading something a lot like Martial. The court is always already over-­full of epigrams because its daily business consists of libelli. Even as Martial exiles his book from undue intimacy with Caesar, it simultaneously slips back into the mix: il n’y a pas de hors-­texte. Incitements, circuits, circles, circuses: Incitatus. The last word of the poem is the name of a charioteer. The new beginning has some odd, punning and very much disavowed relationship to Book 1. It sounds sort of the same, but it is also quite different. The horse-­text, good luck escaping it: you thought you could take a pass, but you can’t, Mr Rabbit, not with those paws of yours. The book is remapping the socio-­ literary space. Where do the old trifles of a Martial fit into the new-­but-­ not-­ too-­ new order of things? We are told that the witty absurdities (ineptiae, 11.1.14) of the narrator can safely be turned into an afterthought.222 After the spectacles, after the bets: read a tiny bit of Martial,

222 See Epigrams 2.85.9–10 for nugae and ineptiae as quasi-­synonyms.

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172 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature the man who used to sing about spectacles and who staked it all on the Flavian house. After the spectacle of the Flavian fall, read a bit of Martial, the man whose nothings were famous all over the world, but whose nothings now might in fact be worth nothing. Read a bit of Martial, a man who now hopes that by humbly avowing as to the nothingness of his new nothings he might manage to amount to something again.

ii.  Epigram is the poetry of private life and festal time (Epigrams 11.2–3) The second poem of this book continues with its programmatic reprogramming of the writing agenda while, of course, pretending that more or less nothing has changed. The categories are abstract and trite rather than concrete and specific to the historical moment. We shoo away gloomy, Cato-­like readers. This is the poetry of “private life” and, simultaneously, of “lived truth.”223 Triste supercilium durique seuera Catonis frons et aratoris filia Fabricii Et personati fastus et regula morum quidquid et in tenebris non sumus, ite foras. Clamant ecce mei ’Io Saturnalia’ uersus: et licet et sub te praeside, Nerua, libet. Lectores tetrici salebrosum ediscite Santram: nil mihi uobiscum est: iste liber meus est.   Gloomy brow and hard Cato’s frowning face and the daughter of plowman Fabricius and masked contempt and moral strictures and whatever our hidden selves disclaim: off with you! Lo, my verses cry out, “Hooray it’s Saturnalia!” 223  Note that these verses very closely match the sentiments of Petronius, Satyricon 135.15: “What’s with the scowling at me, Catos. Why do you condemn a work that is fresh and unaffected? (quid me constricta spectatis fronte Catones | damnatisque nouae simplicitatis opus?)” There too the narrative voice says that one is going to “tell it like it is” (quodque facit populus, candida lingua refert). And, while it is always possible to allegorize this novel and to find its “Neronian” qualities, what one actually sees in what remains of it is a world in which Rome and imperial politics are very, very remote from the lives and concerns of the characters.

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The new beginning as the end: Books 11 and 12  173 Such is both allowed with you in charge, Nerva, and a pleasure. Sour-­puss readers go learn rocky Dr Santra’s lessons by heart. I’ve got nothing to do with you. This book is mine. Martial, Epigrams 11.2

Accordingly, when we say that Nerva is the enabling condition of this kind of literary activity, we praise him for enabling multiple dimensions simultaneously: because of him one is free to lead a naughty, trifling existence to which public life is relatively indifferent.224 Censorious Domitian has been replaced by a relatively easy-­going Cato who is not ubiquitous and always engaged.225 A line like this anticipates Epigrams 10.20.21 and its celebration of drinking parties: “then even unbending Catos would read me (tunc me uel rigidi legant Catones).” One is all the more likely to suspect that this sort of talk is politically programmatic given that Epigrams 10.20 is part of Pliny’s epitaph to Martial qua poet who wrote about Pliny.226 That is, Pliny’s obsessive self-­ positioning throughout his letters latches onto Epigrams 10.20 as the place where Post-­ Domitianic Pliny and Post-­ Domitianic Martial agree on the proper shape of the aesthetic and moral landscape in this fantastic new Rome.227 Both authors are interested in celebrating a world in which one can say, “everything in its place and a

224  Habinek, 1998:113 shows that we should be skeptical of the facile antithesis between public writing and private writing in the first place: “[T]he book, which might at first glance seem to signal the dislocation and diminution of aristocratic power, becomes a strategy for its reinscription and the ‘private’ writing of literature demands acquiescence on the part of its reader with a force comparable to that of ‘public’ writing on stone.” And for Martial the dividing line has always been pointedly blurry. 225  And ubiquity was part of the Domitianic program. See Leberl, 2004:81–85, a section entitled “Omnipräsenz als Ziel der Herrschaftsdarstellung.” 226  See Pliny, Epistulae 3.21. Henderson, 2001:68: “But surely Martial’s epigram was, and is, also sarcastically sending up Pliny as ‘witless, charmless’ bore? (Of course it is, this is an epigram.) It must also follow that the Letter gets its own back by tearing Martial in half . . . In that sense, this has been an ‘inventive/penetrating/razor-­edged’ way to bury, not to dig, the emperor of epigram (1). A cutting ‘So long’ to brother Martial.” 227  Though contemporaries living in the same city, Martial and Pliny occupy fairly disjunct social worlds. See White,  1975:298: “The two men, though they both had friends at every social level, did not have many of the same friends.” Of over 250 available people, only seven seem to be “shared friends.” And if we focus on “literary friends” the gap seems just as noticeable if not the more striking (White,  1975:299–300). Henderson,  2001:61: “Martial only names Pliny in this poem—no mention anywhere, e.g., of his help with the move to Spain in the Epigrams—and Pliny only ever mentions Martial here. In all their combined pages. The question asks itself: what is the final score between these inkling amigos?”

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174 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature place for everything” rather than experiencing the constraints of an impressive imperial censorship.228 The sense that “we are all hypocrites” is (supposed to be) a liberating confession in Epigrams 11.2. That is, Cato is himself no more than the mask of Cato and disdain is just an act: et personati fastus et regula morum. We pretend to be one thing, but, when the bright light of the public space no longer shines upon us, we are another thing.229 The “public self ” is dismissed and shipped off to its proper domain. Ite foras means “Off with you,” yes, but it more specifically means, “Leave the house and go outdoors and head off to your world of public hypocrisy. Let private me, a me whom public me disavows, be the real me.” The cynical, amoral, lawless possibilities of a schema like this are checked immediately. The poem says instead that the poet’s verses cry out, “It’s the Saturnalia!” Nevertheless the party self and the private self have been linked up. The private secret is not scary and not revolutionary. Instead it is free-­and-­easy, it is Saturnalian. It parties, it plays around with (ritual, familiar, licensed) inversions of social hierarchy, but it fundamentally respects the legitimacy of public life even if that same life is not “wholly authentic.” I will let you be Caesar, you let me have my nugatory private self. Deal? The epigrams have presented themselves as Saturnalian in many dimensions before: the books are published in December; they can be given as gifts for the Saturnalia; they celebrate the Saturnalia itself . . . 230 But, as Book 11 opens, it is Nerva whose light touch enables this sort of play. Nerva is in charge and watching over us, but we know that we are making him happy by exercising our liberty: et licet et libet, permission-­and-­pleasure. 228  Note, though, that I have implicitly taken sides relative to THE big question about Epigrams 10.20 as if it were not a (dangerously, for Pliny) open question: “So was the Pliny epigram a relic, a survivor, of Ten, ed. I? Or was he new blood after the coup?” (Henderson, 2001:81) Martial might be saying of Pliny that he “was a success-­story under whatever Caesar” (Henderson, 2001:82) [emphasis altered]. But this is an idea that none of our Antonine survivor-­denouncers of the Flavian age want to find kicking about in our heads. With such a thought perishes the whole “new” enterprise of conjuring the Trajanic enterprise’s very newness. 229  “What we are not in the darkness (Quidquid et in tenebris non sumus, 11.2.4)” is the inverted way of talking about this: there is “shadow me” and then “daylight me.” 230  Citroni, 1989:222: “Vi è dunque notevole probabilità che oltre ai libri XIII, XIV, VII e XI, anche i libri IV e V siano stati pubblicati in dicembre, nel mese dei Saturnali, . . .” Citroni, 1989:215: “L’affermazione che il libro può integrarsi opportunamente nell’atmosfera dei Saturnali o può sostituire gli svaghi propri dei Saturnali ricorre, oltre che in Xenia e Apophoreta, nei libri IV, V, VII, X, XI.” Citroni, 1989:209: “In Marziale è affermato con chiarezza che il libro è un passatempo, una sostituzione dei passatempi usuali nei Saturnali. Marziale utilizza questo motivo a fini di apologetica proemiale, per presentare, con il gesto di ostentazione di modestia che è consueto nei proemi, la propria opera come niente più che un trastullo dei giorni di vacanza, un gioco fatto a tempo perso . . .”

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When Domitian was the guy sitting over us and watching us, when he was the praeses, we saw the emperor very much worried about regulating private bodies and pleasures and we thanked him for so doing: “Now there will be neither eunuch nor adulterer under your supervision (nec spado iam nec moechus erit te praeside quisquam; 6.2.5).” Severe readers of today are assigned to drab antiquarian works if they insist on inserting their morality into books. The narrator closes with a strong contrary assertion: iste liber meus est (11.2.8). My freedom and my book-­of-­life converge: Nerva gave me both, and I feel most free when I am talking about the trifles of everyday life.231 Politics and contempt and persecution in the name of morality are all “out there” and, though we do not say this, “back then.” Here in the cosy little domestic space of the book, things are different: we wear no mask, you see us for what we are, and we are small, happy creatures at play. Like so many glad little rabbits, I suppose. The third poem continues in the same vein. Or, rather, it is rewriting the opening moves of one of the early books of Epigrams but recalibrates them to Nervan times. And the spirit of the Nervan age is characterized by a salutary distance. This distance is never directly contrasted with the claustrophobic Domitianic atmosphere, but one nevertheless feels freedom in the very fact of the subtraction of those old modes of speaking. Epigrams 7 opened with ecstatic pre-­triumphal poems that anticipate the return of the emperor covered in glory. In Epigrams 11.3 emperor, war, and book are configured differently. Book 11 is being read by domestic idlers (urbana otia, 11.3.1–2). But it is also being sent off into the field where the Roman soldiers read it at the edges of the empire. The book is “along for the ride” as empire happens, and it too is conquering. But this is all done with a (relatively) light touch. Nerva is not a Hercules at the head of a vast army and he is not smiting exotic monsters. Instead, empire “just happens” and it happens “easily.” One is free to turn one’s poetic focus to jokey topics like, “Why is it that a famous poet like me is not getting paid all that much for his poetry?” And so the poem can close by saying, “The gods have restored Augustus to us: where is the new Maecenas? (cum pia reddiderint Augustum numina terris, | et Maecenatem si tibi, Roma, darent! 11.3.9–10)” The principate has been restored, but we are not shouting that idea and not articulating it in precisely those 231  Rimell, 2008:164: “The interacting components of Book 11 are engaged in the delicate balancing act of forging Nerva’s, and Martial’s, image.” Rimell goes on to discuss, inter alia, the many connections between the opening epigrams of this book and the sad-­sack openings of Ovid’s Tristia. So the balancing act is delicate indeed.

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176 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature terms.232 That is, we do not say that a monstrous interloper was on the throne. Instead, the poem performs its own new aesthetics-­cum-­ethos of the age: easy, breezy, back on track. Enjoy some light poetry adapted to a golden age. Let me strike a new compact of complicity, please.

iii.  Nerva dials back the principate (Epigrams 11.4–5) Let us take stock for a moment of our opening poems and the agenda we can see in their collection of motifs. First, we approach the emperor, but indirectly, and then we are quite happy to withdraw over into a separate literary space. Then we calibrate the relationship between severity, epigram, and life by resetting things to an old, “harmless” register. Next, we check in on the armies: they are fine. A soldier is reading a book. The trumpets are not blasting. The blood is not flowing. Then in Epigrams 11.4 we offer a prayer on Nerva’s behalf. We see Jove, but he is not a double for Caesar. Instead, the poem situates itself within the older idioms: all of you various gods, please look after Nerva who is now entering into his third consulship. The citizen asks the divinity to protect the chief magistrate: this is an almost republican idiom, but, in effect, this is “Augustan” all over again. Not only does one not call the emperor dominus, his chief titles are not really imperator or princeps either: consul is the heading under which we are to imagine him. Of course, Nerva is never called consul in this poem, and he is about to be called dux and princeps. Nevertheless, the poem really is interested in the old, softer version of the principate, and it is quite hopeful that Nerva will allow himself to be positioned within that matrix. And, most notably of all, the poem is not just a prayer that the gods will look after the consul, but it also asks the gods to look after the senate. The semi-­bold suggestion that there might be some sort of equal footing shared by the senators and the consul who is also “first citizen” (princeps) lasts for only a nano-­second. The final verse makes sure to say that the emperor provides the moral template according to which the other aristocrats will live (hunc omnes seruate ducem, seruate senatum;| moribus hic

232  Another very strong hint: Epigrams 11.20 that talks up Augustus the epigrammatist. “Martial enrols Rome’s very first emperor, Augustus Caesar, as the prototype imperial reader of ‘lascivos . . . versus,’ indeed as the prototype writer of such epigrams: a proto-­Martial on the Palatine.” (Hinds, 2007:130)

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uiuat principis, ille suis; 11.4.7–8). And, even if all of this morality is perhaps “just an act”—as per the logic of Epigrams 11.2—the book seems to be quite pleased with the idea that “those masks will play that part” and “these poems will play this part.” The important thing is that in the Nervan age we specifically avoid “getting behind the mask.” Too much prying just would not do since one might end up asking about who really thought what about Domitian, or even what people thought about Nerva himself. Instead, we celebrate the formal qualities of this age. And, formally, we have returned to The Age of Augustus. Accordingly, it is time to start writing again, especially if a rich patron would be so kind as to show up as well (hint hint). In Epigrams 11.5 Cato the Younger is presented a would-­be Nervan partisan. A notable violence is being done to historical understanding. The names that Martial enumerates in the poem show us scenes from the greats of the exemplary past: Numa-­and-­Camillus are here, as they were in Epigrams 9.27. But the poem aggregates names from the final generation of the republic in its second half: Brutus, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, and, last, Cato. Naturally, we do not really imagine “going back” and restoring the republic. Instead, we imagine going forward with Caesarism all over again. “Reverence” and “Caesarism” unite in Nerva’s own “reverence for what is right.” That is where we start the poem and, in some ways, our fantasy of Nerva-­ism more generally (tanta tibi est recti reuerentia, Caesar, et aequi, . . .  11.5.1). We can call this poem the “end of the beginning” of Book 11. We have refounded the principate and rewritten the history of Rome. And we have done so with an eye to making a space for the very book we are reading, a book of epigrams that celebrate their ability to be “mere epigrams.” In the next poem we will be talking about Martial as Catullus yet again: “Give me Catullan kisses and I will give you a Catullan Sparrow (da nunc basia, sed Catulliana:  . . . donabo tibi Passerem Catulli; 11.6.14 and 16).”233 We are

233  The line is “naughty” too: “[W]hatever Catullus himself thought he meant by a passer, Martial’s Catullus knows that a passer is never just a passer.” (Hinds, 2007:175) Then again it is most definitely not naughty: “There is no double entendre intended; passer simply stands as the title of Catullus’ book of poems, and should therefore be written with a capital letter.” (Pitcher, 1982:98) The chief point being, I suppose, a generalization of Hinds’ position when mixed with Pitcher’s fantasy: how many things can be just themselves any longer even when it might be quite expedient to reclaim some semblance of simplicitas, a word, we will recall, whose meaning has never been in the least bit simple.

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178 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature back to the world of Epigrams 1.234 It is like nothing has happened.235 And that, of course, is the game: something has happened, but we will not say what happened. Instead, we are pretending that it’s “poetry as usual” and, by putting it thus, we hide the fact that business has been rather unusual of late and that the imperial futures market remains somewhat up in the air.

iv.  Martial’s (confused) preface to his (wretched) postscript: Book 12.pr and 12.1–5 As Book 12 opens we are finally able to see Martial’s own post-­Domitianic trajectory more clearly. This book opens with a letter sent from Martial to Priscus: Priscus is in Rome, Martial has left Rome. The “new beginning” for literature that was promised in Book 11 turns out to be somewhat differently novel than one might have guessed.236 The space Nerva has re-­ opened at Rome is not one that Martial will occupy. And the rebirth of epigram that was promised turns into something that will presently be described as a sort of stillborn provincial literature that fails to thrive because epigram has been transplanted and removed from its native climate.237 Priscus, who has been with us from the start and whose built-­in “antiquity” has been a source of amusing possibilities, now serves as a darkly ironic reminder of “the good old days” for Martial himself. Martial’s prefatory letter reveals a new and changed narrative voice. He is apologizing for not writing much: it has been years . . . The poet who was churning out a book of epigrams every year or even every nine months has significantly slackened his pace. And we are also informed that he cannot even blame busy city life for keeping him from his compositions. In fact, one of the 234  In the twelve books of Epigrams, Catullus is mentioned by name twenty-­three times. Four of those references are in the first book. Nine of them are in Books 10, 11, and 12, with 12 providing the majority. In short, “Catullus,” while ubiquitous, is nevertheless of most interest both at the beginning and at the end of the epigrammatic project. 235  Rimell, 2008:163: “Critics have generally discussed Book 11 in terms of what seems to be its distinguishing feature – ‘epigrams of a very frank nature’ – and have stressed its ‘unifying theme’ of Saturnalian licence, writing without inhibitions.” 236  Sullivan, 1991:51: “However willing Martial was to be a Vicar of Bray, he stood out as an obvious sacrifice. He could be dispensed with.” 237  The book itself, though, opens with plenty of material about just how happy Martial is to be back home again. See Howell, 1998 on the many expressions of joy as well a few indications of regret. And see especially the claims at Howell,  1998:184–185: despite what many have claimed, the decision to return to Spain was not motivated by his former flattery of Domitian.

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few things one can do amid “provincial solitude” is study, and that really ought to have afforded the occasion for a good deal of composition. However, it is the lack of urban distractions that yields a lack of poems about the busy lives we all lead. In fact the narrator is happy to reduce himself to a mere vehicle for a sort of urban self-­relation: whatever people liked in his books was really just a transcript of their own lives (si quid est enim, quod in libellis meis placeat, dictauit auditor; 12.pr.9–10).238 The narrator explicitly expresses his regret at leaving all of that behind. He implies that his misguided motivation was a sort of spoiled fastidiousness on his part (illa quae delicati reliquimus, desideramus quasi destiuti). A lot seems to have happened in the space of a book. As Book 11 opened we saw a man putting on a confident smile as he got back down to the business of being the next Catullus. Book 11 was a Book 1 in so many ways. But now we seem to be reading something like Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto: “Exile stinks!” The extent to which the city was “too coarse” for the poet’s delicate sensibilities is thoroughly open to question. Delicatus is a very surprising adjective to adduce at this juncture. The word delicatus is very frequently part of a discourse of moral reproach that scolds the softness of others. Here it is obviously a self-­reproach: “I was too soft for the roughness of city life.” But why go to Spain? Why not head to the pleasure-­ pits of Baiae? The letter is full of a variety of bitter and relatively familiar complaints about the disagreeableness of the periphery when examined from the perspective of the Roman center.239 Small-­minded parochial sniping brings a man down. Or, as it is put here, it makes it hard for him to have a bonum stomachum. The provinces foster dyspepsia. In Rome one can digest this, that, and the other happily, especially since, one suspects, the food is so good there too. But, while we are on the topic of food, the narrator says he has forced himself to prepare a feast-­of-­words as part of the welcome-­to-­ nowhere meal that Priscus will receive upon arrival. And this book is that meal. It seems unlikely that the whole of Book 12 is the work of a few days. Perhaps this letter stood at the head of a smaller collection. But that does not really alter the manner in which this letter does introduce us to “Late

238  Dyson and Prior, 1995:251: “Martial’s descriptions of the city in the Epigrams convey a sheer delight in the variety and complexity of the urban experience of late first-­century A.D. Rome.” 239  Rimell, 2008:191: “Epigrams 12 is a difficult and puzzling book for several reasons. As a concluding nostos and finale to a would-­be twelve-­book epic before Martial’s death in 103 or 104, it looks melancholy, fractured, anticlimactic.”

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180 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Martial,” a figure that presents itself as being rather too much akin to “The Late Martial.” Martial is not really himself any longer. He perhaps only pretends to be himself in order to keep up appearances. But, then again, was he not always just pretending to be a self? And one is welcome to rethink and to complicate the narrator’s portrait of the “masked” quality of public life versus the authenticity of epigram as posited in Epigrams 11.2. In any case, it was a very different mask that the self of yesteryear wore. Priscus is asked to read-­and-­digest the meager, reluctant fare that is offered to him (de nugis nostris iudices nitore seposito, 12.pr.26–27). The trifles that were once in fact little gems that flashed with the wit of a world-­famous genius sound a lot more like mere trifles this time around. And, if what Priscus sees is any good—but how could it be . . . ?—he will give the nod to Martial and Martial will send Book 12 back to Rome. Martial claims to be worried that, unless Mr Yesterday has read and approved his recent poems, what he will send back to Rome will not be a book from Spain but instead a book in Spanish (ne Romam . . . non Hispaniensem librum mittamus, sed Hispanum; 12.pr.28). Martial has lost himself and his Roman identity by ending his career with a return home to Spain. The narrator’s “delicate” sensibilities are in practice all directed against his current provincial life. You shouldn’t go home again because then you can’t go to Rome again. Book 12 itself, the Spain-­ish/Spanish Book, is the obsessive topic of the opening of Book 12. In the prefatory letter Priscus inspires the book. In Epigrams 12.1 Priscus is reading Book 12. In Epigrams 12.3 Priscus is the patron of the book. In Epigrams 12.4 Caesar is reading Book number . . . Hm. What is he reading? We will return to this poem shortly. In Epigrams 12.6 Book 12 is making its way to Rome. Only with Epigrams 12.7 do we get a “mere epigram,” a short two-­liner about a bald woman. And that same poem is readily forgotten given that Epigrams 12.8 is about Trajan. Nevertheless, we have begun the Roman Book by this point and are no longer just talking about getting the book into the city of Rome. A poem was omitted from the list above. In Epigrams 12.2, Book 12, a “foreign book” (peregrine liber), is being sent to Rome and it needs to be given some pointers and some basic orientation. The book is directed to the “new temple” of the Muses, i.e., a library recently restored by Trajan. The poem is shown other likely places of cultural and social power that might welcome it. The core Roman social structure is here: the consul, the senate, the knights, the people. Stella is the consul of 101CE. And Stella is going to receive the poem and then transmit it to the other orders. Stella himself will weep to read Book 12 all the way through. And when the

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people hear just two or three verses, they will know that this is Authentic Martial (Ille dabit populo patribusque equitique legendum,| nec nimium siccis perleget ipse genis; 12.2.15–16). Correspondingly, when we ourselves read, for example, Epigrams 12.20 and learn that Themison does not need a wife because he is fucking his sister, this should bring a tear to our eye: “Yes, that’s my Martial!” Why did he leave? How could he leave? What ever happened to all of that great poetry about patrons, clients, dinners, and eunuchs? The answer to such questions is left, for the most part, as an exercise for the (weeping) reader.240 A cluster of Caesar poems emerges at the end of the opening to the book and, accordingly, it also finds itself at the opening of the body of the book: Epigrams 12.4, 12.6, and 12.8. Each poem casts a different, and often confusing, light on the Caesar-­and-­poetry question. Epigrams 12.6 is a Nerva poem and Epigrams 12.8 is a Trajan poem. This makes it hard to understand at a glance which specific man is “Caesar” in Epigrams 12.4.241 Similarly, the preface to the book had announced that it all came together fast, but, clearly it also came together rather slowly too. And, further, we are going to hear about revised and edited editions of earlier books. There has never been a real problem with the idea that the poems in any given liber also represent an aggregation of various items that may once have formed a libellus. At the end of the year we get the extended remix and/or album form of the collected singles released previously. But this fact never got in the way of a relatively straight-­forward reading of any given book from the perspective of its notional unity where the shape of this unity is adumbrated by the poems that open and close the book that we can hold in our hands today.242 But in the present case we have too many different timeframes in play. We consequently have trouble adopting a simple perspective on the book as a whole. We are promised a burst of fresh poems after a long period of idleness, but, before long, we are talking

240  Rimell, 2008:192: “When we read the book through, we encounter multiple versions of a kind of culminating epigrammatic schizophrenia about identity and geography.” 241  Fitzgerald, 2007:159: “Books 10 (first edition) and 11 between them span the change of regimes, and the anthology alluded to here has elided (rasit, 12.5.2!) that awkward shift in Martial’s allegiance.” 242  In fact, the dominant position today is that the books are indeed carefully structured wholes. The tendency to see architecture in the books is so strong that Holzberg in fact wants to see structures between books and, ideally, a Dodekalog. This position will lead him into a number of efforts to harmonize Books 10, 11, and 12. See Holzberg, 2002:135–152. But my ear has always been somewhat more attuned to the discordant notes. And perhaps one does not need to be so sensitive an auditor as myself if a bomb was lately set off in the amphitheater and the echoes are still resounding throughout the city.

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182 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature to a dead emperor about how he breathes new life into literature. Book 12 is dislocated both along the axis of space and the axis of time. Similarly, this oddly formed book makes as part of its opening gambit a notice that it is going to make (distorting and distorted) claims about the shape of other books. Epigrams 12.4 tells “Caesar” about Books 10 and 11. Longior undecimi nobis decimique libelli artatus labor est et breue rasit opus. Plura legant uacui, quibus otia tuta dedisti: haec lege tu, Caesar; forsan et illa leges.   The longish labor of my eleventh and tenth books has been compressed and filed down to a short work. Idlers can read more: you have given them secure ease. Your read these, Caesar. Maybe you will even read those. Martial, Epigrams 12.4

Given our understanding of the contents of Book 10, we infer that the addressee of Epigrams 12.4 is Trajan. And so, until Epigrams 12.6, at least, one decides that this is a “Trajan Book.” Trajan is told that both of those earlier books have been shortened and filed down. Today one does not notice that either book is especially short: each has a familiar number of epigrams within it. And if we can see Trajan in Book 10, Book 11 has a lot of Nerva in it. That is, only one of the two books immediately “feels” like it has been revisited. All of which means, I suppose, that there are special Trajan Editions of the post-­Domitianic Epigrams on offer. This is, in fact, what the next couplet will state. What such a thing might have looked like is an exercise for the reader (then and now).243 After declaring that the two books have been shortened in the first couplet, the second couplet invites people with too much time on their hands to read the longer editions. These people have so much time on their hands because Caesar himself has given them the gift of a safe and secure otium, untroubled leisure time. Conversely, Caesar is told to read these edited editions. Perhaps he will also read some day the longer versions, if, of course, he has an inclination to hear good things about Domitian. 243  Henderson, 2001:80: “Unsurprisingly, the representation of his journey from Rome to Spain and the tomb, in the revisionary games of Ten through Twelve, amounts to a notorious tease of guesswork and fun with floundering.”

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The princeps is the enabling condition of epigram. People are safe and sound, and so they can both read and write this kind of poetry. The prince is seen at the edge of the zone of poetry. Caesar is a “marginal” figure: his world is larger and more expansive than this zone of poetry. In attending to this larger world, he will detach his full, awesome presence from the realm of epigram. The excessive proximity of Domitian is giving way to the old figure of the spectator princeps who is the giver of the great big show-­as-­offering (munus) in which all of the smaller performers do their thing. If Caesar wanted to know it all, he would be within his rights. But everyone is happiest when Caesar reads only so much and no more. This return to the old way of talking is fine but for the fact that Book 10 once upon a time had Domitian poems in it. And, further, Book 12 is written by someone who has told us that he is really miserable about how much time he has on his hands. Trajan may have given people “safety” and “ease,” but Martial left Rome and he had nothing much to do in Spain. Epigram finally achieves the smallness it always said it wanted. And it is miserable.

v.  Now one is free to enjoy all of Helicon, or not (Epigrams 12.6 and 12.8) In Epigrams 12.6 we celebrate the advent of Nerva to the throne.244 The dates we have on hand in this book are, then: 101ce when Stella the consul is reading the preface. We are still in 101ce when Epigrams 12.4 says Trajan is reading Books 10 and 11. But if Trajan is not reading Book 12 itself, then maybe the Trajan-­poem about Trajan-­books is gathered into Book 12 from a pile of poems dating from 100, 99, . . . . In any case, Nerva’s reign runs from September of 96ce to January of 98ce. A Nerva poem

244  Note that the order and composition of the Epigrams at this juncture is disputed. What I am calling Epigrams 12.6 is 12.6 in Lindsay, 1923. Shackleton Bailey, 1993 has 12.5 as 12.2 + 12.6.1–6. A debate over the order and boundaries of the poems at the head of Book 12 is unfortunate, but it fits in well enough with my general mode of reading the Epigrams. Namely, for me there is a conceptual blur and mingling among proximate poems that takes place in any case. And in this instance this same mingling has yielded issues when it comes to the transmission of the text and editors’ responses to that transmission. The fact that the author himself is producing multiple editions in his lifetime does not much help the situation. Lindsay’s note on 12.6: “cum III confl. (om. vv. 1-­6) CA.” CA is the archetype of LPQfW. For Lindsay there are three major families of manuscripts each with an archetype at its head: AA, BA, and CA.

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184 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature potentially has trouble fitting into the “nothing for three years” span that the preface to Book 12 talked about. A Nerva poem could be four years old if we want to be sticklers for dates.245 Contigit Ausoniae procerum mitissimus aulae Nerua: licet toto nunc Helicone frui: recta fides, hilaris clementia, cauta potestas iam redeunt; longi terga dedere metus. Hoc populi gentesque tuae, pia Roma, precantur: dux tibi sit semper talis, et iste diu. Macte animi, quem rarus habes, morumque tuorum, quos Numa, quos hilaris possit habere Cato. Largiri, praestare, breues extendere census, et dare quae faciles uix tribuere dei, nunc licet et fas est. Sed tu sub principe duro temporibusque malis ausus es esse bonus.   The Ausonian palace has acquired the most gentle of the greats, NERVA. Now one may enjoy the whole of Helicon. Upright honor, cheerful clemency, judicious might: they’re back. Abiding terrors have turned and fled. Here is the prayer, Pious Rome, of your people and nations: May you always have such a leader, and this one for a long time. Blessed be your spirit and your character: few have their like. These Numa, these affable Cato might have. Munificence, benefaction, material support for the poor, gifts that the god’s kind generosity has scarcely matched: TODAY this is right, proper, permitted. BUT you, under a hard prince and in evil days, dared to be a good man. Martial, Epigrams 12.6

The “fuzziness” of the shape of the poetic project afoot in Book 12 stands in stark contrast to the claim in the second line of this poem: now that Nerva is emperor, one is free to enjoy all of Helicon. The poets have been 245  Henderson, 2001:79: “Domitian’s death made a mess of Martial’s Christmas gift for 96, and Nerva’s death didn’t help matters, either, 25 January 98, at the age of sixty-­eight.”

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restored to their mountain now that the Palatine has this man as its occupant. The obliquely evoked idea of a not-­whole Helicon adumbrates a censored poetry of yesteryear. Anything and everything goes today, says the frank speech—or is it “frank speech”?—of the hour. Prized cultural abstractions are returning: fides, clementia, and cauta potestas. They are even overdetermined. For example, “good faith” does not just stand alone, instead we have “upright good faith,” recta fides. And clemency makes sure to smile (hilaris clementia). One could also note that “judicious might” and/or “the circumspect use of power” (cauta potestas) describes something like a lion with a rabbit in his mouth. It is careful not to hurt us. And we do not ourselves have to be quite so careful about offending it. And the climax of this second couplet comes with a declaration that “long(-standing) Fears have turned tail and fled.” A clement Nerva will realize that the fides that a Martial showed to a Domitian was a sort of sham fidelity occasioned by fear. The poem’s final couplet returns our attention to the issue of “what is permitted.” This is an age of permissiveness specifically because Nerva himself lived under “a hard princeps” and he “dared to be a good man in bad times.” Martial has even outlined a template for the institution of the principate as a whole: the emperor serves as a redistributive hub as well as a model for elite gift-­ giving more generally. Martial is also attempting to versify a blueprint for talking about the past as we move forward. Just about every author in this age will be found engaged in this same project. For example, Tacitus will talk about being a good man in bad times when he writes up the life of Agricola. Pliny’s letters will look forward while painting an overly rosy picture of “the good guys”—such as Pliny himself—back in the day as we also praise the new age and its new freedoms. And this community of post-­ Domitianic men writes itself up as a collection of people who endured and maintained what virtue they could in spite of it all. And now that the bad times are over, we can just get back to the good old days and ways: Augustus, Maecenas, a curious Numa, and an oddly smiling Cato who is hilaris for one of the very few times in his whole literary afterlife if we are to believe Epigrams 12.6.8. We can go back to the way we never were, to a life, though, that we would like to imagine as having been lived. It is in the light of this fantasy autobiography that we can start building the new Antonine world.

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186 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature Nerva was a good man in bad times, says the narrator. In fact, this is not an especially novel Nerva that we see here. Nerva is a quiet poet if we look for him in Martial’s Domitianic poetry. But what are we to say about Martial himself? Martial talked a lot about Cato back in the day, but this was by way of praising Domitian. And even as Martial says we can today use “all of Helicon,” he studiously avoids in Book 12 ascending some of the ridges upon which he lingered in Books 6–9, such as mounting to that lovely spot where the panegyric pass and the hyperbolic highlands meet. Martial needs his books to be edited. He needs his poetry to be forgotten, at least in part. He needs the new Caesars to be so kind as to accept from him his pleasant portraits of themselves as well as the preciously (and newly . . . ) slender volumes that he sends them. Or, at any rate, Martial of 101ce retains and/or retells a story wherein Martial wrote of-­and-­to Nerva of 97(?) ce: nunc . . . semper . . . nunc . . . . says the poem, “now,” “forever,” “now.” But history has a poetic force all its own. Something has gotten rewritten even if the poem remains the same as it was in that moment when the words were first sung. There is a new meaning that emerges out of a new moment in which they are sent out all over again after three years of avoiding Helicon: nothing/after a few days of furious writing/after Nerva/during Trajan/ . . . . Now that he is freed from the monster and the terror, says the 97ce poem, we are free to write the 101ce poems. But a lot can (not) happen to a poet in the space of three years. He has been busy writing, unwriting, and not-­writing, to hear him tell of it. The poems are trying to negotiate a simultaneity of “all of the above” and “none of the above.” The epigrammatic textual space had been a parallel for the multiplicity for the cityscape and its improbable conjunction of heterogeneities that somehow all work together—thanks, in no small part, one says, to Caesar.246 But now the textual corpus is frayed, empty, erased, . . . Meanwhile Rome is experiencing a real change if not exactly a renaissance. World and work are drifting apart. Martial is simultaneously writing himself into and out of “The New Rome.” The New Rome is Good Old Rome, but Martial is both literally and metaphorically absent from the glorious Roman “past-­and-­future.” The day before yesterday is tripping him up “right now.” And the “right now” itself is a stuttering sort of present that never advances and only 246  Rimell, 2008:8: “[In Martial] Epigram’s world is both inconceivably immense, diverse, fractured, and at the same time unified, collapsible, homogeneous.”

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loops back with new edits and new smiles that do too little to get rid of the persistent obstacles to “Martialism” as an element of the new political order. The rabbit dared not be a good bunny in bad times: bonus, malus, and mores did not line up for him as they did for Nerva. In fact, at the time, the lepidus lepus, Mr. Rabbit Refined, could not shut up about just how great those bad old days were: “the hare plays safely in the great maw” (tutus et ingenti ludit in ore lepus, 1.6.4), etc. Epigrams 12.8 has a familiar ring to it. In it we are celebrating a warrior emperor. We’ve headed back to that bit of Helicon where one pens pan­e­ gyric. The emperor is Trajan. The time must be, more or less, “now,” the real now of Book 12 not yesterday’s now of 12.6. Great Rome is glad of its great good fortune in having a great man like Trajan. Terrarum dea gentiumque Roma, cui par est nihil et nihil secundum, Traiani modo laeta cum futuros tot per saecula conputaret annos, et fortem iuuenemque Martiumque in tanto duce militem uideret, dixit praeside gloriosa tali: “Parthorum proceres ducesque Serum, Thraces, Sauromatae, Getae, Britanni, possum ostendere Caesarem; uenite.”   Rome, goddess of lands and peoples, she who has no equal, no second, was lately gladdened as Trajan’s future years through so many ages of men she counted, as she saw brave, young, and Mars-­like in so great a general a soldier. She said as she gloried in so great a leader, “Chieftains of the Parthians and Seres, Thracians, Sauromatians, Getans, Britons, I have a Caesar to show you. Come!” Martial, Epigrams 12.6

Trajan is young and martial/martius—i.e., he is not M. Valerius Martialis. He is a praeses, man in charge. Trajan emboldened Rome to say to the world and its leaders, “Bring it on! I’ve got Caesar.” The flattery is ornate.

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188 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature The conceit is contrived and hyper-­inflated. “So much . . . so great . . . so many . . . ”: this poem sounds a lot like the poems addressed to Domitian, the very sort of thing we said we had left behind. Rome spoke: dixit. Rome spoke because she had looked into her own future by looking into Trajan’s future. Her final word was the poem’s last word: “Come (uenite)!”. The periphery is invited in that the center might dominate it. But, even if Rome recently said “Come,” Martial recently said, “I am leaving.” He, a Spaniard, is already defeated by Rome. He made his journey to Rome once upon a time when another Rome and another princeps said, “Come, visit!” But, despite initial successes on his campaigns, the Spanish rabbit has grown dispirited. In Book 9, when Domitian was the praeses, Martial and the Martialesque had a long future ahead of them, or so one hoped: sitque precor longum te praeside, Caesar . . . (9.18.1). But with Trajan as the praeses, even though the rhetorical figure remains the same, the focus has shifted. Rome and Caesar defy the Outsider, writes the Spanish poet lately of Rome. To the extent that Domitianic strains are being sung for Trajan’s ears, there is no space for the bard himself within the future of that old song. The times and places never quite work out for Martial. There is room for someone more or less like him, just not Martial himself. Both of these messages emerge out of the opening to Book 12. Martial’s perspective has become alien and alienated. He says what one says, but it all feels like going through the motions this time around. The new beginning can already taste how this will all end: “Come (again), and be defeated (again).” Meanwhile the sheen and shine of Domitianic power/ poetry has been lost and it is not going to return. The erudite labor that once wove the fine strands of a carmen deductum now comes across as so much belaboring of a threadbare old bunch of rags: “I sold my soul to Domitian and all I got was this lousy t-­shirt.” The art of complicity has turned into the mere kitsch it always was.

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3 Statian Metapoetics The High Art of Complicity A.  An introduction to Statius’ Domitianic literature Martial is a Domitianic author. Statius is a Domitianic author. Those two sentences offer initial, hollow truths. Domitianic might only be a means of designating a span of time. The specifically Domitianic quality of Martial’s poetry has just been explored in some detail. That is, Martial’s poetic project is not an enterprise that just happens to unfold during a certain set of years. Instead, his verses explore in great detail the ins and outs of writing under Domitian. And it is not at all clear that the project as a whole can be detached from the figure of the emperor, both as a concrete historical individual and, more importantly, as an object of imaginary orientation. The follow-­up question is, accordingly, to what extent is the poetry of Statius similarly Domitianic?1 In the most literal sense, no, Statius is not “Domitianic” by being, as it were, a pet poet who is working on commission. He is not specifically tied to the imperial house.2 And the poetry might, for example, mention the emperor but how seriously should we take any of it? Is it really fair to say that there is something fundamentally Domitianic about the enterprise? But, as will become clear, the nature of 1  In fact, Martial’s epigrams cover a broader swathe of Domitian’s reign and then spill into the next era. But Statius’ Siluae are “very” Domitianic to the extent that they seem to all come out late in the reign—i.e., after “the terror” begins—and our poet even seems to die in the same year as the prince. 2  Newlands, 2012:23: “What then was Statius’ relationship to Domitian? He was not, as is often thought, a ‘court poet’ or ‘imperial lackey,’ for he was not close to the court. He won once at the Alban games but failed to secure first prize at the Capitoline games, a source of great grievance to him . . . . The publication of his major works late in Domitian’s reign brought Statius success as a poet but does not imply that he was particularly in the emperor’s favour.” Newlands, 2012:24: “In the Siluae the poems addressed to Domitian or associated with the court are significant but in the minority . . . In the first collection of Siluae (Books 1–3) only four of the 18 refer to the emperor; none of the four books of Siluae published in Statius’ lifetime was dedicated to him.” The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The  Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Erik Gunderson, Oxford University Press. © Erik Gunderson 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.003.0003

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190  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity the relationship between poet and princeps in the Siluae is highly convergent with that we can see in the Epigrams of Martial. A number of salient differences emerge, but these tend to be questions that pertain to the details of the articulation of the pas de deux between power and poetry rather than major reconfigurations of the nature of the performance itself.3 A number of scenes and motifs that are familiar from Martial reappear within the Siluae. And the two collections of verses very much occupy the same world.4 For example, Siluae 2.1 shares its subject matter with Martial, Epigrams 6.28 and 6.29. Namely, these are poems about Glaucias, the foster son of Atedius Melior. It seems entirely possible that “foster son” is a euphemism: the words for a sexual favorite are all here too.5 And both poets adopt a similar orientation to their subject matter: the pair is valorized as a pairing. In other authors in other centuries the relationship, whether an erotic pairing or no, might be more likely to inspire a jeremiad. The baths of Etruscus are celebrated in Siluae 1.5. Martial, Epigrams 6.42.1–2 avers that you’ve never bathed until you have bathed in the same.6 3  See also Rosati, 2006:49 for a tripartite portrait of poetry and power: “Thus we have a complex semiotic web by which Statius achieves his eulogistic strategy: the poet unites three ‘voices’: his own, that of the dedicator and that of the dedicatee, and he controls all three of them, in the sense that he not only expresses his own voice, but he interprets in his own way (that is, he conditions and orientates) the other two as well. Thus, far from creating a passive reproduction of a presumed ‘authentic’ meaning of the work illustrated (the Flavian ideology), the poet assumes a privileged position of power: he becomes the ‘focus’ that reunites and redefines the various points of view.” 4  A prolix appraisal of the overlap in named persons can be found in White,  1975. An alleged antipathy between Martial and Statius is likely overblown. They read one another, use the same expressions, and address the same people (Henricksén,  1998:116). Compare Steele, 1930:333: “These illustrations show something of the field from which the poets drew, and that they all had the same literary aims and followed the same method in the utilization of material. The same aim and the same method are also shown in their work in certain fields.” 5 The not-­ to-­ be-­ trusted title of the poem refers to the boy as a puer delicatus. Newlands,  2011:65 effectively ignores the sexual possibilities by emphasizing this poem’s connection to “Roman family life” and “loving fosterage.” Bernstein, 2005 similarly stresses fostering and even works to turn delicatus/deliciae into something non-­sexual without really confronting the sexual question head on (Bernstein, 2005:267). Damon, 2002:177 assumes without comment that Glaucias really is a puer delicatus. Gibson, 2006:xxxix articulates the state of the evidence much more clearly. Asso, 2010 has embraced the issue in the most satisfying manner: both the erotic and the familial discourses are in play, and we need to say something about the “queerness” of that configuration. Schröder, 1999:183–189 reviews the question of the (untrustworthy) titles of the individual poems of the Siluae. Note especially that puer delicatus in fact seems to be an anachronism (Schröder, 1999:187). Nevertheless, some reader read the poem and decided that the relationship between Melior and Glaucias was not best summarized as that of a foster-­father and his son. And, as Courtney notes, the poems get their titles fairly early even if Statius is not their author (Courtney, 1990:vi). 6  Newlands, 2002:9: “Statius’ Siluae describe some of the most striking artistic features of imperial culture, in particular the highly visible, lofty monuments of the emperor and the strikingly opulent villas of the cultured élite.”

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Novius Vindex owned a lovely little statue of Hercules: both Statius and Martial are quite happy to tell you about it: see Siluae 4.6 and Epigrams 9.43 and 9.44. A tame lion at the shows attracts Statius’ attention in Siluae 2.5. Martial’s interest in animals and shows is pervasive. We will naturally add to the list of convergent poems Statius’ poem on the emperor’s boyfriend’s haircut (Siluae 3.4). As with Martial the key poems in key positions are assigned to the emperor. And, as with Martial, the figure of the poet and his verses as set within these same poems pointedly yokes the poetic project to the imperial project. The first book of the Siluae opens with a poem about an equestrian statue of the emperor. It closes with a poem about the Kalends of January, that is, with the new beginning of the year and its “new” consul, Domitian (yet again): see Siluae 1.1 and 1.6. The fourth book of the Siluae opens with a poem celebrating the seventeenth consulship of Domitian in 95ce. The next poem marvels at a banquet given by the emperor. The next is a witty discussion of an imperial building project: the emperor’s new road. What we are seeing is not just the case of two men who happened to participate in the same circuit of patronage at the same time who, unsurprisingly, produced pieces that reflect the specific interests of their wealthy benefactors. That is only part of the story. The logic that animates the Siluae shares too many deep structural patterns with the Epigrams of Martial for us to be satisfied with that answer. Moreover, even if we posit that some of the approaches to the material and specific tropes were effectively fed to one poet or the other by either a patron’s express wishes or by a canny appraisal of said patron by the poet, this by no means mitigates our obligation to explore the structuring structures that are on display. That is, we need to explore poetry’s relationship to power in a deeper sense. It is too easy to say that people did what they did because they had to.7 Instead a Faustian bargain is at work: power inspires, entices, enables, promises, seduces, . . . Both poets have embraced the fertility of power/ poetry. Each has made the constitutive (im)possible logic of the Domitianic age into a condition of (im)possibility for his own verses. Even if grafted onto the poetic project, the moments of imperial flattery really do embody elements of its “authentic performance” in as much as it is only the critic’s fantasy that conjures as split between text and subtext 7  Geyssen, 1996:143: “Statius’ panegyric poems are not staid and lifeless lines composed to fulfill certain obligations. Nor should they be seen solely as blandishments designed to ingratiate the poet with various strata of Roman society.”

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192  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity where the profundity of the latter saves the poet from the implications of the former.8 Please note, though, that even if I cross my fingers behind my back at a wedding when I say “I do,” I am, nevertheless, actually married in law even if I think that marriage is a joke, and I plan on sleeping with one of the groomsmen before the night is out. One can observe in Martial a profound uneasiness about what it really means to be a “Domitianic poet,” but this same uneasiness is inseparable from the poetic project as a whole. He wants to be both big and small, to master the master, and to achieve other impossibilities, impossibilities that a mere flair for verbal paradox cannot effect in concrete practice. We explored the performance that eventuated from those utterances. Similarly, it seems naive to posit a simple partisanship on Statius’ part. He is playing the game, and he is doubtless at least partially ambivalent about the game itself.9 It would be surprising if the concrete historical individual named Statius was not not conflicted about his socio-­political situation. It will be our task to watch the details of the play and to delineate those contours of its specific articulation in the Siluae that indicate its most conflicted and involuted moments. But, in the final analysis, the question of what one is to make of the Siluae should not be reduced to a matter of the author and his intentions. Instead, we will again look closely at the way language and power interact and the manner in which poetry’s own will to power entangles poetic world-­making in a meta-­narrative that ends up telling tales on the teller of tales himself.

B.  Says this poetry, “This is how you are supposed to read this poetry” The Siluae radiate “genius.” The poems are a performance of virtuosity in multiple simultaneous dimensions. But here we need to resist the 8  Geyssen, 1996:6: the view that the imperial praise is disguised criticism “is tainted by the preconceived notion that no one living under a tyrant would offer praise if it were not necessary. (This view assumes, furthermore, that Statius could see Domitian only as a tyrant.)” Furthermore, the praise is not in fact grafted onto the project: “[W]e must accept that Statius’ praise is pervasive; it is not confined to a few unrelated and insignificant poems.” (Geyssen, 1996:7) Are the “safe criticism” and “doublespeak” theses really standing on such solid ground? See Leberl, 2004:15–17. 9 Other ideas well worth entertaining: the poems are not relentlessly Domitianic (Newlands,  2011:4) and the ludic, playful quality of the poems should not be discounted (Newlands, 2011:5). But, personally, I think that there is a problem with power in the Siluae and that the “playful” quality of the poems is part of this same troubling issue of the relationship to power.

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temptation to talk of the “genius” of the master poet who has mastered all meanings by mastering the poetic tradition itself. We need to find ways to say something important about literature like this that do not simply reproduce the internal ideology of the symbolic artifact before us. The mastery of the poetic tradition on display, for example, invites us to read all of this as “literature about literature” and so to seal off the text from other evaluative schemata. The poems invite us to generate a clever appreciation of the clever work Statius does with Vergil. The poetry’s structural narcissism invites us to flatter our own vanity by participating in this circuit Art about Art. And in appealing to our vanity, it solicits our complicity in what seems like a relatively harmless aesthetic game. But such solicitations are disinvitations as well. Rather than take what is offered to us by the narrative voice as being “the rules for reading,” we can “mishandle” the text and re-­examine what, exactly, the genius has gotten up to. A surfeit meaning arises to one side of the offers that the author-­ figure makes either explicitly or implicitly to the reader-­figure. This non-­ meant message exposes a specific poetry-­and-­mastery configuration. It exposes, then, an instance of the art of complicity per se. And this is because in the world of the Siluae one is not going to be able to think about poetry without also thinking about mastery, nor, conversely, to think about mastery without thinking as well of poetry. Beyond this general narrative stance, though, a collection of specific postures will be noted by the reader of the Siluae. These are positions adopted relative to the material by the narrative voice of the poems.10 Many of them have strong analogs to what one can observe in Martial. For example, the narrator is keen to frame our reception of the poetry. As with the prefatory letters in Martial, in the Siluae too we can see a variety of moments where the reader is told what to make of what is about to be said. It is important not to let these introductory narratives be the last word on the poems that follow.11 At a minimum one needs to note that the poetic 10  Nauta explores two principal configurations of the narrative: an “I” who is a member of a “we” who are imperial subjects and grateful to the emperor (Nauta,  2008:147) and the friend who is personally connected to the addressee (Nauta, 2008:150). Nevertheless, see his concluding sentence: “[A] full study of the Statian ‘I’ would at the same time have to be a study of the Statian ‘you.’” (Nauta, 2008:174). Note the reservations of Kreuz, 2016:50n4 relative to Nauta’s model of the narrative voice(s) of the Siluae. See also White, 1975:267: “As for distinguishing between the warmth of some friendships and the coolness of others, to note how often a patron is styled as dilectus or carus amicus is a less than certain guide, since the language of a poet who lives by patronage is not always to be trusted.” 11  A lot of work on Statius conflates the narrator with the author. And this is especially the case with the prefaces. I will usually say just “the narrator.” The text constantly invites us to think that we are learning about The Real Statius, but it is rash to be over-­hasty in accepting

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194  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity project refuses to let the poetry speak for itself.12 Readers are handed specific readings in advance. These framing devices are not even limited to the openings of books, but one finds as well a variety of inset frames that similarly steer the eye in a certain direction. Naturally, every direction is always also a misdirection. As was the case with Martial, we hear all too often that the poetry we are reading is (mere) trifling play. The programmer programs the programmatic passages with a set of words and phrases that attempt to slot the poems into an (allegedly) familiar template. The preface to the first book insists that these verses were just dashed off.13 Rough edges are inevitable. But one has to publish the verses because the original recipients of these impromptu pieces are themselves disseminating them. The whole sounds like a collection of self-­serving half-­truths. Does the poet really think these poems are crap? No. The neologism “humblebrag” fits the situation well enough. Others might even hear a genteel politesse.14 But, no matter how these claims hit one’s ear, we will assuredly appreciate that a framework within which to read the poetry is being imposed, even if one also appreciates that irony is present as well: “Take note of the following items. Otherwise you will be looking in the wrong places and will misread.” What follows will routinely be a “resistant” reading rather than a “complicit” one. Note how this same reading is condemned in advance by the Siluae themselves: according to the programmatic passages, it is an errant reading. “Speed” is a quality over which the narrator lingers: it appears as a quality in the initial description of the collection and returns in most of the summaries of the individual poems: a statue today, a poem about the this invitation. What we “know” is what we have been invited to know. Kreuz’s caution is welcome: “Die Trennung von physischem Autor, Autor im Text und konkretem Sprecher im Text muß keineswegs die vollkommene Absage an biographistische Interpretation bedeuten, als Korrektiv derselben aber ist sie offenkundig und dringend vonnöten.” (Kreuz, 2016:42) 12  Henderson, 1998:102: “Preface mediates between poems and reader, proposing a perspective for their reception.” 13 Statius, Siluae 1.pr: libellos, qui mihi subito calore et quadam festinandi uoluptate fluxerunt. Impromptu versification is a real and important skill in this world. Presenting these pieces as they might be mere transcripts of such a performance is a gesture of patent artifice. See Newlands, 2011:3 and 57. Compare Bright, 1980:30. Henderson, 1998:113: “The book-­ work of re-­presentation is on show.” Newlands, 2002:33: “The words ‘talent’ and ‘genius’ are taboo. Statius’ insistence on the hastiness of his work falls into the same category as Catullus’ apologies in his first poem for his nugae, his ‘trifles.’” 14 Gibson,  2006:xix–xxii walks us through the evidence: once one pushes past a few demurrals, we have a pile of evidence that Statius’s project is the ambitious product of a confident pen. Compare the remarks of Henderson on the ornately self-­ conscious self-­ positioning posturing prologue to Statius’ Thebaid (Henderson, 1993:162–164).

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statue tomorrow; a wedding today, 300 verses forty-­eight hours later; a bath before dinner, a poem about the bath before the dinner itself is over . . .15 This is all here-­and-­now poetry that you have right here and right now when you hold the book in your hands. The connection between poetry and life arrives as ready-­made. One infers as much from the fact that the making was so readily done: poetry on the spot to celebrate the then-­and-­there. To the extent that we see care and facility rather than rough edges and gaucheries, then we appreciate that the issue of “speed” actually answers another set of questions entirely, namely, the consummate social savoir-­faire that allegedly connects beautiful poetry to elite society. The here and now is quick and easy.16 It takes no effort to participate in or to give voice to this genteel world. We are also told that these poems are like the Culex or the Battle of Frogs and Mice: what we are seeing is an epic poet at play.17 Nevertheless, Statius’ baroque aesthetic means that he finds it difficult to maintain an especially light touch when it comes to the topic of play. And so he uses praeludere instead of ludere and he sets the word at the end of its sentence to make sure that you take note of it: “But one reads both the Culex and the Battle of Frogs and Mice. And none of the poetic greats failed in a less stern style in his writings to make some preliminary play (sed et Culicem legimus et Batrachomachiam etiam agnoscimus, nec quisquam est inlustrium poetarum qui non aliquid operibus suis stilo remissiore praeluserit; 1.pr.7–10).” A recherché word articulates the idea of goofing off.18 15 Gibson,  2006:xviii: “But speed is an unusual criterion for composition.” Wray, 2007:141–142: “When genius works at speed, we prize its works no less. And a poetics of genius is precisely what Statius’s prefaces seem to me to be theorizing.” Zeiner,  2005:250: “Statius wants us to appreciate the compositional nature of his verses as a product of his versatility and poetic genius, otherwise his repeated references to celeritas are meaningless.” See Rosati on the break with Callimacheanism here. Rosati, 2015:61: “The attack on the imperatives of Callimacheanism is made indirectly and discreetly . . . It is not by chance that Horace’s unit of measurement for bad poetry, the hundreds of verses, return in the claim that Statius makes for his own improvisatory ability.” [original emphasis] 16  Coleman,  1988:xxvi: “As the phrase ‘quadam festinandi voluptate fluxerunt’ suggests, this poetry was composed with spectacular fluency and confidence.” 17  Myers, 2015:46: “Statius’ persona in the Siluae is that of an epic poet at play, who has only temporarily abandoned this higher genre for a wholly new and original departure in a lighter vein.” Roman, 2015:449: “Notably missing in this dichotomy of the sublime and the risible . . . is any place for poetic genres of a middle stature that fall below epic on the scale of grandeur but admit of serious literary ambitions.” 18  All forms of praeludere: five occurrences in the classical Latin corpus. Forms of ludere appear over 1400 times. The noteworthy word was duly noted by Claudian, an avid reader of Statius. See Dewar,  1996:110: “praeludere: Theodosius’ great victory over Maximus is here made merely to set the scene for the crushing of Alaric. praeludo is a word little used in verse, and so it is all the likelier that Claudian is thinking of Statius’ flattery of Domitian, Ach. 1. 19 ‘magnusque tibi praeludit Achilles.’ Note also Prud. Ham. 723f.”

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196  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity In practice we are not allowed to forget that a man such as our narrator is never “merely playing”: his Latin never sounds in the least bit like the sort of thing any old Gaius would casually cough up. Similarly, it takes the narrative voice the first quarter of Siluae 1.5 to say several times over, “I am just goofing off ”: “This is me not doing epic . . .” “Other muses require me . . .” “Now is not the time for the Thebaid . . .”19 “I want to have a bit of fun with a select companion.” “Time for drinking and not singing of the Labors of Hercules . . .” “My muse is playing for Etruscus . . .” Mere play, simple play, unaffected play: this is not in fact the play you will find when you read the Siluae.20 And, in addition to what is in practice complex and artful play, the narrative voice laboriously disseminates endless talk-­about-­ play. Truly playful people tend not to have to tell you that they are playing around. Consider a parallel case: the man who says, “Just kidding” or “Can’t you take a joke” has more often than not just said something hurtful that did not feel like it was a mere joke. One notes that Statius chooses a stiff and precious phrase, dilectus sodalis, “the choice companion,” to designate the man with whom he is allegedly relaxing and letting his hair down.21 The parts correspond to the whole: things are never free and easy, even when we claim to be taking it easy. Everything is choice, select, and careful, and this is true of both the objects themselves and the language that designates those objects. To the extent that we are seeing verses that have received little or no re-­editing— true in part, I suppose, but how big a part . . . ?—then Statius trained himself in the art of spontaneous affectation.22 In contradistinction to something like Catullus’s erotic mutuality of versified play, Statius’ scene is 19  A much more positive take on this trope in the prefaces: “[B]y presenting each individual poem not as an instance of something he has composed earlier, but as an interruption of his daily work as an epic poet, Statius makes each occasion seem unique and special.” (Nauta, 2008:169) 20  Bright, 1980:16: “What is unusual is Statius’ assumption that these jeux d’esprit are of sufficiently enduring interest to justify publication in collected books.” The sequel answers the implied question: Statius has “enhanced” the stuff of mere occasional verse and thereby transformed it into something that might last. The sixth chapter of Newlands, 2002 works through ways in which Siluae 1.5 articulates a new, alternate poetic program that sets itself apart from but not beneath Statian epic. As epic is to suffering, the Siluae are to the pleasures of private life. Bessone, 2014:232: “On the other hand, in the Siluae, self-­representation as an occasional poet does not appear alternative, but rather complementary to (or even homogeneous with) that as an epic poet.” 21 Statius, Siluae 1.5.9: “I want to sport with a choice companion (dilecto uolo lasciuire sodali).” See under diligo: “2 dīlectus, a, um, P. a., loved, beloved, dear (rare).” 22  See Gibson, 2006:xxv on the broader ramifications of the claim in Siluae 5.3.214 that his father taught him to avoid speaking as the common man speaks (non uulgare loqui). Zeiner,  2005:59–60: Statius has just announced his acquisition of cultural capital and his commitment to elitism.

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much starchier: Clio mea ludit Etrusco.23 “My Clio” + “play” + “dative of advantage.” One strongly suspects that play is merely a pretext for a performance of a combination of well-­mannered restraint and formal innovation: “Look at what an unusually light touch I have.” Of course, his touch is not at all light.24 And the adverb should be rendered as an adjective: he has an odd touch and not a notably light one. Mannered manners will prevail.25 Statius is the sort of poet who will close a book of poems by saying that the poem you are reading is a joke-­poem sent in response to another joke poem. Everything is carefully labeled and framed. Siluae 4.9, a poem that closes its libellus, is deeply ironic, but the ironies themselves have been flagged from the outset: “Assuredly this is a joke: to send me a libellus in exchange for a libellus! (Est sane iocus iste, quod libellum | misisti mihi, Grype, pro libello. 4.9.1–2)” That was not urbanus. If you keep on joking like that it won’t be a joke in the end . . . We are ringing the changes, and this display of change-­ringing is “no joke.” This display of postures constitutes the substance of the performance. It is fundamental to the project of the Siluae, a poetic woodland in which carefully rehearsed poses are struck by men artfully dressed for an outing in the countryside. There is not much danger of being gored by a wild boar in a landscape like this. Statius lingers with moments where the sign-­system can work itself. The book-­roll gets filled up with talk about book-­rolls getting filled up. The poem about textuality is full of cross-­references to Catullus’ poems about textuality. This is a poem about a book in which poems and books spiral off into infinity. One could call this a mise en abîme, but Hegel’s “negative infinity” might be a more useful label: this is an endless, sterile succession of images that hints at a profundity that is in fact never going to arrive.26 23 Statius, Siluae 1.5.14. Catullus 50 is the contrasting poem. See Gunderson, 1997. 24  Hardie,  1983:154: “The Siluae may appear sometimes to lack lightness of touch; but there is a detectable sense of humor beneath the surface, which should not be underestimated.” 25  Geyssen,  1996:5: the “ornateness, periphrasis, hyperbole and metaphor” of the Siluae does not correspond to classicism, and “preconceived notions of poetry” need to be suspended when approaching Statius. Bardon,  1962:745 surveys the aesthetic challenge presented by the mixture with which we are confronted: “Le besoin de bizarrerie et de grâce, sans nous mener au baroque même, nous éloigne du classicisme. . . . Pourtant, ces visions aimables, et aussi peu naturelles que possible, sont un des charmes des Silves.” His heterogenous catalog continues on this same page. 26  Hegel, 1975a:137: “This Infinity is the wrong or negative infinity: it is only a negation of a finite: but the finite rises again the same as ever, and is never got rid of and absorbed. In other words, this infinite only expresses the ought-­to-­be elimination of the finite. The progression to infinity never gets further than a statement of the contradiction involved in the finite, viz. that it is somewhat as well as somewhat else. It sets up with endless iteration the

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198  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity The “danger” of joking that opens the fourth book is defused as we ostentatiously take care to be seen joking about that joke of our own making. The verses are full of cues to keep interpretation inside the tidy frame that is built to house the same. As with Martial’s Domitianic poetics, depth is swapped out for “depth.” Siluae 4.9 complains that there is no (Catullan) charm, no lepos in tit-­ for-­tatting. And, indeed, within the Catullan universe that might well be true. But the narrative voice of this poem is tit-­for-­tatting while saying that the same is uncharming. This is, naturally, a “charming” conceit in its own right. Nevertheless, one notes that the same is also destined to be a “mere conceit” and that the conceit lying behind such a conceit is that (mere) word play really does have sufficient charms. The emphasis falls here on both the word “mere” and the way in which it is set in parentheses by the poetry. The good reader is invariably provided with a sotto voce subtext that consolidates specific qualities of the text proper. Here, for example, the “hypocrisy” of the narrator is distinctly unthreatening. Hypocrisy is fun, funny, a joke, and a learned joke at that. Consider again the preface to Book 4: “secret joking” might be dangerous. No, we are told, jokes can be made publicly. If in that passage we suspected that there was some sort of “hidden reserve” that subverted this claim and complicated it, in Siluae 4.9 we are told that “deep down, this is all shallow.” This is not to say that this particular reading of Siluae 4.9 is “the last word” on depth and joking in Statius, it is only to note that the poem itself is a set of words that come last and that this same collection of words folds  into itself a “deeper meaning” that scares away those who might look  for profundities, especially political profundities, in “light verse.” Hendecasyllabi are summoned, but not as part of a broader game of sex, society, and verse but only as hendecasyllabi about hendecasyllabi. These are hendecasyllabi about the word hendecasyllabi. The Catullan hendecasyllabic thing goes missing because we are so busy showing off our ability to cite Catullus that we never get around to in fact being Catullan.27 This is one of the key features of Statius’ aesthetic, though: everything will get set alternation between these two terms, each of which calls up the other . . . But such a progression to infinity is not the real infinite. That consists in being at home with itself in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself in its other.” 27 Catullus, Carmina 42: “Come, hendecasyllables, all of you, as many as you are, from everywhere, all of you, as many as you may be: a disgusting adulteress thinks I’m a joke . . . (Adeste, hendecasyllabi, quot estis | omnes, undique, quotquot estis omnes. | iocum me putat esse moecha turpis . . .).”

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in quotation marks, and so, deep down, there is very little to get scared of. You need not fear encountering a real, live monster as you plunge into the depths. Your real fear ought to be that you might ignorantly fail to appreciate a learned cross-­reference. Or perhaps you might fear being laughed at for mistaking a “monster” for a monster. The editorial voice and the narrative persona both have a directive quality to them. They (too) freely label their own practice. And, in so doing, they can convert material that might feel like it was “on the nose” in the positive sense into items that feel “on the nose” in the negative sense: that is, the apposite starts to feel unimaginative. Tell overwhelms show amidst all of the talk about showing: “Look, here is some more poetry.” The narrator’s deprecation of the sub-­epic poetic project turns into a sort of contempt for an audience that needs so much guidance. Not only is Statius’ poetry about poetry, it also makes sure to be seen as a performance of poetry about poetry. That is, there is not a metapoetic subtext that appears to the reader upon closer inspection. The audience who is versed in verses is beaten over the head: “Behold (ecce! en!), this is Poetry about Poetry.28 Behold (ecce! en!), here are my allusions! Here are my intertexts! This is Art as per the Rules of Art.”29 My own evocation of the frequent use of rhetorical evocations of presence points out the manner in which these mannerisms end up doing more work than merely sounding and resounding in a hollow echo-­ chamber of verse.30 The acoustic insistence upon lived, visual experience attempts to leverage synesthesia to body forth the immanence of a lost moment. It is gone, it is past, but “look!,” it lives on and will live on. Authorial intentions and the narrative ego stand in for, underwrite, and make up the losses for the departed (Domitianic) moment. The voice in 28  Verstraete,  1983:196: “Horace’s classical dictum ars est celare artem is certainly not a hallmark of mannerist literature.” And for Verstraete Statius is assuredly a mannerist who writes a hyperstylized Latin. 29  A less hostile and more nuanced appraisal: “[P]oetic excess exists in the creative tension with the polished refinement and often playful wit characteristic of the small-­scale poem.” (Newlands, 2002:3) 30  Ecce: fourteen times in the Siluae. En: nine times in the Siluae. Is the label of “mannerism” just a (negative) way of adverting to aesthetic adventurousness (Newlands, 2002:3)? No. Critics who deploy the term mannerism do not necessarily say that Statius was the first mannerist and that mannerism is of itself bad. See, for example, the extensive appraisals of Neronian and Flavian poetry as a mannerist response to Augustan classicism in Burck, 1971. The real question: was the adventure in the Siluae a success? Verstraete, 1983:196: “Even if we accept the Siluae on the premises of literary mannerism, we are still entitled to wonder how successfully and effectively that mannerism is, in fact, sustained.” Nevertheless, this was an adventurous age, and that is worth celebrating: “Ce fut un temps où la variété et les différences du goût ont exprimé un enrichissement réel de la sensibilité.” (Bardon, 1962:732)

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200  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity your ear guarantees you that there was a glorious there over there that your eyes just missed seeing.31 Statius’ Siluae—owing to their hasty, sloppy composition . . . ?—contain a specific “this is (lyric) poetry” feature that juts out rather obtrusively from the text. Statius uses forms of chelys with remarkable frequency.32 The dictionary entry for the same has already noted as much: “a lyre or harp made of its shell, pure Latin testudo (except Ovid, in post-­Augustan poets only; most frequently in Statius).”33 If a search for forms of the word turns up forty-­eight citations across the full corpus of classical Latin (and some of these citations are a later author quoting an earlier author), the fact that Statius’ Siluae themselves use the word twenty-­two times is indeed striking. And as such this word’s deployment becomes emblematic of a feature of the project as a whole: some of this is genuinely recondite material, other items are faux-­recondite. Words like chelys are affectations that turn something that had been remote into the drab and commonplace. Much as a truly classy person never uses the word “classy,” the poet who over-­uses chelys tends to sound like a poetaster.34 Nevertheless, there is little to be gained by describing any of the aforementioned choices as elements of some “failure” on the part of the Siluae to live up to an externally imposed aesthetic evaluative schema: “If he had used chelys 11 times the poetry would be refined, but he used it 22 times and so it was gauche . . .” What is of greater interest is the manner in which Statian “mannerism” is part of a politico-­aesthetic project that is very insistent about being very insistent about whatever it is we are doing: “Here is some poetry. Here is some power. This is wonderful. There has never been anything quite like it.”35 That is, this very “directiveness” is the 31  Kreuz, 2016:54: “Eine wahre Autorenintention des wirklichen Autors ist in Textgattungen wie den in den Siluae vertretenen nie, jedenfalls nicht vollständig.” 32  Bessone,  2014:215: “The omnipresent and omnivalent symbol of the lyre (competing with that of the file) holds the oeuvre of Statius together under a single sign.” 33  Lewis and Short, 1962, s.v. chelys. 34 This would be my chief point of emphasis concerning the sociological reading of Zeiner, 2005: Statius aspires to be a representative of legitimate culture, but not everyone who heard his verses would have agreed that he had succeeded or even that the culture he was “representing” was itself especially “legitimate.” It was, though, the culture of those currently occupying the center of political power. Zeiner, by presupposing Statius’ legitimacy, fails to note the obsessive self-­referentiality that ties the poetry to its object. The poet and the poems are constantly crafting their own legitimacy as well. There is a precariousness to the whole universe of social symbols here, a precariousness that corresponds to the “newness” of so much of what we see: new genres, new people, new uses of wealth, new modes of evaluation, new political powers . . . 35  Curtius, 1973:282: “The mannerist wants to say things not normally but abnormally. He prefers the artificial and affected to the natural. He wants to surprise, to astonish, to dazzle.

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issue, not whether or not one finds it tiresome. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that these directions are incomplete and/or misleading, and at multiple simultaneous levels.36

C.  All that glitters makes for a golden verse As with Martial’s “society of the spectacle,” the relationship between surface and depth has been (ostentatiously) decomposed. The poems sing about the immediate and the novel while talking about their own hasty composition: we are in a rush to articulate “Domitianic modernity.”37 The old, the deep, the hidden, the secret: one acknowledges the possibility of such, but the whole domain appertains to a conservative traditionalism that is being assaulted in practice as well as in theory. The aleatory and the unexpected—which is often neither genuinely aleatory nor unexpected— occasion paroxysms of praise when Martial visits the arena. The poetic spark delights in running along after the editor and re-­writing the latter’s innovative performances out in the world inside the realm of verse. Statius’ impromptu poetry shows itself ready, willing, and able to tackle the many spontaneous delights of the Domitianic age. Even if this is a forced, artificial pose, it is, nevertheless, politically and aesthetically consequential, and consequential even to the extent that it is not “authentic.” That is, whether or not one believes in “the game,” the game itself insists that what most matters is being seen to play it. As with Martial, a key element of the lusus consists in the de-­fanging of dangerous situations. While there is only one way of saying things naturally, there are a thousand forms of unnaturalness.” The evocation of “normal” and “abnormal” and “(un)natural” is likely to raise hackles. One could substitute “familiar,” “unfamiliar” and “(un)conventional” and produce a less inflammatory formulation. Vessey, 1974:271: “[T]he term mannerism has been increasingly used by critics of ancient literature to describe stylistic phenomena which deviate in a predictable fashion from classical norms.” Vessey, 1974:272: “Mannerism of content or ‘thematic’ mannerism . . . might well be better labelled counter-­classicism. It represents a purposeful rejection of classical values as compared with classical stylistics.” Much of what I am discussing in the Siluae is a “counter-­classicism” of content that is likewise expressed in a non-­ classical style. 36  See the reading agenda laid out by McNelis, 2007:283: “Pindar constructs his own argument about social norms . . . In the case of the Siluae, such an enquiry about the relationship between Statius and the society he depicts will result in varying assessments of, for instance, power and patronage.” 37  Newlands, 2002:7: “[Statius’ text] uses the confrontation with the specificity and alterity of prior texts to develop a new modern voice and idiom, and by calling given codes into question it goes on to produce a fresher, more hospitable code for the modern age.” Pavlovskis,  1973 argues that Statius is the poet of “a modern, superior way of life” (Pavlovskis, 1973:3).

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202  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Danger becomes “danger.” Naturally, “danger” can itself turn into something dangerous (without the scare quotes) in the end. But one has to at least note the ostentatiousness with which the first transformation is effected. “He was like a lion-­tamer who knew how to stick his hand down in the beast’s maw without getting hurt,” says the narrator of Siluae 3.3.38 We will look more closely at the poem below, but the addressee is Claudius Etruscus. The topic is Etruscus’s father, a servant in the imperial house. The lion is Caligula. The poem offers a collection of displacements: son is not father, past is not present, servant is not master, tamer is not beast, Domitian is not Caligula, . . . However this simile—one stripped from the Flavian amphitheater of here-­and-­now—that tucks itself into a moment of the there and then offers a subtext. This subtext is not something like “Domitian is a monster.” Instead it says, “Even if Domitian were a monster, those of us who are masters of the servile game know how to nevertheless get away with all sorts of things, we slaves who master the kings of the Roman jungle.” The poetic “play” in a passage like this turns into a celebration of a community of the subservient who nevertheless rise within the system by being good at “playing the game.” Etruscus’s father was a success. Etruscus himself is an important man. And Statius is the bard standing there with his chelys ready to celebrate the winners of the modern game rather than to engage in a retrograde meditation on the way libertas died at Pharsalus. And so we can see that the “joke” of the talking river who talks-­up his own submission is structured according to the dominant logic of domination that pervades the Siluae. Says the river, “Thank you very much! Servitude is worth it! I got to yield with you as the general, with you commanding it (sed grates ago seruitusque tanti est, | quod sub te duce, te iubente, cessi. 4.2.81–82).” The poem jokingly says, “Submission is wonderful,” but the very same message also appears in non-­joking contexts as well. For example, it appears as an element of the celebration of Domitian’s equestrian statue. A smug confidence that the poet is really the lion-­tamer should not be confused with actual resistance to the system or a reluctance to participate in it. Self-­made men, men of talent, men of genius: these are our (fantasy) winners in a courtly world, not men with old names and old habits 38 Statius, Siluae 3.3.72–3.3.77: “A tyrant he endured, fearsome to see and to address, a monster to his own. He was like a man who masters the dreadful hearts of beasts and now bids them, after a taste of blood, to release a hand plunged into their mouth and to live bereft of their spoils (terribilem affatu passus uisuque tyrannum immanemque suis, ut qui metuenda ferarum corda domant mersasque iubent iam sanguine tacto reddere ab ore manus et nulla uiuere praeda).”

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and obsolete values that go along with their quaint, hollow imagines hung in their atria.39 A symptomatic element of the strategic speciousness of poetic archaism in the Domitianic world is the deployment of macte. Like chelys this word also flags nothing so much as a contemporary project that has had a classy patina of Ye Olde Latine applied to it. The word is old and obsolete for Livy, but it is on everyone’s lips in the Domitianic era. The old idiom was macte uirtute: “Blessed be ye for your valor.” The “contemporary” reformulation of this archaism is macte animi, a phrase that might have more or less the same force until one reflects on the general semantic drift of macte. One could argue, I suppose, that a poet might be interested in substituting animus for uirtus for metrical reasons. And one can even declare that the two phrases mean more or less the same thing. But, unsurprisingly, actually looking at the passages in question reveals a disjunction between uirtus and animus. The former conjures old, traditional manly martial excellence. The latter can mean bravery, but instead in practice it works a lot more like “spirit” or even “genius.” “Bravo, clever fellow, game well played!” is the modern archaism in Domitian’s Rome. The archaic archaism was, “Fight and die for traditional Roman values, men!” Macte used to be a very high style way of saying “Bravo!” by tapping into an even older religious substrate. But now we are seeing it freely deployed in this verse that insists both that it is Definitely Not Epic and that it is Quite Casual, Actually.40 The result is another making-­trite of a rare word.41 It gets dragged out from the thesaurus and waved around with such fanfare that the precious jewels start to feel like glassy fakes in 39  Wallace-­Hadrill, 1996:285: “The [Roman imperial] court and its membership had no ‘official’ definition, for this was a social not a legal institution, private in its composition though public in its importance. The contrast with the Senate is significant.” Saller, 1982:60 gives us the stakes: “Whether warmly personal or formal, amicitia with the emperor was an enormously important fact in an aristocrat’s life. As suggested above, an amicus could expect honores for himself, and also auctoritas derived from his ability to influence decisions and secure beneficia for friends.” 40 A more positive appraisal can be found at Newlands,  2011:24–25: we see neo-­ Callimacheanism meeting up with occasional poetry. The result is “a curious blend of elevation and intimacy.” See also the appraisal of the Callimachean resonances in Statius project at Gibson,  2006:xxiv–xxviii. On the occasional and/versus the Alexandrian in the Siluae see further Rosati, 2015. 41  We are seeing the word far too often. It is something of a special effect, and few authors use it regularly. Specifically, if macte appears sixty-­nine times in the 7.5 million words in the Latin database, then appearing ten times in the twenty-­five thousand words of the Siluae does seem to qualify as a noticeably frequent use of a rare word. In fact, no single text uses it more than does the Siluae. Silius Italicus’s long epic uses macte only five times, and only in three passages. He has macte indole sacra, macte uirtute paterna, macte uirtutis, and macte (pudici) animi. In Silius the set of nouns is basically traditional and the tone elevated. There

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204  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity the end. Macte toris . . . Macte bonis animi . . . Macte, oro, nitenti|ingenio curaque puer! . . . Macte animo quod Graia probas . . . Macte animis opibusque meos imitate labores . . . Macte pio gemitu! . . . Macte, o iuuenis, qui tanta merenti|lumina das patriae . . . Macte, quod et proles tibi saepius aucta uirili|robore, . . . Macte animi! . . . Macte animo, iuuenis!42 Marriage, good looks, pious grief, fertility, courage, hard-­work, fine character . . . Good things are good. Let’s give them a hearty cheer. Each of these passages should likely be read with some attention: there is more going on than the mere use of a word in here. But, at the same time, we should not let that “more” blind us to the fact that “something less” is becoming of macte itself. In the case of this word high style has become “high style.” Despite the “conventional” quality of the last two ­citations—citations which come from the posthumous Book 5 and sound much like a bit of Silius or Martial—everything else is quite marked. Clever ways to say macte proliferate. This dusty old heirloom word finds itself surrounded by novel objects and newly elaborate grammatical constructions.43 The sonorousness of macte uirtute has “yielded”—as per a favorite image in our authors . . . —to a series of shouty cries of “Bravo!” and “Huzzah!.” And Pliny’s two “clever” constructions in the Panegyricus do not sweeten our appraisal much: the word has become part of the hot air of imperial bloviations.44 Yes, this is all stylized, and highly so, but the literally numinous qualities of the word have been shoved to one side. And so the highly stylized ends up squeezing out the (literally) high. The new heights effectively belittle the old heights.

D.  The high and the low in the here and now The fate of macte is a symptomatic moment that offers a point of entry into a broader collection of phenomena. This collection of features belongs to the domain of desublimation, a topic familiar from our discussion of Martial. As before, the version of desublimation on display should not be

are a couple of syntactical twists, but they are decidedly minor relative to what one sees in Statius. See Punica 4.475, 10.277, 12.257–258, and 15.274–275. 42 These are snippets from Siluae 1.2.201, 1.3.106, 1.5.63–64, 2.2.95, 3.1.166, 3.3.31, 4.8.14–15, 4.8.25, 5.1.37–38, and 5.2.97. 43  Coleman, 1988:xxvii: “E. R. Curtius’ concept of ‘mannerism’ has been widely adopted to define the nature of the Siluae: Curtius meant ‘all literary tendencies which are opposed to Classicism,’ ‘the artificial and the affected [preferred] to the natural’. ” 44  See Pliny, Panegyricus 46.5 and 89.3.

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confused with the comic version of the same.45 That is, comedy very much enjoys ostentatiously dragging the high down low. In the desublimation of Siluae, there is no explicit effort to make the high lower. In fact, every effort seems to be expended to insist that one ought to fully invest in the loftiness of the lofty. Nevertheless, there is a general cheapening of the precious. Things that had been low are pushed into the stratosphere. Notions that had been reserved for the high find themselves applied to the mundane. The idea that everything is awesome tends to yield the suspicion that perhaps nothing is all that great after all, or, at any rate, one is losing the ability to sort the truly great from the “great.” The discourse of the exceptional starts sounding just like a rhetorical mode, a form that has overwhelmed its contents. One can, though, point out a politically consequential effect of this same process. Whether intended or no, the net result is a sense that greatness is a matter of mundane concerns about power and observing the golden rule about the guy with the gold making the rules. In short, a species of cynicism replaces reverence, and it does so as a consequence of the very formal qualities in which the poetry invests so much energy. One has long been hard pressed to determine just how seriously to take a great deal of poetic discourse. The trope of metonymy is pervasive. As such, it is difficult to say that there is anything unusual about a poet who is wont to designate wine by talking about “Bacchus.” In fact, it might be difficult to find poets who are able to resist the temptation to do so. Nevertheless, Statius gives little impression that the Olympians are good for all that much more than a means of making common nouns sound proper and for adding some grandeur to the mundanities of a social circle that is never allowed to feel that it is itself in the least bit mundane. “The wine was good at your party” is “Now, now I feel myself fading ‘neath your Bacchus, and am drawn drunk into a tardy slumber (iam iam deficio tuoque Baccho | in serum trahor ebrius soporem. 1.6.96–97).” The “immanence” in a line like this is not to be found in the proximity of the divine, but instead in the preciousness of the socially charged moment. And, in fact, these are two of the last verses of the last poem of the first book. The final stanza starts by talking about how this one day will live on through the years (Quos ibit procul hic dies per annos! 1.6.98). And such a conceit naturally gains its truth as a function of the fame that the poet is herewith producing. Domitian’s Big Day is “intoxicating” because of Domitian, not 45  See pages 139–48.

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206  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Bacchus.46 The frenzy of celebration and commemoration that has entered into the poet’s breast arises from getting too close to power. And, further, this approach to power is itself an approach to heaven, as we will discuss later. Accordingly, the poem has virtually nothing to do with Dionysus and everything to do with the way a label like “Dionysus” looks fantastic on a bottle of expensive wine that has been set on god-­like Domitian’s table. If “Bacchus” is not a god but instead merely wine waiting to become ennobled by a special occasion for special people, so too is “Ceres” just bread that has arrived at the right table. In Siluae 4.2.34 we see a table overburdened with food and wine. That is not quite how the verse works, though. Ceres is “comically” figured as a bustling serving woman and Bacchus as a put-­upon waiter struggling to get the job done (ipsa sinus accincta Ceres Bacchusque laborat | sufficere). It’s a humorous touch, if one wishes. And yet one nevertheless worries that, in the final analysis, the gods and goddesses really are over-­worked and getting a work-­over by the mortals.47 As per the belabored conceits of Statius’ poetic imagination, the divinities “barely suffice” when it comes time to serve power as it ought to be served. One finds far, far more of this sort of thing in the Siluae than one does any simple reverence for the Olympians.48 In Siluae 5.1 Ceres is one of the goddesses whose many visages have all turned into a single object of representation, namely the addressee of a poem, the dead Priscilla. The poet talks up the tomb of the dead wife and says there one can see a variety of statues of “Ceres, et al.,” each of whom wears Priscilla’s features. And “they receive and by no means scorn the fair face | do the gods.”49 That is, the gods are all happy to be reduced to mere 46  Compare Statius, Siluae 1.2.258: “alike we reveled and raged before the altars” (pares bacchamur ad aras), a moment that is all about the homosociality of Callimachean poetics. Despite the translation above, in practice bacchamur in a line like this means “We remember lines like immanis in antro bacchatur uates and infelix uirgo tota bacchatur in urbe from our Vergil lessons.” It does not mean “The god has entered us.” It means, “a desire to flag our memories has entered me.” 47  Less dark is Taisne, 1994:312: “Stace fait intervenir beaucoup plus de divinités que ses prédécesseurs. Elles se montrent le plus souvent sous leur meilleur jour: Stace prend soin de faire disparaître tout caractère terrifiant et hostile tant dans leur aspect extérieur que dans leur dispositions morales.” But I would highlight her notes about quantity and quality. There are “too many” gods. Their qualities have been “reduced.” 48  And so I worry very much about the use of “playful” in the following: “The claims to divinity that the vast height and extent of [Domitian’s] hall express become confused with actual divinity, as Olympus and the Palatine become interchangeable in Statius’ playful trope.” (Newlands, 2002:269) Not all play is harmless, and not every joke is a mere joke. 49 Statius, Siluae 5.1.230–235: “Such impressive riches does the august marble breathe forth. Presently you are restored, transformed into various likenesses: here you are a Ceres in bronze, here the radiant Cretan maid, in that cupola Maia, and a modest Venus in this stone. The divinities welcome and scorn not your fair face (tantas uenerabile marmor | spirat opes.

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metonyms for the mortal: the face-­swap is a fine thing. Art reduces the Olympian immortals to the permanent playthings of an artist catering to an important man’s grief. And then Statius writes up a celebration of the same that the immortalization via art itself might be immortalized in still more art. As for the immortals, well, “they didn’t complain,” and that’s going to be good enough for the Domitianic smart set: haud indignata numina. Litotes: it’s not just a trope, it’s a way of life under the emperors. Traditional myths have become a matter of tradition pure and simple. Accordingly they have turned into a collection of elite symbols that get swapped by a certain class of people. This phenomenon is not necessarily new to Statius, but it is nevertheless a pronounced feature of his relationship to this material. If the old stories have turned largely into a set of precious coins that one collects and judiciously spends, we also see new items being minted and inserted into the symbolic economy. The everyday details of Domitianic life become precious objects that have been animated by a labor of poetic genius, a genius that claims itself to be inspired by the quasi-­mythical spirit of the age.50 “Domitianic modernism” expresses itself in this particular ordering of layers: we make sure to coordinate the things of the world, the world of myth, and the world of today. The verses constantly strive to make grand claims about the present order of things.51 One can—and, in fact, a panegyrical author probably should—“casually” mix myths and realia in order to add luster to an enchanted world. The more familiar and restrained figure of thought limits itself to saying that today’s charms are “on loan from” or somehow secondary to those of the world of fairy-­tales: “He had the swiftness of an Achilles.” “She was a veritable Venus.” That is, what is best in this world is both like and connected to items from some superior other world, and this other world’s superlativeness is never forgotten. But, as we also saw in Martial’s Epigrams, there is a much more bold claim that one can and does make. Namely myths furnish an initial and mox in uarias mutata nouaris | effigies: hoc aere Ceres, hoc lucida Gnosis, | illo Maia tholo, Venus hoc non improba saxo. | accipiunt uultus haud indignata decoros | numina).” 50  And the resultant poems both embody and body forth symbolic capital. Rühl, 2015:105: “For most addressees, a poem written by Martial or Statius provides an additional opportunity for displaying their prestigious goods to a certain audience and from a new perspective, that is, a perspective not everyone can resort to.” 51  Note the implicit tension here with one of the core features of Latin literature more generally. Habinek, 1998:3: “The social milieu from which Latin literature emerged and in the interests of which it intervened was that of the elite sector of a traditional aristocratic empire. Many of the characteristics of Latin literature can be attributed to its production by and for an elite that sought to maintain and expand its dominance over other sectors of the population through reference to an authorizing past.”

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208  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity imperfect means of approach to the actual greatness of contemporary reality itself.52 This is especially the case when we look at the imperial house, but the phenomenon seeps out into “the world” more generally. For example, the poem to Statius’ wife starts a segment saying she is the equal of the women of myth.53 But before long we learn that their sorrows had nothing on hers: non sic . . . non sic . . . (3.5.57–58) And, naturally, one wonders if we are even thinking all that much about the heroines of myth or instead doing a reading-cum-rewriting of Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses. In which case mythological tears offer little more than a welcome occasion for not so obliquely praising today’s poetry and today’s poet as a successful reader-­and-­rival of yesterday’s poet. This “worldliness” of the mythological may well be part and parcel of a “less serious” poetic project as announced by the framing devices. This is “play,” after all. Nevertheless, full measures of awe are accorded to the emperor and to the extended universe of social passions that bind superiors and subordinates in a matrix of legitimate hierarchies. And so we can consider the “ultimate” metonym: Jove as metonymous for Domitian.54 Throughout the poems we compare the earthly lord to the heavenly one. But the net effect is not a sense that Domitian is as close to the king of the gods as a mere mortal might get. Rather, one is invited to appraise Jove himself in light of the Domtianic example. The fun and games is doing social labor as well: it connives with core theses of imperial ideology. Non sic . . . , “Not thus . . .” appears four times in the Siluae. We saw two of the occurrences just above. But they comprise the second and third actual appearances. The first time one sees the phrase it is in the course of Domitian’s party. The narrator is inviting us to compare it with the mythic feasts in heaven: “Yesteryear, just try to compare the time | of antiquated Jove and his golden age: not thus did the wine then flow, . . . (i nunc saecula 52  Bright,  1980:18: “[T]he poems display a consistent perspective of a world populated primarily by the traditional mythological divinities in full parade uniform, and only incidentally inhabited by mere mortals.” Taisne only wants to go so far as to discuss a free mixing of mortal and divine. “[I]l fa de pair avec l’admiration sincére de Stace pour son époque qu’il assimile à un nouvel âge d’or.” (Taisne, 1994:66) Verstraete, 1983:204: apart from some notable exceptions “myth and the world of myth function simply to supply the poet with a ready-­ made frame of reference with which to compare and judge contemporary reality.” 53 Statius, Siluae 3.5.44–45: “Alas! Where now that familiar faith, tested and proven through so many trials, a fidelity that makes you the equal of the Latin and Greek Heroines? (heu ubi nota fides totque explorata per usus, | qua ueteres Latias Graias heroidas aequas?)” And with heroidas one inevitably hears the title of a work of Ovid. 54  See the long note of Gibson, 2006 on propior Ioue at Silvae 5.1.38 for a survey of the Domitian and Jove question (Gibson, 2006:93–95).

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compara, uetustas, | antiqui Iouis aureumque tempus: | non sic libera uina tunc fluebant . . . 1.6.39–41).” The so-­called golden age? Merely gilt, if you ask me . . . Out-­of-­date Jove-­in-­heaven never had it half so good as Mr. Up-­ to-­date Jove-­on-­earth. The apotheosis of imperial rhetoric is written up and set to song by our “playful” poet who just “dashed this off ” and who begs our forgiveness for its rough edges. Presumably with a bit more polish passages like these would shine even more brightly and so capture the real luster of the court. As in Martial, there is a consistent “naughty” conflation of the king of the gods with the ruler of men.55 Talk of heaven and talk of the palace constantly intersects. It is virtually impossible to talk about the former without making some comparison to the latter. And, further, as in Martial, the hierarchy between the two domains is unstable. A rain of delicacies is showered upon the guests at Domitian’s party. This conceit is expanded. The gift-­shower is compared to a natural shower. We are to imagine a gentle beating of pleasing gift-­blows hailing down upon us in Siluae 1.6.23–24.56 And then we linger some more. “Let Jove . . .”: the king of the gods is given a jussive subjunctive. He can cover the world in clouds and “menace” the fields with rain, “provided that” the present sort of gift-­rain is produced by “our Jove” as well (ducat nubila Iuppiter per orbem | et latis pluuias minetur agris, | dum nostri Iouis hi ferantur imbres, 1.6.24–27). One is teasing, ironic, and generally “artful” when speaking of the heavens. The gods are a locus for our clever inventions, a place for working up tropes and conceits. And these same figures of thought are all used to set in more flattering light “Our Jove,” a Jove who is, in so many ways, the only Jove we really care about.

55  God-­like Caesar is as old as the panegyrics to Julius Caesar. “How then does Cicero use religious material in the [Pro Marcello]? The most striking point is the way in which he systematically attributes to Caesar the qualities of the divine.” (Levine, 1977:69) And the conceit by no means ends with the end of Domitian: “However, I hope to be able to demonstrate that religious themes, similar to those that play such a major role in Pro Marcello, likewise find a dominant place in [Pliny’s Panegyricus].” (Levine,  1977:78) Nevertheless, one needs to be sensitive to how one articulates the theme: there are many different gradations of flattery. And association should be distinguished from identification. This is a point about which Pliny himself is (flatteringly) insistent: “Let us not on any occasion coax and flatter [Trajan] as a god, never as a divinity. For we speak not of a tyrant but of a citizen, not of a master but of a parent (Nusquam ut deo, nusquam ut numini blandiamur: non enim de tyranno sed de ciue, non de domino sed de parente loquimur. Pliny, Panegyricus 2.3).” 56  This description is stylistically marked in that it contains an oxymoron with the surprising verb and adjective deferred: qualis . . . hiems . . . | grandine contudit serena (1.6.23–24).

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E.  The ecstatic present (and the mundanity of the traditional sublime) The “rabbit in the lion’s jaws” has turned into a bunny who plays a dangerously impious game relative to the Olympians. The urbanity of the impiety is what shields him from any real anxiety. The narrator is much too sophisticated to evince actual piety. Consider the way that Hercules looked when he felled the Nemean lion. The image appears after descriptions of Mars, the Dioscuri, and Bacchus. All of these are too small and do not really capture the majesty of a triumphal Domitian’s mighty face (parua loquor necdum aequo tuos, Germanice, uultus; 4.2.52).57 Domitian is inserted into a familiarly precious mythic catalogue, but he is also inserted in a prime position. The incidents of his reign are perhaps almost captured by the most memorable events in the histories of the immortals. The idioms of theology are recalibrated into a politically expedient discourse. A parenthetical like “God willing” is rewritten as “Domitian willing” (sic numina principis adsint; 5.2.154). A mythologized Domitian moves through the world and showers mere mortals with benefits at the end of Siluae 5.2. The “divine presence” returned to Rome transforms the life of Crispinus (proximus ille deus; 5.2.170). Much as Domitian surpasses old glories, so too does Statius’ Latin outstrip the old ways of speaking.58 The old, standard mode of praising a man and his mortal condition was to call him “god-­like”: proximus deis. Plautus, Cicero, and Seneca are very comfortable speaking this way.59 But a high-­end ethical compliment is not at all what the narrator seeks when it comes time to consider the case of the emperor. It is tempting to brush all of this off by saying that it is just standard imperial panegyric. But such a claim takes the easy way out. The praise is not some thin powdery sheen that has been sprinkled on the surface and one that will vanish with a heavy sigh and a column of weary air emanating from the exasperated critic. We are reading the poetry of a narrator who “believes in flattery” and not just poems addressed to a tyrant who

57  Braund, 1996:50 compares the “epiphany” of Domitian at this feast to similar conceits to be found in Martial’s treatment of the emperor (Epigrams 8.39 and 9.91). 58  Geyssen, 1996:144: “Statius’ flattery is the result of the panegyrist’s need to exaggerate, his desire to go beyond his tradition, exploring innovative methods of praise and new settings in which these methods might be applied.” 59 See, for example, Plautus, Pseudolus 1258; Cicero, De Legibus 2.40; and Seneca, Dialogi 2.8.2.

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demands flattery.60 You are what you do, and flatter is what our narrator does. The nature, scope, and consequences of his activity need to be explored. The Siluae sing of an ecstatic present rather than revering a remote, lost past. As such it is un-­epic in a Bakhtinian sense.61 The desublimation may even have comic touches from time to time. But the project as a whole turns around the trope of “surpassing.”62 The narrator constantly claims that he only aspires to catch up rhetorically with a here and now that has outstripped the old, traditional “beyond.”63 The celebration of this glorious present accordingly also tends to delegitimate the past and its values which are first reduced to mere conceits and then depicted as inferior to the ineffable quality of the contemporary moment.64 Poetic authority yields to a poetics of authoritarianism.65 The sequel to desublimation is a strategic

60  And we must remember that “imperial flattery” is not the only flattery to be found in the Siluae. Damon points out that Statius has done something quite radical by taking the discourse of public encomium—that is, the standard rhetoric of hyperbole that the community has accepted as familiar and traditional—and moved it into the private sphere. “[T]o put it bluntly, without the public setting, encomium is just plain flattery.” (Damon, 2002:181) 61  Bakhtin, 1981:13: in national epic the past serves as the subject; tradition serves as the source; the epic world is separated from contemporary reality. The epic world is a world of “firsts” and “bests.” An epic is a poem about an inaccessible past. 62  Curtius, 1973:162: “If a person or thing is to be ‘eulogized’ one points out that he or it surpasses anything of the kind and to this end employs a special form of comparison which I call ‘outdoing.’ On the basis of a comparison with famous examples provided by tradition, the superiority, even the uniqueness, of the person or thing to be praised is established. In Latin poetry Statius is the first to make this a manner.” Agonistic comparisons are part of one’s earliest rhetorical education as Quintilian makes clear: “So also arises that exercise consisting of comparison: ‘Which of the two is better, which worse?’ (hinc illa quoque exercitatio subit comparationis, uter melior uterue deterior. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.4.21)” On this see Focke, 1923:331. Markus, 2003:448–451 uses Curtius’ ideas to discuss “outdoing” as a motif in Statius’ presentation of his epic project in light of the wondrous Domitianic present. 63  Claudian, an enthusiastic student of Statius, “outdoes” his idol in as much as he effectively summarizes the narrative stance of the Siluae themselves so well in the course of his own In Rufinum 1.283: “let a bested antiquity keep silent (taceat superata uetustas).” In his commentary on the Panegyricus de sexto consulatu Honorii Augusti Dewar,  1996 regularly flags points of intersection between Claudian’s poem and the Siluae of Statius. 64  Pavlovskis, 1973:2: “Ever since Hesiod poets had spoken of a Golden Age, a time irretrievably lost in the dim past. In the Silvae a happiness similar to that of the Golden Age appears to have briefly returned in an unusual guise — that of life in the midst of contemporary Roman civilization, with its superior baths, roads, and gardens.” 65 This is a starker way of talking about what Newlands calls a “Poetics of Empire.” Newlands does not want to talk about the deprecation of the past in Statius. But her formulations concerning the “contemporary” quality of the verses are useful: “The ‘poetics of Empire’ lavishly fashion a bold and complex celebration of Rome at the height of its power. Indeed, these are true poems of an Empire at a high level of technological and cultural achievement, exulting in world domination.” (Newlands,  2002:45) Zeiner,  2005:50: “Statius’ declarations about Domitian’s equus or Gallicus’ pietas reflect his sense of authority; the poet speaks the ‘discourse of authority,’ i.e., in a legitimate, sanctioned competence.”

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212  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity resublimation. The comic treatment of the past is coordinated with a ­reverent tone maintained concerning the political structure of the present. The notion of “yielding” routinely accompanies images of contemporary excellence. We will explore this motif in more detail below, but it can be quickly summarized here. The past is told not just to make way for the present but to give way to it.66 Elsewhere in Latin the verb cedere tends to be unpleasant if not downright negative in its valences, at least for the subject of the action. In a military context this action signifies retreat or abandoning a post. In economic situations the verb denotes a failed commercial enterprise or an insolvent debtor making over his property. And so it is a “bested, defeated” universe of ideas and values that is ordered by a triumphal present to do that which the weak must do when faced by the ­stronger: cedat . . .  Whatever private reserves of doubt there may be about any or all of this, these same reserves are not some reservoir from which revolutionary fervor might draw. They are instead the locus of a depoliticized, unresisting “resistance” that eventuates in people’s participation in the formally efficacious public rituals that reproduce power and its legitimacy. Whatever one might imagine the resisting conscience to be, when asked to participate in the celebration of power in the here and now, it “yields” to the clarion call of expedience. The Siluae contain related terms that participate in this same game of ironically-­but-­not-­so-­ironically enjoined submission. “Wanting” and “preferring” similarly “yield” up their standard senses when exposed to Statian poetics. Instead of being sites for the articulation of personal, private will, the two verbs find themselves deployed within scenes where one stages the ostentatious embrace of Domitianic modernity: this is what one wants; nothing else is to be preferred. As the opening poem of the collection draws to a close the equestrian statue of Domitian is favorably compared to other great works of monumental art.67 The recherché articulation of this conceit includes the 66 Damon,  2002:178 highlights the “positively flippant” quality of a number of places where mythic greatness is asked to yield to the Domitianic everyday. But over-­confidence can also be tied to insecurity. See Rosati, 2008:181: “The problem that faces the Flavian political regime is in many ways similar to the one that the ‘literary authority’ of the same period has to face (and we find a clear reflection of this connection between the political and the poetic dimension in the work of Statius): it is a problem of succession and legitimacy, of transmission and power.” 67  Henderson, 1998:111: Statius’ statue takes Horace Carmina, 3.30.1–5 and amps it up. “[Statius] transfers [Horace’s] Pindarizing claim to eternity for his work onto the imperial statue which forms both his own work of representation and the work that symbolizes the rei(g)ning of Caesar.” Bessone, 2014:221–222 on Siluae 4.7: “Statius abandons the modesty pose of Horace, who, though often Pindarizing, declared Pindar unattainable—a sublime

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f­ ollowing: “Your eyes evoke celestial flames and harsh Rhodes, Apollo cast aside, would prefer them (tua sidereas imitantia flammas | lumina contempto mallet Rhodos aspera Phoebo; Siluae 1.1.103–4).” That is, Rhodes would rather have Domitian’s statue in preference to the (none too impressive) Colossus.68 But the already outré notion is insufficient as it stands in that paraphrase. Statius has gone further. The Colossus’ inadequacy is expressed by contempto Phoebo.69 This decodes to “in their dissatisfaction with the statue of Apollo.” But if we are naive enough to read what the verse says on the face of things, the god himself was just scorned. The Palatine gods are to be preferred to the Olympians. The climax of the poem on the statue of Hercules comes with the assertion that the object, despite its storied past and famous owners, has its very best home now. The original artist of the work would prefer that the sensitive eyes and ears of this owner in this age behold his craftsmanship. The poem ends: “Assuredly you, Lysippus, author of this work, would prefer to be validated by no other eyes (certe tu, muneris auctor,| non aliis malles oculis, Lysippe, probari; Siluae 4.6.108–9).” In fact, the poem discusses all the poems that the statue itself will inspire. The poem conjures up a referential abyss for us: this is art about art about art about . . . 70 But it is the purported longing of the past to participate in this present that enables the infinite regress of high style representations of representation. We do not posit a nostalgia to be as great as the past greats. Instead, we say that the present is the “preferred” (malles) destiny towards which the past elects to move. Whatever might be great about the past achieves the full truth of that greatness only when put to the test, appraised, and validated by the eyes of the present (probari). “We” are the best judges of what has value, and the past itself acknowledges as much.

swan, as against the bee of the Matinus (Carm. 4.2.1–4 and 25–32); instead, the Flavian poet puts himself on a level with the poet of Thebes, showing that he has done what Pindar himself promised to do, namely to give glory to the city through his song.” 68  Contrast Pliny, Naturalis Historia 34.41: “The statue was 70 cubits high, but an earthquake brought it down after 66 years. Nevertheless, even lying there it is still a marvel (LXX cubitorum altitudinis fuit hoc simulacrum, post LXVI annum terrae motu prostratum, sed iacens quoque miraculo est).” 69  Nero’s colossus (which presently wears the head of the Sun) is a key point of contrast in Geyson’s reading of the poem. See Geyssen,  1996:25–27 and Geyssen,  1996:142. In which case contempto Phoebo sounds a lot like the (expected) message: “You are better than that monster Nero.” 70  Newlands, 2002:74: “[T]he poem is more than a playful compliment to a patron. It intimately concerns Statius’ own poetic art and the values it can promote.”

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214  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Earnest or not, the narrator is “playing the game.” The poem claims that this same game-­playing is the font of its own inspiration.71 And, in effect, that’s exactly right. This universe of symbols is indeed structured by the Domitianic muse rather than by any Olympian one. And one gives to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Eschatological interpretations seek to redeem the poet. But we are examining the poetry and the narrator, not peering into the heart of a man named Statius. In fact, the baroque mode of address throughout these poems makes it abundantly clear that the speaking voice is an “artful” façade and not some sort of personal voice that offers heartfelt confessions. The conceits, that is, are all pointedly contrived. And “contrivance” is, of itself, one of the pleasure-­giving items on offer. The best minds of a generation are setting themselves precisely this task and no other. Martial’s poetry celebrates the delightful surprises of the Flavian amphitheater. It mirrors with his verses the pleasing ironies of the display that power is offering and offers it back to power. The Siluae too rejoice in presenting to power surprising and outlandish collocations of words and images. The gesture takes its lead from power itself. Representation is keen to be seen as re-­presentation. The fun-­house mirror of verse even rejoices to reflect back as bigger and better anything and everything that was already grand to begin with. This is “the convention,” that is, it is the place where several paths meet, where the subject and power come together, and where a compact is forged. And so the poem on the seventeenth consulship of Domitian falls all over itself in its expressions of joy.72 Gaudia and forms of gaudere appear four times in the first twenty-­five lines of the poem. Domitian ruptures-­ and-­structures time. And in so doing, says our narrator, he inspires a new poetry of newness that outstrips the old figures of thought. There is a new sun in the sky (atque oritur cum sole nouo; 4.1.3). The emperor gleams, he is shinier than the great stars, he is grander than the morning star (cum

71  Henderson,  1998:38: “[Statius’] lure to readers works like this: participate, and keep Rome safe, just sing along with the song, it’s yours.” 72 [Longinus] insists that contrivance is the kiss of death for truly sublime pathos: “Emotional passages are all the more compelling when the speaker does not appear to make an effort over them. Instead, it seems like the occasion itself gives rise to them (ἄγει γὰρ τὰ παθητικὰ τότε μᾶλλον, ὅταν αὐτὰ φαίνηται μὴ ἐπιτηδεύειν αὐτὸϲ ὁ λέγων ἀλλὰ γεννᾶν ὁ καιρόϲ. [Longinus], De sublimitate 18.1).” This is not to say that [Longinus] does not believe that panegyric can evince τὸ ὕψοϲ, only that for him the bulk and bombast of praise work very much against emotional profundity. See [Longinus], De sublimitate 8.3.

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grandibus astris|clarius ipse nitens et primo maior Eoo; 4.1.3–4).73 The laws and the leading citizens rejoice. Their prayers have been answered. Caesar’s modesty has been vanquished (curia Caesareum gaudet uicisse pudorem; 4.1.10). And, defeated, he agrees to be consul again. The description of the moment and its affects is diametrically opposed to the contents of the re-­ description of the same by the likes of Pliny: “We celebrated, but we were forced to do so.”74 Two-­faced Janus is univocally grateful. War has ended. His temple has closed. A new, peaceful beginning is here for Rome (4.1.13–14). Look! (ecce) Janus is raising his hands and about to speak. The god’s gesture is highlighted by the placement of the adjective at the end of the line while we still do not know—but we can guess . . . —the noun to which it is joined: “He raises aloft—look!—supine | hands (leuat ecce supinas | . . . manus; 4.1.15–16).” Supinae makes one think of subjection and submission, a topic that is the air owing to the victory that ends the war and so closes the temple. But the god seems like the defeated one, doesn’t he? That does not feel quite right. “Supine hands,” one is told, describe a situation where “the open palms [are] turned upwards (a gesture of one praying).”75 Maybe this helps assuage our concerns. But in such an idiom aren’t those hands “supine” because a mortal is submissively addressing the gods? Pious Aeneas, for example, makes this gesture in Aeneid 3.176. But why should a god pray? Why should Janus “submissively” pray after the fashion of a mortal? And then when we hear his prayer, what are we to make of its over-­the-­top address to this same mortal that applies to him terms that would suit the king of the gods? Says Janus, “Hail, great father of the world, you who make ready to renew with me the ages of men . . . (salue, magne parens mundi, qui saecula mecum | instaurare paras . . . (4.1.17–18)” Immeasurable future time is what we see even as we are pointedly blind to a past that would not recognize this contemporary god’s title, or even

73  The comparative and superlative degrees are both very common in the Siluae, especially when used positively of power. 74 Consider, for example, the opening of the Panegyricus: “May my thanks be as far removed from the very semblance of sycophancy as they in fact are free from any compulsion (tantumque a specie adulationis absit gratiarum actio mea quantum abest a necessitate; Pliny, Panegyricus 1.6).” The thanks are real thanks. No, really. Similarly, public discourse in Domitian’s time was nothing but a competition to see who could flatter the most effusively: “We come into the senate house not for some contest of flattery but instead to practice and to bestow justice (in curiam non ad certamen adulationum sed ad usum munusque iustitiae conuenimus; Panegyricus 54.5).” 75  Lewis and Short, 1962, sv supinus.

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216  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity the legitimacy of a man who held so many consulships in a row. Saecula await: whole ages of men. The making is a re-­making; the beginning is a return: instaurare. But, again, all of the making is really breaking. And symptomatic of the political breakage is the linguistic violence done to traditional ways of singing about men and gods. Everything in the poem sounds familiar enough, but beneath the glitter one finds a Latinity that has parted ways with the gold standard of its own past.76 This is a gilded age in which cleverness is the coin of the realm. This poetry shows itself keen to embrace a facile ability to deracinate and to reappropriate cultural symbols in a manner that is flattering to a self-­authorizing power.77 As Aristotle noted, comedy shows people as worse than they are.78 Panegyric traffics in larger-­than-­life representations. But there is a species of “panegyric comedy” that seems worth exploring. The “ridiculousness” of praise itself is at stake here. But, in this odd generic schema, the ab­surd­ ity of the commendations does nothing at all to blunt their earnestness. The risible quality of the praise instead only further testifies to one’s investment in a cynical posture of compliance that affirms power on one level while feigning to hold something in reserve from it on another. One of the most revolting things about true Christians, and the thing that Pliny thinks most worth punishing, is their unwillingness to simply lie about their faith and to make an expedient, insincere gesture of piety to the emperor cult.79 A “true Roman” knows that supplicating the imperial numen is what makes one an authentic member of the community, especially if one does not actually believe in this very numinousness.80 76  Perhaps one should transfer Zeiner’s remark about Statius on Claudius Etruscus into a note concerning Statius on Statius: “Statius has successfully reflected Claudius’ symbolic distinction and implicitly summed it up in one effective image: nitor.” (Zeiner, 2005:160) 77  White,  1975:279: “What is lacking in this group [of poems addressed to Etruscus by Martial and Statius] are pieces which afford a glimpse of relaxed intercourse, with no hint of contriving by the patron.” 78 Aristotle, Poetics 1448a16–18: “The same distinction divides tragedy from comedy. The one wants to portray people as worse than they are at present, the other as better (ἐν αὐτῇ δὲ τῇ διαφορᾷ καὶ ἡ τραγῳδία πρὸϲ τὴν κωμῳδίαν διέϲτηκεν· ἡ μὲν γὰρ χείρουϲ ἡ δὲ βελτίουϲ μιμεῖϲθαι βούλεται τῶν νῦν).” 79 Pliny, Epistulae 10.96.5: “I saw fit to dismiss people who denied that they were or had been Christians if, under my direction, they called upon the pagan gods and offered supplication to your statue with wine and incense. I ordered that the statue and the likenesses of the gods be brought in for this reason. There were also required to abuse Christ. It is said that genuine Christians can by no means be induced to perform any of these actions (Qui negabant esse se Christianos aut fuisse, cum praeeunte me deos adpellarent et imagini tuae, quam propter hoc iusseram cum simulacris numinum adferri, ture ac uino supplicarent, praeterea male dicerent Christo, quorum nihil cogi posse dicuntur qui sunt re uera Christiani, dimittendos putaui).” 80  Scott, 1933 insists that we can and should read the Siluae as working with the logic and idioms of emperor cult.

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Such real Romans put great stock in their own cynicism and hypocrisy. All prophets seek to be known as false prophets and to spread the gospel of insincerity. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Statius, one such prophet, enthusiastically tears down the Olympians. He makes them seem smaller than they should. This is “comic,” and it is an important dimension of panegyric comedy. The emperor may well seem ridiculously large, but the absurd feat of perspective is accomplished by wantonly diminishing the scale of everything else in sight. Excessive praise of power does not of itself require this supplementary gesture. It is quite possible to say that “The gods are great. You are great. Everything about you reminds me of them.” The same could be true of one’s relationship to the heroic past: “It was astounding. You are astounding.” But we see instead a readiness to reduce the grand to a question of style. The sublime is converted into a (mere) trope and the domain of the transcendental is filled only with figures of thought rather than items in which one places any real trust. The sovereign poetic will to power can and will play with speech registers as it wishes.81 This yields a substantive sympathy with the emperor that acts as a counterweight to any real or imagined dissatisfaction with him.82 As the emperor can conjure into being, so can the poet . . . Unsurprisingly, the hyperbolic drive that pushes the here and now into escape velocity affects the more “intimate” zone of the poet’s world as well.83 His wife as a mother surpasses the mothers of myth.84 His own father is a better poet than Callimachus and Alcman.85 And, though in

81  Compare Fitzgerald,  2007:121: “This particularly dense sequence of interrelated but heterogeneous poems thrusts in our face the arbitrary power of the poet to interpret a given figure of speech positively or negatively.” 82  Compare Fitzgerald, 2007:105: “One of the most significant features of that world is a relatively new political system in which one man claims the right to be auctor, editor, and censor and communicates with his own anonymous public via huge and hugely popular entertainments. The analogy between emperor and author is there to be made, and in later chapters we will see Martial explore some of its possibilities.” 83  Zeiner, 2005:46: “It is quite striking indeed to find Statius addressing private individuals with the same degree of exuberance and sublimity as he does the Emperor.” 84  See Statius, Siluae 3.5.57–59: “Not so does Alcyone of Trachis circle her nest, not so does Philomela circle her vernal home, cherishing and imparting her life’s breath to her children (non sic Trachinia nidos | Alcyone, uernos non sic Philomela penates | circumit amplectens animamque in pignora transfert).” 85 See Statius, Siluae 5.3.106–08: “[Lament, muse,] the death of your great child: the Munychian citadel produced not his superior, nor learned Cyrrne, nor bold Sparta (magni funus alumni, quo non Monychiae quicquam praestantius arces doctaque Cyrene Sparteue animosa creauit).” Gibson, 2015:307 is willing to take this as far as it will go: “Iz.-Fr., Mozley, and Vollmer imply that Neapolis is compared with Athens, Cyrene, and Sparta in terms of poets. But the passage is best interpreted as a comparison between Statius’ father and all the famous offspring of the three cities, not merely poets.” [original emphasis]

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218  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Siluae 5.1 none has ever so lamented as Abascantus did for Priscilla, we learn in Siluae 5.5 that none could possibly lament more than Statius himself as he bewails his own loss.86 These poems of loss are the verse analogs of prose funeral orations, and, as with all epideictic genres, one expects and perhaps even demands hyperbole. But such an observation by no means detracts from the basic realization that Statius’ dedication to genre and form is attended by a specific kind of relationship to the past. This relationship is consistently agonistic: uincetur, supergressus, non sic . . . non sic . . . , “bested,” “surpassed,” “not so did . . .” The narrative voice is always combative and contrastive. The tropes that articulate the narrator’s relationship to his wife, his father, and to himself mirror those that articulate his relationship to the astounding fact of the principate. Rather than some extreme against which one might measure one’s own lot, the remote past of myth provides a lofty starting point from which one ascends still further into the ecstatic present of power and/or pain.

F.  An introduction to Domitianic grammar and syntax: the psychic life of subjection It is important to appreciate that Statius’ aesthetic innovation and modernism is tied to his sense of the moment. Domitian, as it were, names “the moment,” and it is a species of flattery to say as much. But the emperor is also a synecdoche, a pars pro toto. The Siluae conjure forth a whole world and a logic of that world. We will explore Statius’ Domitianic world by looking into its grammar and syntax: how does one form statements about it? What is “idiomatic” when it comes to articulating the world conjured by this poetry? What ideas go together and how are they linked? As the first of a collection of points of Domitianic grammar and syntax, we can begin with Domitianic psychic postures. One might be tempted to label this section “Domitianic verbs” or “Domitianic acts,” but the verses are redolent of insincerity and, accordingly, it would be rash to describe 86  See Statius, Siluae 5.5.18–22: “Whoever may have consigned to the flame a youth still distinguished with the flower of tender youth and seen the cruel flames snake their way across the first down of boy’s cheek as he lies there, let him come and weary himself in alternating lament along with me. He will be defeated by my weeping. And you, Nature, will feel shame: that is how wild, how mad my grief is (quisquis adhuc tenerae signatum flore iuuentae | immersit cineri iuuenem primaque iacentis | serpere crudelis uidit lanugine flammas, | adsit et alterno mecum clamore fatiscat: | uincetur lacrimis, et te, Natura, pudebit: | tanta mihi feritas, tanta est insania luctus).” Gibson,  2006:xlii flags the high literary ambitions here: a healer who cannot heal himself opens a door onto an “epic” aspect of this poem.

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any given act as itself an action rather than the miming of something akin to the same action. Nevertheless, even if one of the points of the Siluae may well be the demolition of the naive category of “sincerity,” the poems nevertheless contain a collection of activities over which a great deal of energy is expended, no matter what one says about the interiority of the narrator who recounts them to us. There is a pointed departure from psychological naturalism. Everything is too intense. Surprise and paradox are cultivated. Irony is embraced. Naturalism—a rather vague and ill-­defined category—should hardly be a decisive aesthetic criterion, of course. As an effect it is itself the product of artifice in any case. And if one could only praise naturalism, it would be hard to enjoy genres like tragedy or comedy, much as Aristotle had insisted: the arts need not only depict people “as they actually are.” Nevertheless, the departure from naturalism or, really, anything like a “light touch” in the Siluae is noteworthy for several reasons. First, if this is Statius “doing Horace” in rough generic terms, then we can see a marked distance in the narrative voice and its articulation of psychic life. So, this is new and innovative. This is a neutral comment. It might even be a positive one. Next, the forced conceits are presented as if this sort of reaction were “the most natural thing in the world.” And so our distance from “the natural” is made quite palpable. That is a less neutral comment. Art is by no means hiding itself. And, finally, one can note a consistent socio-­political matrix into which these “non-­natural sentiments” have been slotted. And here we have the pointed comment: the verses both depict and enjoin a “psychic complicity” with the governing power structures of the day.

i.  Marveling at modernity in Siluae 1.1 and 1.2 The narrator is especially keen to speak of marveling.87 Forms of mirari appear twenty-­two times in the Siluae. Forms of attonare appear nine times. And stupere also appears in nine passages. There is a pervasive sense of “marveling,” of “astonishment,” of being “gobsmacked” by the various

87  Taisne, 1994:81–86 notes a tendency for admiration to be collective in the Siluae. There is a “chorality” to praise. See also Taisne, 1994:330–331: “[Le rôle de Domitien] essentiel consiste par sa seule présence à réaliser l’harmonie de Rome et du monde. Point de mire privilégié des dieux et des hommes, Domitien assure, par leur admiration et leur confiance unanimes à son égard, leur parfaite cohésion dans un univers apaisé et organisé.”

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220  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity things one encounters in the world of the verses.88 There is something “normal” about being overwhelmed in these very encounters.89 Expect to be blown away Domitian, his Rome, and, indeed, just about everything in it worth mentioning. A too-­much-­ness saturates this world that is being represented with tremendous(ly) (feigned) difficulty.90 ECVS MAXIMVS DOMITIANI IMP. Quae superinposito moles geminata colosso stat Latium complexa forum? caelone peractum fluxit opus? Siculis an conformata caminis effigies lassum Steropem Brontemque reliquit? an te Palladiae talem, Germanice, nobis effecere manus, qualem modo frena tenentem Rhenus et attoniti uidit domus ardua Daci? nunc age Fama prior notum per saecula nomen Dardanii miretur equi cui uertice sacro Dindymon et caesis decreuit frondibus Ide: hunc neque discissis cepissent Pergama muris, nec grege permixto pueri innuptaeque puellae ipse nec Aeneas nec magnus duceret Hector.  88  A strongly contrasting account of the function of wonder in the Siluae can be found at Newlands, 2002:157. 89  Hardie, 1983:183: “Turning from private to public life, the imperial poet ceased to participate in his addressees’ activities; he became a mirator alone.” Note the “poetics of complicity” at Newlands,  2002:263: “Playing the role of naive outsider, Statius feels as if he is in heaven . . .” Then at the close of this same paragraph: “Aloofness and distance evoke wonder and are an essential component of Domitian’s self-­fashioning as a god and absolute monarch.” Geyssen, 1996:139: “Statius has constructed Siluae 1.1 . . . so that we see the statue as the poet does. The result of all this viewing is naturally the act of marvelling and, for some, fear.” 90  While it may be the case that Statius’ claims concerning too-­muchness get to themselves be “a bit too much,” let us contrast a simple rhetoric of excess with something like “stuplimity” in Ngai, 2004. Her account of “poetic fatigue and hermeneutic stupor” adduces moments where the aesthetic project itself challenges the audience. Consider the “too muchness” of the overwhelming deluge of language inflicted upon readers by Beckett, Goldman, and Goldsmith. This poetics of excess affectively regulates the subject’s relationship to language through stylistic innovation (Ngai,  2004:254–259 and especially Ngai,  2004:258). Anyone who wished to describe the Statian baroque as willfully tedious might be able to explore his or her project via Ngai, but I have my doubts that its tediousness is, as it were, the point.

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An introduction to Domitianic grammar   221 The Equestrian Statue Of Emperor Domitian What is this double mass with colossal statue set upon it that stands embracing the Latin forum? Finished in heaven did the work flow down to us? Fashioned in Vulcan’s forges did the likeness leave behind a wearied Steropes and Brontes? Did you such for us, Germanicus, Athena’s hands make, looking as you did lately when holding the reins the Rhine and the lofty abode of the startled Dacian saw you? Just try now, Fame of old, that name illustrious through the ages of the Trojan horse to admire. That horse his sacred peak did cost Didymon and Ida her felled foliage. This horse Troy with her walls thrown down could not hold, nor could the mixed throng of boys and maidens, not Aeneas himself, not great Hector lead it in. Statius, Siluae 1.1.1–13

The first people to be amazed in the Siluae are the Dacians. Defeated, they looked upon their master Domitian and were astounded (attoniti uidit domus ardua Daci; 1.1.7).91 Marveling (mirari) appears two lines later: “Just try now, Glory of Yesteryear, to marvel . . .”. The point being, of course, that that was a naive wonder because Domitian’s horse is more amazing still. But let us go back to the Dacians. We are seven lines into the Siluae when we first see people marvel. The clause in which this happens is itself embedded in an elaborate conceit. We are attempting to describe—that is, we are pretending to attempt when in fact succeeding in the same attempt . . . —the massive equestrian statue of Domitian. The poem opens with a collection of questions: “What is this amazing thing? Is it something heaven-­sent . . .?” Different aspects of Domitian’s own greatness are 91  See also Siluae 3.1.17–19 for another doubling of stupefaction and marveling early on in a poem: “The very year itself is stunned to behold the effort, and the months, straitened within their twelvefold course, marvel at a work destined to live long (stupet ipse labores | annus, et angusti bis seno limite menses | longaeuum mirantur opus).” Though adduced with abstract, and high-­style phrasing, time is narrowed down to mere number. Notionally grand but instead abashedly empirical, “mere time” knows itself to be “too small” for the sorts of things of which we sing. The great work in question is the topic of the poem itself, the temple of Hercules that Pollius built.

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222  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity flagged as we ponder the stupefying quality of the statue. And it is the imperial might of the imperator that is highlighted by the evocation of the Dacian surprise. One can see in the statue something that the bested Dacians saw, something astoundingly awesome and beyond expectation. The moment stages the practical, bodily enactment of the logic of hyperbole from the previous section where the experience of seeing the statue is a collection of epiphanies. The recognition of one’s own defeat and inadequacy is necessarily folded into this gaze. One sees them seeing themselves and so too does one indirectly see oneself in the same gesture: to look upon the statue is to see what a Dacian saw to feel oneself multiply bested by what one sees. To marvel at it is to marvel similarly (but differently (but also similarly . . . )). The next several lines of the poem are expansive about a “beyond myth” moment as per the preceding discussion. Who could be impressed by the story of the Trojan horse after seeing this statue? “Yesteryear’s Glory is free to marvel at the famed Trojan Horse . . .”92 One even notes that the Trojan Horse is in fact more literally the “name-­of-­the-­horse” here. There is a multiple repudiation of the idea of an underlying referent, at least when it comes to the past. Fame is condescendingly told to marvel at the nomen/ name/noun of the horse that has been exposed as fundamentally unimpressive in light of current facts. And in this conceit concrete people were not even marveling at a real thing. Old story-­telling was content to marvel at a story that was older still. The past is a store-­house of stories. We are the inheritors of that treasure-­chest. We loot the contents. We parade around in them. No special reverence is shown for that past. The point of emphasis is us, parading in the here and now, parading in these old treasures while also bedecked in newer, still more impressive ones. The contemporary treasures are both really real—the statue exists, for example, and it is large—but they also include verbal treasures as well, newer, bigger, more amazing verses than the old ones. These new words know but also outstrip the old words. After exposing myth as no match for Domitianic reality—or is it ­“reality”?—the narrator effectively insists that we add those scare quotes to “reality” by flagging this very issue: “Think not that this outstrips fact . . . (Nec ueris maiora putes . . .; 1.1.17).” The statue-­poem and its ability to make vividly present the statue is a really real matter that ought to 92  Zeiner, 2005:45: “Such mythological comparisons are typical of Statian style; the bold statements confidently merge myth with reality, imparting to the Emperor a power over the timelessness of the mythical past.”

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occasion our own admiration.93 A stunned Homer and Vergil behold the Domitianic horse and each sighs: “Much as Achilles was no match for Domitian, so am I no match for Statius.” That is, Statius’ insincerity relative to the emperor needs to be connected to his modesty as a poet. A modernist innovator in multiple genres, to what extent does Statius in fact feel that Homer is unambiguously his superior?94 The ambiguities of the rhetoric of the Domitianic moment are fundamentally entangled with the answer to this question.95 The narrator, at any rate, presents a poet-­and-­ prince set against as well as beyond epic-­and-­tradition. The next poem does some of the very same things relative to a very different occasion. The Domitianic “element of surprise” and subjected subjectivity each reappear all over again but “humorously” in the second poem of the book: a wedding poem that talks up the love of the couple. It is, of course, rather churlish to complain about the rhetorical excesses of an occasional poem dedicated to just such an occasion, but we are pursuing the implications of a favored figure of thought, not litigating the actual beauty of the bride. After a variety of passages that indicate that this couple surpasses all of the mythical couples of yore, we listen as Cupid gives a long speech. In the course of that speech he notes how stunned he was when he observed this mortal. Cupid has been an eye-­witness of the amorous passions of mythical characters (uidi et Abydeni iuuenis certantia remis | bracchia . . .  ; 1.2.87–88). But the passion of the contemporary poet Stella for his bride Violentilla outstrips all of that. And, when he sees this, Cupid is astounded at the profundity of Stella’s passion: “You, young man, have surpassed all of the Old Loves. I myself was stunned that you bore up under such tremendous waves of ardor . . . (tu ueteres, iuuenis, transgressus amores. | ipse ego te tantos stupui durasse per aestus . . ., 1.2.89–90).”

93  Newlands, 2002:53: “The novelty of the statue and the wonder of its effects function as a cue to the reader to wonder too at the novelty of Statius’ poetry.” 94 See Dominik et al.,  2015:4–6 on “the novel and experimental nature of all Statius’ poetry.” But see Baudrillard,  1981:47 on innovation. One can apply his remarks about the history of fashion to poetic stylization as well: “Formal innovation materialized in objects does not have an ideal world of objects as its goal but rather, a social ideal, that of the privileged classes, which is the perpetual reassertion of their cultural privilege. The priority of this social function of discrimination over the ‘aesthetic’ function is visible in fashion, where at any moment the most aesthetically aberrant and arbitrary forms may be reactivated simply for the purpose of providing distinctive signs for a material which is always new.” See also Bourdieu, 1984 for a much more comprehensive discussion of “the labor of distinction.” 95  Newlands, 2002:73: “As the statue tests the limits of imperial art with its colossal scale, so the poet here tests the limits of imperial panegyric with a bold new poetic form that ambitiously expands the concept and function of ecphrasis and rewrites epic for the contemporary age.”

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224  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity One poet writes to another poet. Entre nous, we use a certain kind of speech.96 But this speech is not all that different from the speech used with the emperor. One poet ironically deploys myth as a mere collection of conceits on a theme for another poet who can appreciate that such is what one does nowadays.97 Every lily comes gilded, every conceit is rococo. But the gold is always also fool’s gold. The injunction that “The mendacious cleverness of an indirect song should cease” (cessent mendaces obliqui carminis astus, 1.2.27) is itself nothing but a lying bit of oblique cleverness set to verse and, moreover, a sort of disauthenticating-­cum-­authenticating mark set upon the poem’s first movement. The Statian ϲφραγίϲ impressed upon the text assures us that this document has in fact come from the master and constitutes an authentic example of his genius, but it also attests that what one finds rolled up inside the papyrus is a collection of lies. Our recognition of this force of this signet ring can guide our reading of the whole. There is always an ironic distance between what we are saying and what we are doing. There is always a clever doubleness that marks the astute mendacity of the contemporary literary aesthetic. The poem perhaps celebrates the marriage of two people, but this same marriage is an occasion for a celebration of the joys of bullshitting a bullshitter.98 The poet friend is deployed by the narrator in a variety of contrived postures: “You were amazed to get the girl . . .” (tu tamen attonitus, 1.2.31). A tremulous young lover is then staged. But the point of putting the addressee in such a posture is the enabling of a rhetorical pose on the part of the narrator himself, “Away, sweet bard, away with such sighs. She is yours. (pone o dulcis suspiria uates, | pone: tua est. 1.2.33–34).” How is this not itself a species of mendacious cleverness? How is it not sidelong in its working? For the narrator is constantly winking at the inset addressee, the other poet: “I know that you know that I know that we are just playing the most clever sort of word-­game here.”99 “I will pretend that you were stunned. I will pretend that Cupid was amazed. You will pretend 96  Taisne, 1994:328: “Mais l’activité par excellence qui concerne la majeure partie des personnages des Silves, quel que suit leur âge et en toutes sortes de circonstances, c’est la poésie.” 97 Far less cynical is Newlands,  2002:89: “Once again Statius engages creatively with notions of poetic decorum, elevating the personal occasion of a wedding through epicising play.” 98  Frankfurt, 2005:47: “For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” [original emphasis] Compare Damon,  2002:180 on the suspension of fides in the Siluae: “[W]e are no more likely than Crispinus was to believe that he brings Mars to mind or that Statius was sincere in saying it.” 99  The use of the word uates should probably put us on our guard. Roman,  2015:447: “The notion of the ennobled uates lapsed first into cliché, and eventually into fodder for satire.”

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that you did not notice that this was all mere pretense.”100 How one poet talks to another poet about their craft converges with the manner in which a poet talks to the emperor about his.101

ii.  Make way for the present If one posture is marveling, a related one is yielding. Or, rather, marvels provoke an injunction that something should yield. Cedere might mean “to happen” or “to withdraw” in a neutral sense. These lexical entries are avoided.102 A suggestion that yielding is in order is adduced because some immanent superlative is announced as being of such a quality and/or quantity that the old, recognized members of its class ought to yield and so make way for a new exemplary member. Of the twenty-­six occurrences of forms of cedere in the Siluae, fully twelve of them are jussive subjunctives: cedat, cedant, cedamus.103 One should further note that yielding is frequently something both that we are commanded to do and that we are delighted to do. Julius Caesar’s equestrian statue in the forum should “yield” to Domitian’s equestrian statue (cedat equus Latiae qui contra templa Diones . . .  ; 1.1.84).104 The first Caesar should make way for This Caesar, 100  Culler, 2002:155: “Apostrophe reflects this conjunction of mouth and happening. The vocative of apostrophe is an approach to the event because its animate presuppositions are deeply embedded, asserted the more forcefully because they are not what the sentence asserts.” In Statius the gap between mouth and happening turns into a singing-­one-­thing-­ but-­meaning-­another irony that those in the know will understand as words coming from a mouth that avers that, in the end, nothing other than song is happening. Culler, 2002:165: “Nothing need happen because the poem itself is to be the happening.” Culler,  2002:171: “This is the kind of effect which the lyric seeks, one whose successes should be celebrated and explained.” But what if one decided that the lyric was somehow dangerous and politically suspect? Doesn’t the literary event and literature as event feel rather different when Statius sings his songs to power than when Keats offers us his hand? The too-­clever “candidness” of, “O brightness suffused with fair blood, where are you? (o ubi purpureo suffusus sanguine candor; 2.1.41)” dissembles: the complex narrative of the boy gets frozen in a moment of pederastic fascination. 101 Newlands,  2002:90: Siluae 1.2 “functions as a second programmatic introduction to the collection.” She and I diverge on the nature of the program. 102  A semi-­exception: cedere means “away with you” in Siluae 1.5.22 (flumina et Herculei praedatrix cedat alumni). This is “X should give way” but not “X should give way to Y,” which is the notion we will be exploring. 103  Cedat and/or cedant appear six times in all of Vergil, nine times in all of Ovid, and four times in Lucan. In Statius the Thebaid uses one of them twice. The Siluae uses them eleven times. In short, though the command to yield is familiar enough to a reader of Roman poetry, its frequency in this specific work is noteworthy. 104 Geyssen,  1996:67: “The point of the correlation is readily apparent: the present emperor is superior to Caesar, a conclusion that is inescapable, given the juxtaposition of

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226  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity the First among the First Citizens. The public space that has made way for Caesarism should make way all over again for Super Caesarism.105 As with the ruler, so with his favorites. Leading citizen Rutilius Gallicus has recovered from an illness.106 Apollo and Aesculapius talk him up. They note that though Gallicus comes from an illustrious family, he should be instead seen as its first noble member.107 And, further, his own ancestors are happy to “yield” to Gallicus: “He is himself his kin’s good stock, and nobility has been retrojected into the past. His antecedents are not obscure, yet by subsequent splendor it is bested. And it delights to have yielded to a glorious grandson (genus ipse suis permissaque retro | nobilitas; nec origo latet, sed luce sequente | uincitur et magno gaudet cessisse nepoti; 1.4.68–70).”108 The Latin is striking, and it breaks with the long traditions of talking about pedigree. But, I suppose, in so doing it only mirrors the glorious rupture caused by Gallicus’ astounding greatness. Time and again, the here and now is too big for the there and then. We are not adding to old family stores and accumulating glory within a conservative multi-­generational aristocratic framework. Instead, Statius celebrates a modernity that is effectively radical in its relationship to tradition.109 The everyday wonders that surround the people who are thriving in Domitian’s world reveal this same world that the people of the poems objects Caesarean and Domitianic.” Geyssen shows the expansive quality of the hierarchical comparison. 105  Ironically, there is not, in fact, a lot of public space left over in the forum in the wake of Julio-­Claudian self-­promotion and this statue is one of the few truly flashy Domitianic pieces. See Dewar,  2008:71. Dewar,  2008:81 on Siluae 1.1.28: “[T]he great Julian basilica is like a lowly guardsman protecting the sacred presence of the emperor.” Dewar is following up on the conclusions of Thomas, 2004. 106  Gallicus was one of the biggest of the big men: “Daß Rutilius Gallicus in der domitianischen Zeit zu den wichtigsten Trägern vom Kaiser übertragener Macht gehörte, war auch bisher schon durch seinen 2. Konsulat und durch die Stadtpräfektur klar gewesen. Die außergewöhnliche Übertragung des Prokonsulats in Asia für zwei Jahre verstärkt diesen Eindruck.” (Eck, 1985:483) 107  Bernstein, 2015:139: “Gallicus’ career exemplifies the newly expanded social mobility of the first centruy ce . . . Noble descent could still be viewed as a distinction by Statius’ contemporaries, but it no longer held the same dynastic significance.” 108  Henderson, 1998:81 translates: “His family’s one-­man pedigree, his aristocracy is | a posteriori, and his origin isn’t lost, but the light that’s come after | is overcome and is glad of a mighty grandson to defer to.” Henderson, 1998:82 notes the connection in these lines to uinci gaudet in Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.851: “Statius is even quoting from Ovid’s catasterism of Diuus Iulius: ‘gazing down from his twinkling star, he confesses that his son’s services are greater than his; glad to be mastered by him.’” 109  Newlands, 2002:6: “Through the celebration of luxury Statius proposes a provocative new concept of nobility to which economic, moral and artistic values rather than hereditary qualifications are essential.” Zeiner, 2005:75: “As a spokesperson of the dominant language, Statius also speaks for the dominant culture in which material wealth functions as a discrimination social factor and covers a broad range of visible manifestations.”

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inhabit to be something transcendent, a world that goes beyond the over-­ stuffed reputations of all of the things that have been celebrated before.110 Let, then, all of the famous estates of yore make way for the trees and fields at Vopiscus’ villa.111 Arion, Amphion, and Orpheus may have been famous as poets, makers, and builders, but, says our poet, they are nothing when matched against the sort of bricks and mortar work effected by Pollius Felix at his villa in Surrentum.112 The praise is so over the top that it is all too easy to suspect that we are joking: Amphion built the walls of Thebes with music; Felix found a great contractor to do his home renovations. Sorry, song, you lose. But, joke or no, such a line fits into a larger pattern of constant aggression against tradition and even traditional culture in the name of voluble praise for the all too mundane elements of the contemporary world.113 The hendecasyllabic poem about Domitian’s road (Siluae 4.3) is, somewhat uncharacteristically, genuinely funny and charming, at least for the first hundred lines or so. The rebarbative topic is handled with poetic skill and flair. In the course of the poem a “joke” about the pleasures of submission arises in the course of the river’s self-­description. The river had been wild and destructive. Now it has been tamed. And only as tamed has it really become itself, that is a river (amnis esse coepi). And so the river offers thanks. Servitude, ordinarily disgusting, humiliating, and a sort of 110  Leach, 2003:152: “Individuals of different social provenances, from emperor to freedmen, populate each book, intermingling private with public places and making the diffusion of luxury across a spectrum of classes one of the most telling indications of its acculturation.” Newlands,  2002:125: “Running counter to the strong strain in Roman, and specifically Augustan, moral discourse, Statius’ villa poems are provocative in their bold endorsement of luxury.” Zeiner, 2005:132: “Statius embraces the luxurious goods so prominent throughout the Siluae . . . Interestingly, though, Statius’ use of the term [luxus] is addressee-­specific, and he employs it both negatively and positively according to context.” 111 Statius, Siluae 1.3.83: cedant Telegoni, cedant Laurentia Turni . . . “Yielding” reappears almost immediately in 1.3.88 and as part of the same claim. Accordingly, one hears an anaphora: “Yield . . . Yield . . . Yield . . .” 112 Statius, Siluae 2.2.60–62: “The hand of the Methymnaean bard and together with it the Theban lyre, and so too the glory of the Getic plectrum, let them all yield to you: you also move stones, you too lofty forests follow (iam Methymnaei uatis manus et chelys una | Thebais et Getici cedat tibi gloria plectri: | et tu saxa moues, et te nemora alta sequuntur).” Lovatt,  2007:151: “This poem displaces the role of the vates from public to private, from Rome itself to Greek Naples.” And yet Arion, Amphion, and Orpheus are people whom the poetic persona of Statius’ poetry often takes very seriously indeed in moments of self-­ authorization and self-­accreditation. For example, Amphion is a figure with whom the narrator of the Achilleid will identify himself (scit Dircaeus ager meque inter prisca parentum | nomina cumque suo numerant Amphione Thebae; Achilleis 1.12–13). 113 Newlands,  2002:4: “In the Siluae, linguistic extravagance is closely associated with artistic extravagance, with the emperor’s daring new monuments and friends’ avant-­garde villas. For this was an age of innovative art and architecture.” Zeiner,  2005:78: “By Statius’ time, the imperial villa becomes truly a symbolic investment as much as an economic one.”

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228  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity death, is welcome and “worth it” (tanti est). Domitian was in charge. Domitian demanded it. I gave way. And it was good. (qui terras rapere et rotare siluas | assueram (pudet!), amnis esse coepi; | sed grates ago seruitusque tanti est, | quod sub te duce, te iubente, cessi; 4.3.79–82).114 This moment offers a specific instance of the general insight of Pavlovskis: Statius constantly extols a world in which “nature is no longer natural but changed into something artificial and artistic.”115 Here though one should add one more issue: “becoming artistic” is always also “submitting to mastery.”116 And this mastery is both aesthetic and political. A homology between poetics and empire has been turned into a connivance. Raw, natural liberty is shameful, and it occasions a sense of shame in those of us who experience it. Says the river (says the poet), “(pudet!).” There is something symptomatic in the elaborate bracketing of a self-­ indicting “For shame!”. Diving down into the brackets we are tempted to start thinking about liberty-­and-­shame, liberty-­as-­shame, liberty-­lost-­ as-­ . . . . what? But back up here the answer to that question is easy. Unabashed pleasure comes in absolute, abject submission. Yield. You’ll be transformed and you will love it! Nevertheless, it is the yielding itself that most matters, not the actual subjective experience of the one who yields. The contents of that experience, of course, may only be a matter of poesy and lies. The gesture, though, is a fact. The passive-­aggressive qualities of the Siluae can make it hard to tell how often we are “really yielding” and how much of this is just a pose, feigned submission that cloaks some kind of resistance. But, to the extent that we have “resistance” here, to the extent, that is, that some sort of reluctant and recalcitrant subjectivity is held in reserve, it is not an especially “resistant” resistance. Power is constantly offered compliance. Whether or not the enthusiasm of those who yield is entirely real is an open question that can often be answered in the negative. It’s clear enough that, despite appearances, nobody is really 100 percent on board with the Domitianic program. Still, yield they do. And so occasional verse has little

114  Consider as well the broader associative link pointed out by Taisne, 1994:356: “Stace se plaît aussi à expliquer l’apaisement des eaux par le pouvoir magique de la poésie.” 115  Pavlovskis,  1973:7. For our purposes, it is also worth adducing Pavlovskis,  1973:25: Martial’s treatment of nature is disjunctive from that of Statius and lacks a deep mediation on art-­and-­nature. 116  One can extend as well, then, Pavlovskis, 1973:12 and the full force of Statius’ praise of a contemporary world characterized by “a refined and harmonious relationship with subjugated nature.”

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of substantive import to say in response to tragedy’s account of tyranny: “Let them hate so long as they fear (Oderint dum metuant).” The emotional life of the narrator as well as that of the world narrated is strikingly ersatz. Indeed, one gets the sense that an over-­earnest reader who insisted on sincerity would only attract a derisive smirk in response. Horace had said, “if you would have me weep, first feel sorrow yourself (si uis me flere, dolendum est | primum ipsi tibi, Ars poetica 102–3)”.117 But this advice has been scorned by Statius’ poetic art. Or, rather, there may well be affects and some sorrow hidden somewhere but they are displaced, disavowed, and ironized. Even if one is fond of the biographical fallacy, this poetry snatches away access to it: the (disavowed mask of an) author who “feels something” and in so feeling transmits some sort of passion to the reader has been swapped out for a mask pure and simple. Of itself such a refusal of directness has its own political valence: product and process are all about the savvy and their savoir-­faire. This is by, for, and about “insiders,” and one can enter into the domain of the verse “properly” precisely to the extent that one has pre-­assented to certain ground rules and been initiated into a “secret society” of sorts. It will be useful to explore the concrete articulation of the situation in the Siluae. On the one hand, it would be naive to take any of the passions expressed at face value, but, on the other, what does it mean that someone painted precisely this collection of masks and not some other assortment of them?

iii.  Shut up and be happy: Siluae 4.pr Everybody is happy.118 Gaudere is another favorite verb, appearing in forty-­four passages.119 Its appearance in the marriage poem occasions no surprise. Nor need we be especially cynical about such uses. The many joys that suffuse poems about pretty boys also come as little surprise, at 117  Praise for deep authorial engagement with the subject matter and the power of the same is widespread in ancient aesthetic theory. Compare Cicero, Orator 132: “As I mentioned before, it is not genius that inspires me but rather a powerful psychic impulse that leaves me unable to control myself. And you will find that the auditor never catches fire unless a blazing speech makes its way to him (sed, ut supra dixi, nulla me ingenii sed magna uis animi inflammat, ut me ipse non teneam; nec unquam is qui audiret incenderetur, nisi ardens ad eum perueniret oratio).” See also [Longinus] on the Furies in Euripides’ Orestes: “Here the poet himself beheld the Furies, and the product of his visions all but compelled the auditors to see them as well (ἐνταῦθ’ ὁ ποιητὴϲ αὐτὸϲ εἶδεν Ἐρινύαϲ· ὃ δ’ ἐφαντάϲθη, μικροῦ δεῖν θεάϲαϲθαι καὶ τοὺϲ ἀκούονταϲ ἠνάγκαϲεν; De sublimitate 15).” 118  See Taisne, 1994:99–102 on the “contagion de la joie admirative” in the Siluae. 119  The noun gaudia appears seventeen times.

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230  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity least not at first glance. But it seems rash to declare the happiness to be a simple affair when we get to something like the pleasure a grandfather feels when, after being “conquered” by his posterity, he yields to the glory of his grandson in Siluae 1.4.70. The whole poem is praising an important courtier, and its universe of pleasures makes us wary. In fact, we are already wary of the happiness in Siluae 1.4 before we reach that line. When Apollo tells his medical-­minded son to come with him to heal Gallicus, the action one expects of a healer comes in an unexpected syntactical position. “Now it is time to put your powers into effect (aggredienda facultas! 1.4.62),” the narrator exclaims. The injunction to heal Gallicus has been tucked away inside of one of Statius’ unnervingly frequent exclamatory parenthetical phrases. In these moments we find a tension between syntactical form and emotional content, and this tension is more or less emblematic of the ostentatious and ostentatiously forced quality of the passions in the Siluae. The commandment proper of the main sentence is to “go happy” (i gaudens). And the explanation for the sentiment is given after the colon: “We are given an opportunity to restore a great man.”120 The perspective is, as usual, off: the man is not lucky to recover from illness; the god is lucky to get a chance to show his stuff and in the interest of such an important personage. That should put a happy spring in your step, Aesculapius. In the Siluae we are not vaguely, diffusely gladdened in our private breasts about particular nice things that happen to us. Instead, we are happy and/or told to be happy to participate in this wonderful imperial world, a world suffused by this particular power structure and no other. Accordingly, I would like to linger with a key, late moment of joy. While Statius does not often specifically enjoin happiness, at least in the first four books of the Siluae, he nevertheless does talk up the joys of submission. That is, gaudere and cedere are important affines within this conceptual universe. But the joys of Siluae 4.1 stand out in particular as “deliciously obedient” pleasures. And here we really will tell people to “be happy”: as if one could imagine that they were anything but ecstatic already given that “today” is the day that Domitian enters into his seventeenth consulship! Yield and be happy.

120 Statius, Siluae 1.4.61–64 in full: “ ‘This way, come with me this way, Epidaurian son,’ Apollo says, ‘Go gaily: to us is given — and one must seize the opportunity! — to restore a great man. Let us approach — and do now stretch and extend the threads — the distaff.’ (‘hinc mecum, Epidauria proles, | hinc’ ait ‘i gaudens: datur (aggredienda facultas!) | ingentem recreare uirum. teneamus adorti | (tendatis iam fila!) colos).”

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We will return to this poem, but one ought to note first that the i­ntroductory epistle to the book has also itself used the verb gaudere as it drew to a close.121 The letter’s first half is a fairly simple table of contents. Its second half conjures imagined detractors. One thinks that the objection they level is that the book is too long.122 But the narrator immediately pivots to a qualitative objection instead of a quantitative one: people are reproaching the publication of something “in this style” (hoc stili genus). In short, not everyone is happy about the Siluae themselves qua literature.123 Such detractors are perhaps mere fictions and just foils for a refined species of self-­presentation and self-­aggrandizement.124 This trick is at least as old as Terence. But, real or no, the refutation of their objections is interesting in its logic. “Point the First: there is no point in complaining about something that has already happened (primum superuacuum est dissuadere rem factam; 4.pr. 28–29).”125 Literally the Latin says “to dissuade,” but, in practice, the narrator means “to complain.” The refutation is propped up by a presupposed universe of compliance and making-­do rather than by the logical logic of eristic. It is too late for any of us to really complain about Domitianic poetics. And so: “Point the second: I have already given most of the poems to Master Caesar, and that gesture is way more significant than publication (deinde multa ex illis iam domino Caesari dederam, et quanto hoc plus est quam edere! 4.pr. 29–30).”126 So the poems are “a fact”. They have already been made more-­than-­public in that they have been given to dominus Caesar, a man whose mastery is the destiny of words/things/life. This same socio-­political fact of the poems allows them to brush aside their own 121  Rosati, 2015:67: “The tone is even more polemical than in the past, or indeed, scornful.” 122 Statius, Siluae 4.pr. 26: “So why are there more verses in the fourth book of the Siluae than in the earlier books? (quare ergo plura in quarto Siluarum quam in prioribus?)” 123  Delarue, 1974a and Delarue, 1974b wade into the opaque question of Statius’ relationship to contemporary authors. Delarue sees in the phrase hoc stili genus a resumption of the stilo remissiore defended in Siluae 1.pr.7–10 (Delarue,  1974a:546). That passage is discussed above. 124  Compare Hardie, 1983:164. 125  Coleman, 1988:60 flags this as “a proverbial sentiment” and gives cross references to Plautus and Martial. 126  Recitations (public or private), small collections, then, revised and polished full books: this is, at least notionally, the development cycle of the poetry of Martial and Statius as well as many, many others. See Leberl, 2004:88–102. “Publication” is a very different affair with different logics in this world before the printing press. Consider the permanently “in progress” quality of some of Cicero’s works. “Since this circulation for the sake of correction was a social end in itself, we could conclude that these texts are the traces not of literary processes aimed at the production of perfect texts, but of social performances.” (Gurd, 2007:80)

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232  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity detractors because they are moving within a different, more important circuit than that imagined by the detractors. The pre-­approval of the verses by Caesar can and should shut such people up. The third point is unnumbered. Instead two voices pop out at us, that of the narrator and that of a critic. “Can’t a guy make a joke?” “Yes, but in private.”: exercere autem ioco non licet? ‘secreto’ inquit. The determination of what about Book 4 represents joke-­employment does indeed make for an interesting exercise for the reader.127 If we stretch and strain some of the ideas that are in play here, we can see in the Siluae more generally a narrator who does not just imply that one is “allowed” to be unserious. Instead, this narrator seems to be saying that one is all but enjoined to exercise one’s wits about non-­performative utterances. A dominus who read the book and said that something substantive had been said would be told that, “Deep down, this is not so deep.” The good poetical subject offers up public displays of trifling activity. The critic has gotten it so very wrong. Secret, separate, and secluded “jocularity” is not what is asked of us. That can get subversive and scary (for the poet, not the master . . . ) all too quickly. It is public buffoonery that is wanted. As in the case of Martial’s censorious reader, private hermeneutics and over-­clever readings are presented as antipodal moments that are ostentatiously dismissed by a narrative voice that insists upon a politics of public playfulness. The actual flow of the paragraph keeps the reader from tumbling through treacherous interpretive rapids. Instead, the argument bobs and drifts into differently troubled waters a bit further down the same stream. We surge forward, that is, to a refutation of a point that was not quite the point to begin with. “BUT we watch both sparring matches and fencing practice (sed et sphaeromachias spectamus et palaris lusio admittit.)” The narrator said, “I can joke, right?” The inset critic said, “Do your joking in private.” The rejoinder picks up “unseriousness” and “public,” but then it adds in “danger.” But here what one watches are people practicing for the dangerous “real thing.” It is not even clear that people don’t get hurt during the ϲφαιρομαχία. Perhaps we are supposed to say that the Siluae are the place where the poet of the Thebaid tries out a bit of poetic sword-­play before singing about arms and men in a more earnest manner. And as readers we have been invited to look on while he practices his craft. That seems like something we ought to bear in mind. But this was not, strictly 127  Dominik et al., 2015:5: “Statius is not specific about the nature of the criticism beyond fastening on the issue of propriety.”

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speaking, the discussion that was afoot. The discussion was centered on the ethics of publication. The quality of the material published as well as the poems’ addressee were our chief concerns. We seem to be having a slightly different conversation than the one that we at first claimed we were having. “Point the Last: any reader who reads me unwillingly at once declares himself to be my enemy. And so why should I take his advice? In short, it is assuredly the case the I am the person who is ridiculed. He can shut up and be happy! But you, Marcellus will be this book’s defender . . . (nouissime: quisquis ex meis inuitus aliquid legit, statim se profiteatur aduersum. ita quare consilio eius accedam? in summam, nempe ego sum qui traducor: taceat et gaudeat. hunc tamen librum tu, Marcelle, defendes; 4.pr.33–36).” Things get weird and ugly fast. But the weirdness and the ugliness again communicate more with the socio-­ political context than they do with anything that has been explicitly spoken or even implicitly claimed by a critic. People who do not like a book just set it aside. Where did “unwilling” come from? Who is forcing people to endure Statius? Has his flattery of the palace occasioned performances that yielded “captive audiences”? There is no need to be quite so literal-­minded. The real issue is the way that a word like inuitus (“unwilling”) reminds us of a word like dominus (“master of a slave”) in standard Latin usage. And so it is not surprising that here a word like inuitus sours almost immediately into an “adversarial relationship.” The professed hostility to the poet crops up exactly where we are not saying that one really hates being Caesar’s slave. Similarly, traducor assuredly does mean “to dishonor or to disgrace,” but it designates a dishonor that comes via a very specific mechanism, namely, public display. In “publishing” his Caesar-­poetry Statius is making a public display of himself. But the critic says maybe this was ill-­considered: “You should hang back and keep separate from all of that.” Let us take secreto in that neutral sense for a moment. The unexpressed rejoinder to the critic then becomes something like, “You traduce me by noting that I am self-­traducing; and by displaying my self-­display you declare yourself to be my enemy.” The crescendo of the argument is a frightening anticlimax. “First, . . . Sec ond, . . . Third, . . . Finally . . . ”: we had been pretending to offer a systematic and thorough-­going refutation of a position. The arguments started slipping around a bit. And then when we get to the end all we have to offer is two shouting jussive subjunctives: taceat et gaudeat. But, as a pair, they both set the seal upon the whole of the self-­traducing display that is the public performance of reading-­and-­writing of the Domitianic age: “Shut

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234  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity up and be happy.”128 But neither poet nor citizen ever really shuts up: they are too busy saying how happy they are. And one is completely forbidden from saying secretly, “Maybe I would be less miserable if I were not constantly speaking so highly of dominus Caesar.”

iv.  Everything and everyone wears a happy face: Siluae 4.1 After, then, a bit of fuss and bother that ends with an ambiguous and angry injunction to “be happy,” we read the first poem of the fourth book of the Siluae, a poem that is quite interested in policing the gaudere question all over again, but this time as part of the performance of everyday life in the Domitianic age rather than as part of the hermeneutics of the poems that depict this same age. The first word of Siluae 4.1 is laeta, “filled with joy.” The adjective goes with the noun purpura, “purple.” The latter is a metonym for “high office,” and it can designate both the consulship itself and the sovereignty of the emperor. The poem is about imperial power again assuming consular power, so the failure to make a distinction is effectively strategic. The two purples are but one purple. The Purple is happy to meet up with itself. In short, does the first word of the second line, Caesaris, go with purpura or with fastis, “the official calendar”? De we really want to insist that there is one answer to this question? Who needs purple prose when Statian verse is deploying conceits like this?129 The happy purple adds to its sixteen entries on the consular fasti. “And Germanicus opens up a distinguished new year. AND he arises with the new sun and the great constellations. He himself shines greater and more resplendent than First Dawn (Laeta bis octonis accedit purpura fastis | Caesaris insignemque aperit Germanicus annum, | atque oritur cum sole

128  Damon, 2002:187: “[Statius] shrugs, and invites the hostile reader to go off and enjoy a snicker by himself. To my mind this shrug is what makes these poems hard to stomach as poems today. We don’t belong to the community of interest in which Statius’ praise could count as encomium, and therefore to us they seem, too easily, mere flattery.” Damon’s Statius is advertising new values for a new age, and as level-­headed scholars we should allow him to do such without injecting our own tastes into the matter. Zeiner, 2005:249: “Statius’ remarks and easy dismissal of his critics illustrate literary confidence in the worth of his work.” 129  One needs to note that a celebration for the new consular year is expected and that we  should not be in the least surprised that someone said something like this. The issues of  note emerge from the details of the poem, and not out of its genre or occasion. See Coleman, 1988:63.

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nouo, cum grandibus astris | clarius ipse nitens et primo maior Eoo; 4.1.1–4).” The additive logic of the verse goes from big to bigger to biggest. The fact turns into the glory of the fact turns into the fact as something that eclipses “mere” celestial illumination. We can also read backwards: Domitian gives light to the day. He gives light to the year. He gives joy to power itself. Statius forges reciprocal circuits of imagery. But these same images also insist upon a sort of short-­circuit where all that really matters is power’s self-­relation. The beginning is also the end, and the end the beginning. Power is self-­illuminating. And the narrator claims that a certain sentiment attaches itself to this moment: joy. This joy is—or at least it ought to be . . . —infectious. “Jump for joy Latian laws! Rejoice consular seats! (exsultent leges Latiae, gaudete, curules; 4.1.5).”130 The contagion of affect is spreading through a collection of inanimate objects. But they are, as it were, animated precisely because of the approach of imperial power. The laws dance excitedly. Chairs get flush with happiness. “Be happy,” says the narrator as he gives voice to the things of the world. But we are also given every reason to believe that the world is already happy and that the command is instead a description: “Be what you are . . .” The detractor was told to shut up and be happy off in his private world. Here the mute elements of Roman power are addressed and congratulated for their happy good fortune in being part of public life. The poetic power to say fiat is complicit with the imperial ability to cause its utterances to be performative: “Let our words be law.”131 The poetic version of the situation denies that there is a command coming from power. Instead, the commands come from the poet himself. He commands the world to feel as it must in the wake of its good fortune to have been granted its wish for submission. There is an “ovation” in here— Euandrius . . . collis ouet (4.1.7–8)—but the defeated party is not some conquered foe. Instead, it is the other hills of Rome who have been dominated 130  Coleman,  1988:67: “Oxymoron: exsultare (from the root of salire) denotes vigorous rejoicing, whereas legal contexts are usually solemn.” Claudian has a keen eye for the recherché Statian moment. See Dewar’s note on line 36 of his panegyric to Honorius: “exultat: yet another detail recalling Statius’ celebration of the seventeenth consulship of Domitian, Silu. 4. 1. 5” (Dewar, 1996). 131  Compare Fitzgerald, 2007:135: “But within the world of poetry, whose studied artificiality is governed by the arbitrary fiat of the poet’s word, it is not surprisingly the poet who comes closest to the power of the emperor.” For Fitzgerald, the poet in question is Martial. And see Austin,  1975 on performative utterances: “I now pronounce you . . . ”. See Butler, 1993:225 for an important supplement to Austin’s performatives: “This is less an ‘act,’ singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power.”

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236  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity by the Palatine on a fantastic day such as today. An image that in Lucan would be a perverse token of civil war and tyrannical imposition is converted into a command to celebrate. The consulship and the senate house are delighted (gaudet). Their prayers have been answered. They win (uicisse). Caesar sets aside his repose and his modesty. He assents to be consul again. In full: et requiem bis sextus honos precibusque receptis | curia Caesareum gaudet uicisse pudorem (4.1.9–10). Statius’ verses shamelessly assert that Caesar felt ashamed to become consul. They impose upon their audience the notion that Caesar has been imposed upon. This sort of poetry relies upon a violent remaking of the language of public life. The verses construct a “dominant fiction” that marks itself as pointedly fictive, as a hyperventilating fiction about domination itself.132 The poet “makes,” and he makes a Rome that, he says, throws itself at Caesar and begs for his mastery.133 This is a fantasy of hyper-­power and a world that loves precisely that configuration of hegemony. In the Siluae, Caesar is not a “first among equals.” Instead, he is as bright as a sun and as powerful as a god.134 Janus himself will presently be depicted as thanking Caesar for his kind act of taking up the consulship.135 The poem lavishes more than thirty lines on the god and his speech to Domitian. And, as such, the Janus passage comprises the body of this forty-­seven-­line poem. The fourth book of the Siluae has a “double beginning” and is “Janus-­ like.” The first poem looks forward to a restored/repaired age.136 It delightedly imagines stepping into the new dawn of a new year as well as a new book of verse. So many triumphs are in the offing: the future is easy; to want is to achieve; to try is to win; . . . (mille tropaea feres, tantum permitte triumpho. 4.1.39) But the prefatory letter offers a different, backwards-­ looking face relative to the very same collection. Written from the perspective of the completion of the book (of the year . . . ), the introductory letter is looking ahead and thinking about how its readers will look at the

132  See the first chapter of Silverman, 1992 for an Althusserian/Lacanian take on the ideas folded into the phrase “dominant fiction.” As with Butler, Silverman is interested in the issue of subjection and/as subjectivity. 133  Hardie, 1983:192: the poem is articulated according to the Greek precepts that govern a βασιλικὸϲ λόγοϲ, i.e., the praise of a king. 134 Everyone else in power has a pointedly derivative/reflective power: “Every office derives its light from the consul (lucemque a consule ducit | omnis honos; 4.1.26–27).” 135  See Hardie, 1983:193 on the multiple overlapping cultural strands that Statius taps into here by making this god make this speech. 136  Janus is described as “himself the superlative renewer of the unmeasurable expanse of time (ipse etiam immensi reparator maximus aeui),” at 4.1.11, but we can transfer these images over to Domitian himself.

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poems that make up the body of Siluae 4. Will they complain about what he has just done? The net result is a mutant Janus who is staring at himself rather than one who is casting an eye into the future and the past simultaneously. The Janus-­like narrator sees himself seeing himself. And the moment of introspection conjures a sense of guilt in the form of a persecutory figure who emerges precisely so that the guilt can be converted into an occasion of pride.137 Book 4 will be shouting from the rooftops about how happy it is. The preface to Book 4 stares back at those joys and screams, to nobody in particular, “Shut up and be happy.” “Happiness,” then, is the affect that emerges at the site of the short-­circuit. There is a flash, a crash, the reek of ozone, and then a sticker with a smiling face pops out of the vending machine. Let us briefly resume the topic of “posing,” but this time keeping an eye on the involuted and regressive quality of the self-­staging. One sees oneself seeing oneself being seen. A specifically courtly artifice hovers over the poetry. A certain kind of eye is watching the spectacle, an eye that has also been set within it: power watches.138 And the narrator presents himself as a spectacle of someone who postures that power might admire his posturing. It is not for nothing that ecce is such a common word in the Siluae, and that it crops up at multiple narrative levels. And each of these levels communicates with all of the others. A multi-­layered narcissism springs up: one is proud to have produced the poem; one is proud to have offered it to power; one is proud to be seen by power as the one who offers; one is proud to be seen by others as the one who makes the offering to power; and, sotto voce, one is proud to have so much brain-­power as to be able to cleverly put on such a show of a show of a show . . . On the surface of the text one sees a narrator who delights in demolishing what might be dangerous categories by turning them into sham duplicates of themselves. But this is really the spectacle of a narrator

137  Compare Butler, 1997:118 on Althusserian subjection: “To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.” That is, the iterative mechanism of subjectivation cannot be separated from the question of complicity per se: “Am I ‘problematic’? What should I do about it? . . .” 138 Wallace-­Hadrill,  2011:98: “As a space, [the court] is fundamentally theatrical: it is where people come to see and be seen, and as in the theatre, to watch each other as well as the spectacle. They come to see the emperor and catch his eye; or catch the eye of those who know how to catch his eye; to observe their rivals catching eyes. It is consequently a dangerous space: everyone is visible, but everyone has something to hide from someone else.”

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238  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity who runs pseudo-­risks. He announces rash and bold acts that are not rash or bold or even acts. He feigns anxiety when he is really quite confident.

v.  The bold have nothing to fear: Siluae 3.2 The preface to the third book talks of the rashness of these cute little books (libellorum istorum temeritatem, 3.pr.3). Pollius is routinely “afraid” because of the “audacious pen” of Statius (hanc audaciam stili nostri frequenter expaueris, 3.pr.4).139 When we get to Siluae 3.2 we will see the same language used about sailing. The propempticon to Maecius Celer is a variation on a familiar poetic theme. In Siluae 3.2 the narrator prays for a safe journey for his friend. After the prayer, the ship sails. Then a series of reflections about “the origin and meaning of sailing” arises. This itself is very familiar to the lettered set.140 One suspects that neither the style nor the journey are, in the end, all that bold. How many substantive risks were taken? “Who first . . . ”: we’ve all read this a dozen times over. And Statius knows as much, if only because he has himself read it at least two dozen times over. The point of that first sentence is not what it says—for it has been said many times over—but rather how it says it. And so the last two words are the ones that really matter. The man who invented sailing was . . . . audax ingenii, “a man of daring genius” (3.2.64). The two words do not just end their long sentence, they are likewise enjambed. Audax has not taken the genitive before the Domitianic age. Vergil uses the ablative with this adjective. See audax iuuenta in Georgics 4.565. Horace, Propertius, and Lucan will dangle an infinitive after audax. Statius, Silius Italicus, and, later, Claudian, use audax with the genitive. And so we see the “boldness” of Statius himself. It consists in ostentatiously deploying the word “bold” with a patently “bold” grammatical

139  Henderson, 2007:258: “[S]o these poems might well have ‘courted risk’ (temeritatem), but no, no vipers in Pollius’s bosom here, just the ‘audacity’ of a puny pun.” Hardie, 1983:77: Audacia is also a way of speaking about the extemporaneous quality of the Siluae themselves. Borgo, 2003:47–48: all of our Flavians—Martial, Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, and Statius—ask us to attend to their “boldness.” 140 Vollmer,  1898:399 on Siluae 3.2.61 and following: “Die üblich Verwünchung der Erfindung der Schiffahrt . . .” Comprehension of Statius’ pointedly unusual way of articulating ideas is facilitated by the fact that so much of what he has to say participates in a social-­ cultural matrix that is thoroughly familiar to a certain class of reader.

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construction in a prominent position in its verse.141 The only risk here is that he might not accrue the requisite profits of distinction.142 This “bold” line immediately continues with the idea of “rashness” just to make sure that we make no errors about the (aesthetic) point at issue: “nor was that valor more rash which . . . ” (nec enim temeraria uirtus | illa magis . . . ) Heroes rush in where a fool would never dare to tread, namely into the Alexandrian paint pots of verse cosmetology. We boldly go where every poet has gone before. “Transgression” is not at all transgressive, instead it represents a bid for recognition and reward. This is the “bold” new poetry. It reaffirms the poetic and political status quo while talking up its “revolutionary” quality. “The rash ship of Minerva” was called a trite topic in Siluae 2.7.50: et puppem temerariam Mineruae | trita uatibus orbita sequantur. The line offers a commentary in advance on Siluae 3.2 and its poetics: boldly do the done thing; boldly follow the beaten path; be bold in your syntax as you capitulate to the material order of things.143

vi.  There is nothing to complain about in this best of worlds The rash are anything but. Meanwhile the disaffected are in fact overjoyed. The verb queror is staged ironically in the Siluae.144 In Siluae 1.2.93 Cupid says that Apollo “complained” because the former was treating a beloved bard so poorly. This is charming puffery, not a description of grief. The lovely baths we are celebrating in Siluae 1.5 cause various luxurious kinds of marble to “complain” that they have been excluded (maeret onyx longe,

141  People who just cannot restrain themselves from constant figuration tip their hands: they are partisans of showy school rhetoric (ἐπεί τοι τὸ πανταχοῦ κώδωναϲ ἐξῆφθαι λίαν ϲοφιϲτικόν; [Longinus], De sublimitate 23.4) 142  Bourdieu, 1991:55: “The constitution of a linguistic market creates the conditions for an objective competition in and through which the legitimate competence can function as linguistic capital, producing a profit of distinction on the occasion of each social exchange” [original emphasis]. And distinction has just been glossed as “the specifically symbolic logic of differential deviations.” 143 See Siluae 5.3.155 for another indication that “rashness” is a concept that attaches itself to poets and poetry in Statius world: “rash Sappho who feared not Chalchis (non formidata temeraria Chalcide Sappho . . .).” Or maybe Leucas is what she did not fear. The text is disputed. The passage’s allusion to geography-­as-­biography is itself over-­bold? See the long discussion of the scholarly debate at Gibson, 2015:324–325. 144  The verb is quite common: it appears twenty-­six times in the Siluae, and it can be found in more than one poem in each of the books of poetry.

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240  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity queriturque exclusus ophites; 1.5.35).145 The narrator complains, yes ­complains, and no small complaint at that, that he was not first to hear of the joyous event of the birth of a son to the addressee: “I have no small complaint to make, o best of youths. I am even angry, angry as a lover rages. Was it right that I learn of such great joy from common report? (Sed queror haud faciles, iuuenum rarissime, questus | irascorque etiam, quantum irascuntur amantes. | tantane me decuit uulgari gaudia fama | noscere? 4.8.32–35).” In practice, only the idea of being mistaken for someone vulgar could upset our poet.146 But such is an impossibility: just look at how precious his Latin is (in every sense of the word). The “rash” journey commemorated in Siluae 3.2 gives rise to “just complaints” on the part of the narrator: “Justified are my complaints. Lo, the ship flees wandering over the waves | gradually diminishing (Iusta queror. fugit ecce uagas ratis acta per undas | paulatim minor; 3.2.78–79).” Note how the ecce in fact points to the recherché image that comes at the head of the next line and not towards any notional boat. The “just complaint” and the “Look!” are really just a way to prepare us for the overstuffed artifice of paulatim minor, “gradually smaller.” Complaints tend to be markedly unreal, and the ones to hand illustrate this thesis. Complaints are either feigned or they draw our attention to poetical conceits rather than to political realities. Ideally both inconsequential predicates are satisfied at once. One takes care to be seen to not-­complain. Complaints seem out of place in this world in as much as it is, one says, the best of all possible worlds. None are to be preferred to it. Such, at least, is the way that “preferring” itself is deployed in the Siluae. Siluae 1.1 ends by favorably comparing Domitianic Art to the products of the past. Apelles would have loved to get a chance to portray Domitian: cuperent . . . (1.1.100) Rhodes’ Apollo is not so great. And, as we saw above, Rhodes would prefer to have a Domitian instead of its Colossus (tua sidereas imitantia flammas | lumina contempto mallet Rhodos aspera Phoebo; 1.103–4).

145 Seneca, Epistulae Morales 86 with its praise of Scipio’s bath offers a sort of commentary on the poem as a whole. Copia uerborum denounces copia, linguistic abundance takes on material abundance: “But today who could endure to take a bath like that? A man thinks himself a pauper living in squalor unless the walls shimmer with huge, expensive mirrors, unless the Alexandrian marbles are set off with an inlay of Numidian ones . . . (at nunc quis est qui sic lauari sustineat? Pauper sibi uidetur ac sordidus nisi parietes magnis et pretiosis orbibus refulserunt, nisi Alexandrina marmora Numidicis crustis distincta sunt, . . . 86.6).” See Henderson, 2004. 146  Zeiner,  2005:150: the poem as a whole emphasizes the fit between good taste and proper expenditure.

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One will note that it is not just key words that return, but their very syntax is patterned. The imperfect subjunctive abounds. The poems are full of actions that could have happened, and, indeed, such almost-­events are regularly posited as all but certain possibilities. But they did not happen. The present looks back at a past that has “lost its chance” to engage fully and properly with this same present.147 The past’s pastness is the occasion for its putative sorrow. It is remote and maudlin in its remoteness. Its facts have been pushed into contrafactual constructions. Something happened, but something preferable might have happened, were they not condemned to their then-­ness. The Siluae presents an antiquity that judges itself and finds itself wanting. All of this is, naturally, just a collection of figures of speech. And they are highly contrived ones at that. Nevertheless, we are bombarded with a rhetoric that has manifold means of consigning the glorious cultural archive of the past to a background role. The epic grandeur of a remote heroic age does not weigh upon an anxious, inadequate modernity. On the contrary, modernity is more than a match for antiquity.148 It would take seven epicists of yore to hoist a single lapidary verse such as Statius can today send effortlessly sailing from his smirking lips. Epicurus would prefer Manilius Vopiscus’ garden to the famed Garden at Athens (quas ipse suis digressus Athenis | mallet deserto senior Gargettius horto; 1.3.93–94). A god feels contempt. The philosophical retreat is ­abandoned.149 The Capital Items of the past are lowered. They become mere lower cases, humble species as new exemplary exemplars push them out. Mythic waters are no match for Etruscus’ baths: “Venus would have chosen to be born from these depths. Here, Narcissus, you would have seen yourself more clearly. Here swift Diana would even wish to be caught at her bath (hoc mallet nasci Cytherea profundo, | hic te perspicuum melius, Narcisse, uideres, | hic uelox Hecate uelit et deprensa lauari (1.5.54–56).” We pile up a collection of water-­myths, toss them into the bathroom, and mop 147  Woodcock, 1985: §121: “The imperfect potential subjunctive expresses the speaker’s or writer’s opinion as to what was likely to happen in the past, i.e., what could have, or might have happened. The imperfect tense implies that the opportunity for the event to take place has gone by, and that it can no longer be fulfilled.” [original emphasis] 148  Marcuse, 1991: “Man today can do more than the culture heroes and half-­gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture.” [original emphasis] 149  In fact, Epicurus himself might have been more likely to criticize this estate, not long to occupy it. See Newlands, 2002:131. However, Newlands sees in Statius’ move a bid to disarm the traditional critique and to bring it in line with the “contemporary Epicureanism” of Philodemus (Newlands, 2002:138). But maybe Statius is just brazen: it would be a problem to say there was a problem; so there will be no problem.

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242  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity the floor with them. One should attend to the facile nature of the gesture. There is nothing “precious” about these myths. Conversely the words themselves are precious indeed: Cytherea is the fancy way of saying Venus; Hecate is recherché for Diana; perspicuum is an ostentatiously ironic way of talking about Narcissus’ optical situation. As for the myths themselves and their erstwhile august characters, they are here to serve a higher master, namely the imperative to offer glib copy as we go about cataloging better homes and better gardens. Choices, desires, feelings, . . . The subjective world conjured by the narrator is being systematically deflected and deformed to fit a specific template. Psychic life is being fed an elaborate collection of stage directions by the narrator. The characters on display become marionettes of affect that dance their little dances and take their little bows. “Would prefer” circulates within a universe of luxurious things and their consumption. The preferences do not address themselves to the choice of political orders. Instead, we wind up in a “glorious” here and now of the Domitianic elite when we think about “choosing.” We choose to be rich and to be surrounded by luxuries.150 As we saw above, Vindex’s statue would prefer to have no other owner than the man who currently owns it (certe tu, muneris auctor, | non aliis malles oculis, Lysippe, probari; 4.6.108–9). And readers of the Siluae can be certain that this is certainly the case (certe). To doubt as much is to dispel its verse world more generally and so do away with the suspension of disbelief that all of this talk about certainties requires.

vii.  True confessions of undeniable attachment to the present Though there is much that a psychoanalytically inclined critic might describe as unsaid or negated within Statius’ poems, I would like to instead emphasize that “denial” and “confession” are themselves on the list of activities that have been programmatically turned into mere tropes. And here we find that the cynical deployment of these terms as part of a courtly 150  Naturally, a lot of effort is expended to ensure that we appreciate that “it’s not just about the money.” Zeiner, 2005 is expansive on this. See, for example, Zeiner, 2005:184: “The sense of ditior [in Siluae 2.2.121] seems initially to suggest that Pollius is economically wealthier than his contemporary Romans. Yet Statius does not use the term in a strictly economic sense; given the context of the whole passage, the phrase suggests that it is Pollius’ philosophical capital . . . that actually makes him richer beyond even the mythological Midas or Croesus.” Compare Zeiner,  2005:199: “Statius has been careful to distinguish Vindex’s activity as collecting, not accumulating” [original emphasis]. Nevertheless, Statius’ poetry is also not not about the money . . .

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“post-­truth” regime blunts the power of the potentially moving elements of the Siluae to in fact affect the reader, unless, of course, the reader is some strange beast that can only genuinely be stirred by the prospect of the emperor’s pleasures. Venus avers that there is nothing in the whole universe quite so lovely as Earinus. She has neither seen nor begotten his equal (nil ego, nil, fateor, toto tam dulce sub orbe | aut uidi aut genui; 3.4.39–40). The gods “confess” that the Domitianic startles them with its splendor. Wringing such testimony from the mouth of a god makes one doubt the force of fateri elsewhere in the Siluae. Fateri means “to authenticate” in Siluae 4.6.29. Vindex can tell you how to spot the mark that authenticates works of the old masters (linea quae ueterem longe fateatur Apellen, | monstrabit; 4.6.29–30). The “confession” in such a line authenticates art’s obsession with itself, an obsession that conjures a community of people who are “in the know” only because they are members of the hermetically/hermeneutically sealed community of Modern Art and Good Taste.151 The objet d’art “confesses” its authenticity to the discerning eye of the critic.152 But we are ourselves stuck within Statius’ precious little music box when we hear this word and are assured of this criterion. In contradistinction to an Old Master’s works, the distinguishing mark that authenticates the product of Statian mastery is its obsessive inauthenticity: “I am lying (and only cretins believe in the truth).”153 An emblematic moment would be, then, a phrase like “I make no lying supplement to his authentic excellence (nil ueris adfingo bonis; 2.1.50).” We will look more closely at this poem below since there is something special about “erotically invested bodies” that makes them the ideal moment for signing, sealing, and delivering (un)true words to the power. The twin of the preceding phrase is something like “I am not deceiving you, nor does the familiar license of 151 Coleman,  2008:31: “In insisting that Vindex’ connoisseurship dispenses with epigraphic assistance, Statius is supporting the impression that the Siluae celebrate knowledge, instinct and taste; this is not a culture of writing, but of the senses.” 152 Well, maybe. Coleman,  1988:176–176: “Despite St.’s protestations that Vindex was knowledgeable and discerning, most of the opinions which St. expresses about the statuette (and which presumably originate with Vindex himself) are loci communes (noted in the commentary ad loc.).” Similarly, White,  1975:287 alerts us to a certain “inauthenticity” of the poem itself: “These poems [of Martial and Statius] show so much the same features that we must suppose them to have been confected according to the same recipe. And the recipe could only have come from Vindex.” 153  Damon, 2002:178: “The figure of emphasis, or, saying less than you mean, has often been invoked lately to explain the literature of the empire, but the phenomenon we are examining would appear to be the opposite of emphasis: Statius makes big claims, and means very little by them.”

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244  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity song lead me to say it . . . (non fallo aut cantus assueta licentia ducit; 2.6.29).” And this is again part of a poem about a pretty boy lost. But this pushes at the fictiveness of fiction even harder: “Poets lie, they lie all the time, but I, a poet, I am not lying . . . ”154 The authentic/inauthentic narrator himself constantly steps forward to flag his ironic relationship to real things. Licentia is the freedom to do as one pleases (licet). But it also encompasses excessive freedom, boldness, and a sort of lawlessness. In this instance licentia connives with power to “take liberties with” reality. The performer’s utterances serve the interests of “the masters of the universe” in as much as they say, “Let me be so bold as to say that you are really amazing.” An unfree voice announces its brashness. And it is brash, but only in its relationship to the way that words relate to things. The voice is not critical of the way that power is constantly praised for itself intervening in and reshaping those same relationships. And this is because the poetic will to power is a “licensed” derivative of the will to power that has built in advance a world of the dominant and the poets who flatter them.155 An otherwise affecting passage about the silence of the house in the wake of the loss of one of its members suddenly feels hollow and suspect when the over-­assertive and ever-­meddling narrator’s voice intervenes. A boy has died. The dedicatee of the second book of the Siluae needs consolation, says the first poem of that book. But the following lines are substantially more affecting if one just chops “I confess” from them. With the word here, the insistent presence of the narrative ego triggers a converse reaction: “Oh, right, this is all mere artifice . . . ” See, then, Siluae 2.1.67–68: “Silent is the house, I confess, and abandoned are the household gods. The bedroom wastes away. A gloomy silence hangs over the table! (muta domus, fateor, desolatique penates, | et situs in thalamis et maesta silentia mensis!)” Without fateor one might punctuate these lines without an exclamation point, but with fateor the editor is driven towards it. “Passions” are being shouted at us. Fateor sounds a lot like a histrionic “hélas!” And the word drags everything else along with it. But perhaps this is the chief 154  And recall as well the discussion of Siluae 1.2.27 above: “The mendacious cleverness of indirect song should cease (cessent mendaces obliqui carminis astus).” 155  Newlands, 2002:29: Statius is addressing a “new nobility” that is (allegedly) defined by virtue rather than an old aristocracy. “Statius’ poetry promotes relatively obscure people on the basis of virtue, learning, and wealth, rather than on birth.” That statement, while valid, nevertheless makes too little of the hyperbolic quality of the praise. In the poems “relatively obscure people” (who are, despite their relative obscurity, nevertheless well-­positioned members of the hegemonic class broadly conceived) are doing things that “tradition” could only dream of.

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point: one performs emotional performance itself. The passions are ­supposed to be visibly worn as likenesses painted on a collection of masks that all intensely manifest the idea of someone who feels “just what one ought to feel.”

G.  Select nouns from the Domitianic lexicon The preceding discussion has merged a discussion of the passions with a collection of observations about a set of revelatory “activities” that are con­ sist­ently promoted by the narratives of the Siluae. These activities, though, tend to all be affectively marked: that is, one engages in them eagerly, or, perhaps more precisely, one offers up a world in which a narrator insists that his eagerness be seen. There is a grammar and syntax of the Siluae, then, and one that can be explored within more or less the same rubrics that one would deploy to discuss the grammar and syntax of Latin as a language. The excessively self-­conscious verse of Statius produces a verbal performance that offers itself up to us as a glittering language object.156 It is a “self-­parsing” language object as well. The presentation is directive: “This is to be read this way. That in that way.” But, unlike a simple act of parsing that finds the gender, number, and case of a noun, the self-­parsing quality of the Siluae complicates the situation: the labels affixed to any given verbal object are likely to be double, ironic, and/or misleading. It will, though, be worth our while to linger a while longer with Statian Syntax, a syntax that is less concerned with parsing the canonical grammatical sentence that “Cato is walking” than it is with a new one: “A cour­ tier is singing.”157 And, unlike the Stoic lekton, it is never clear exactly what the truth of this sayable is supposed to be. And that is one of the points of the whole exercise. A certain number of “things” might catch the eye of the reader of the Siluae, and these are not just the glossy topics of the poems themselves. We can instead turn our eyes to a collection of abstract nouns that might

156  Augoustakis and Newlands, 2007:117: “Indeed, a major impetus behind the poetics of the Silvae is self-­conscious innovation.” 157  On Cato the walker see, for example, Seneca, Epistulae Morales 117.13: “Next I say, ‘Cato is walking.’ What I say is not the body. It is a certain declarative concerning the body. Some use the term ‘utterance,’ others ‘declarative,’ others ‘declaration,’ others ‘statement.’ (Dico deinde: Cato ambulat. Non corpus’ inquit ‘est quod nunc loquor, sed enuntiatiuum quiddam de corpore, quod alii effatum uocant, alii enuntiatum, alii dictum.)” On the narratology of this bit of Stoic linguistics, see Gunderson, 2015a:36–37.

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246  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity offer some sort of thing-­ish purchase for us as we try to ground the ­value-­system of the world conjured by the poems and so build up some sort of claim about that world.

i.  Freedom (but not that kind of freedom) The phantom of liberty is perhaps emblematic of the problem of the relationship between words and things. Forms of libertas appear ten times in the Siluae. Unsurprisingly, given the more general history of the word, it does not designate Republican libertas. The word is usually deracinated from any sense of civil freedom. And a term that once straddled both political liberty and free speech comes to mean only the freedom to deploy the word freedom within a certain contrived speech situation that keeps its eye on a “wonderful” political situation from which Republican libertas has been foreclosed. When we first see liberty—or is it Liberty?—it is amid the “free mixing” of persons. The barrier between different kinds of sorting has been suspended at Domitian’s banquet.158 A single table feeds all (una uescitur omnis ordo mensa, | parui, femina, plebs, eques, senatus: | libertas reuerentiam remisit. 1.6.43–45). The verse at 1.6.44 performs its own message, and it packs together different differences. This mingling puts the old golden age of Jove to shame.159 But the phrase “liberty loosened deference” (libertas reuerentiam remisit) only fits the situation in a highly qualified manner. People are “free” only as guests of a specific host. He is the enabling condition of as well as the limit set upon their “liberty.”160 Nevertheless, this same liberty is a “great leveler.” This “irreverent” mass of guests who no longer admire one another nevertheless do not fail to admire the emperor.161 The very next words of the poem are “Verily even you yourself . . . ” The amazement is occasioned by the participation of the

158  Newlands,  2002:16: “[The Domitianic] Cancellaria reliefs represent another radical departure in imperial iconography. Here gods mingle with humans, priests with soldiers, and there are no women and children. Personifications too are intermingled, making concrete abstract notions of imperial authority.” 159 Statius, Siluae 1.6.39: “Antiquity, I challenge you to compare eras . . . (i nunc saecula compara, Vetustas . . .).” 160 Newlands,  2002:236: “[T]he Saturnalia is strikingly called the emperor’s Saturnalia (Saturnalia principis, 82), a paradoxical resignification of the festival that buttresses the emperor’s power over his people and calls into question the very notion of popular liberty.” 161  Taisne,  1994:81–86 notes the tendency for admiration to be collective in the Siluae. There is a “chorality” to praise.

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emperor in the sociality of the feast: “Verily even you yourself — and who among the gods could be invited here, who engage to come? — entered into a common meal with us (et tu quin etiam — quis hoc uocari, | quis promittere possit hoc deorum? — | nobiscum socias dapes inisti; 1.6.46–48).” The emperor is distinct from “every order,” and his arrival occasions nothing quite so much as reverence. To think of him immediately sets us thinking about the gods. His acts, gestures, and conventions are only to be interpreted as per the idioms that appertain to them. And so we see the very terms that we had just used return and flip around as soon as the new axis that orients them is announced. The verse paragraph closes with a declaration of the psychic state of the socially mixed-­up guests who have one thing very well sorted indeed: they are lucky to be at the same party as Il Duce: “Presently each, no matter who he is, have or have-­not, exults that he is the leader’s companion at the feast. (iam se, quisquis is est, inops beatus | conuiuam ducis esse gloriatur; 1.6.49–50).” Conuiua here indicates a sharing of conviviality that nevertheless does not quite share when it comes to Domitian; libertas names a liberty that is highly qualified for the guests; and socius designates a sociality that knows itself to be something that exists at his majesty’s pleasure. Whatever Saturnalian license we might imagine to be evinced by the scene suspends only temporarily and only notionally the order of things. And in the very gesture of suspension it underscores the priority of that same order. The “liberty” one sees at the party is a bit of sociological make-­ believe that subsists on a parallel plane to the poem itself and its own construction of fantasies that always acknowledge a higher power even as they celebrate the “free play of the imagination.” “Liberty” offers an occasion for various jeux de mots. It is not a political word. And, accordingly, the “politics of liberty” in Statius consists of the political valence of depoliticizing an erstwhile political word, of condemning the word to its “erstwhileness.” We can see something like this in the libertas that comes at the head of Siluae 2.1. The poem is a consolation. The addressee is weeping. The narrator tells him to indulge his grief. He is free to do so. In fact, he will be best off if he positively wallows in his sorrows.162 He is enjoined to master his sick sorrow by, paradoxically, giving it free rein: “Glut your debilitating woe with your ills, and master it by giving it complete freedom. (satiare malis aegrumque dolorem | libertate doma; 2.1.14–15).” 162  Newlands, 2011:11: “Another significant feature of St.’s consolatory poems is his challenge to the traditional notions that grief was unmanly.”

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248  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity We again see the familiar structural feature that highlights a surprising use by pushing it to the head of its verse. Domination and liberty are juxtaposed here. The two were juxtaposed in Siluae 1.6 as well. And, if one is willing to read beyond book borders, that was the very poem that comes before this one. But, one will say, that was a different domination and a different liberty. Indeed, they were different. Here the two are purely individual and psychic and have been radically depoliticized even as the narrative voice is cashing in on the (politically harmless) frisson of putting the two words next to one another. This is “edgy” language where the actual edge has been blunted in advance. Compare “revolutionary” new products and the advertising campaigns that greet their arrival in the marketplace today. Res nouae for free-­market types means just “more stuff to buy” and not “revolution.” The cooptation of the word revolution is itself a counterrevolutionary move. And so too with the language of “liberty.” It is hard to say that “untrammeled liberty” as per the world of the Siluae represents a substantive threat to the normative. Yes, we will weep. Yes, we will feel all the feels. And, yes, we will make sure to be seen doing all of this. But, no, “liberty” will never erupt onto the scene in a radical sense. Siluae 2.1 is, it will be recalled, about the death of a pretty manumitted slave boy. And so the ex-­master’s “freedom to weep” as well as the poetic praise of sorrow inevitably stands in contrast to the boy’s own erstwhile want of freedom and whatever unhappiness he might have felt about his dominated lot in life. The liberty of the republic is labeled “Republican liberty” and kept ­disjoint from “contemporary liberty.” Siluae 2.7 marks this and celebrates the distance. When the narrator of the Siluae evokes the “pious liberty” of Cato this by no means necessarily counts as an endorsement of either Cato or liberty. In fact, one is free to take a verse that can read “Cato, serious for his pious liberty” as simultaneously also reading “Cato, a burden owing to his ‘pious’ bluntness” (libertate grauem pia Catonem; 2.7.68). If we think back to Lucan’s epic, there Cato is not just “grave,” he is also “over-­grave,” a full-­of-­ himself hard-­liner whose absolutism has something frightening about it. Think of a line like, “It will be the gods’ crime to have made even me guilty (crimen erit superis et me fecisse nocentem; Lucan, Bellum Ciuile; 2.288).” One often uses cunning intertextual hermeneutics to detect a critique of emperors. But what if our intertexts were counter-­revolutionary? What if they marked out problematic republicans and their disagreeable liberty? As far as regressive allusivity goes, consider the frequent visual citation of Eisenstein and other (politically and esthetically) revolutionary Soviet

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filmmakers by Hollywood directors. These citations indicate only that one has been to film school, not that one is engaged in a radical appraisal of the contemporary political moment. Indeed, quite the opposite can be claimed in practice despite the fact that so many in Hollywood self-­identify as “liberal.” The old film archives are there for the plundering. They are a treasure-­house of images and tricks. The classics of a heterogenous socio-­ political moment are absolutely nothing more than something that we use for our purposes in complete indifference to the spirit of the original. They are symbolic capital that is stored up and disbursed by insiders who very much stand to win concrete capital at the end of the process. For example, the plight of the baby in the carriage on the Odessa Steps in “The Battleship Potemkin” (dir. Eisenstein, 1925) acts as a metaphor for an imperiled communist future in the face of a tyrannical present. The baby on the stairs in the train station shootout in “The Untouchables” (dir. De Palma, 1987) is a cheap emotional prop, a piece of window dressing as Government fights against Gangsters over the specific kind of capitalistic regime to which tomorrow will be subjected. And in “Naked Gun 33 1/3” (dir. Zucker, 1994) the stairs facilitate yet another knowing joke in a movie full of knowing jokes: the capitalist idiots have won. Shut up and be happy. For the Siluae, is the Pharsalia just a collection of impressive sound-­ effects or is it a politically consequential collection of verse?163 To what extent does a poet like Statius in fact prefer the former possibility to the latter? Statius’ willful emptiness might be emptying out everything he touches. If we play the allusions and intertexts game, a “Republican” and “anti-­imperial” reading of Lucan in Siluae 2.7 is difficult to sustain.164 Specifically, if we continue examining the environs of Cato’s “liberty” we will see Cato’s companion Pompey: et gratum popularitate Magnum (2.7.70). Perhaps we are supposed to say that Pompey is “pleasing because of his popularity.” But according to the very same phrase Pompey is also “beloved owing to the way he made sure to court popular favor.” Statius’ line picks up on a train of thought familiar from Lucan’s Civil War and its snide depiction of a Pompey. There Pompey is unequal to his foe but he

163 Specifically, detonabis, “you will thunder,” is ambiguous. Quintilian uses the word of cheap, self-­satisfied rhetorical effects at Institutio Oratoria 12.9.4. But maybe here the word indicates precious, self-­satisfied rhetorical effects. 164  Johnson,  1987:72 identifies Lucan and his poem quite strongly with liberty: “Lucan loves the idea of freedom, despairs of it, and he hates, with a violence beyond any control that art might bestow, the monsters who have been complicit in the destruction of the reality and the idea of Roman freedom.”

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250  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity has mistaken himself for someone great because people praise him in his own theater.165 Statius’ line hides the complexity of the original situation and, in so doing, leaves his own text “ironically” pro-­Caesar. That is, those who are “in the know” know that the summary of Lucan’s account of Pompey in Siluae 2.7.70 is in fact part of an indictment of him. Analogously it seems likely that the smart set also know that the account of Cato has been hollowed out in a similar manner. Cato’s liberty in 2.7.68 is to be read as “(full-­of-­himself) Cato’s liberty” rather than as “the virtuous relationship to liberty in general that Cato in particular embodied.” On our next stop as we ride the freedom train, we learn that a Neapolitan enjoys, in addition to a lovely coastline, “Menander’s freedom,” the libertatemque Menandri (3.5.93). Whatever an Athenian comic poet’s freedom might be, it absolutely cannot be the libertas-­or-­death liberty of someone from the old Republic. A praise of Menander’s freedom is likewise fantastically deracinated from the frank speech, the libertas loquendi, of the old Republicans, including the barbed speech of the Roman comic poets.166 What we are looking at is a cozy poet who is “free” to write lovely verse that itself is redolent of his “objective freedom” to lead his life at ease. But this is a freedom that is predicated upon Caesarism. Statius enjoys what he enjoys because there is a Caesar there to underwrite (as well as indirectly impose) the conditions of the poet’s own comfortable want of constraint. Free as he is, the poet enjoys a Menandrian freedom to have marital difficulties rather than the Aristophanic freedom of Mr. Civic Justice who had Strong Opinions about questions of war and peace in the Acharnians.167 Statius does not abuse his concrete freedom by biting the hand that feeds him and he assuredly does not set up his own separate 165 Lucan, Bellum Ciuile 1.131–32: “He was a canvaser for reputation. He dispersed much to the mob. His entirety was driven along by the breezes of public standing. He delighted in his own theater’s applause. (famaeque petitor | multa dare in uolgus, totus popularibus auris | inpelli plausuque sui gaudere theatri).” Lucan’s Pompey is a shadow of a man, a “Great Name” rather than a “Great Man,” and so forth. The poem is consistently dark about Pompey and his greatness. Johnson, 1987:73: “The pun on Magnus is deliberately easy, blatant, gratuitous.” 166  Consider the language that is “barbed like that of Greek poets” in Aulus Gellius’ retelling of the story of Naevius’ imprisonment for offending leading civic lights with his overly free speech. See Noctes Atticae 3.3.15. Compare Plautus, Miles Gloriosus 211. 167  And not all marriages are happy. This is a messy “we’re happy, Mrs Statius, right?” poem. The situation as per Henderson,  2007:261: “In the collection, retirement to Naples makes or fakes a sphragis. A place to get personal and say what counted.” The complication: “This is no transcription of a marriage, but rather the mobilization of a power-­relation: husbandry” (Henderson, 2007:262). It sure would be fun to take the too-­easy way out: “Statius’s offer. Final reduction. Closure” (Henderson, 2007:268), But one needs to accept that it takes

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polis in a gesture of disgusted revolt. If our narrator is allowed to say what counts, any side-­by-­side comparison (ϲύγκριϲιϲ) of comic poets will inevitably rank mild-­mannered Menander with his domestic intrigues over some other poet who used comic license differently.168 “Liberty or Slavery” is the polarity we find in the poem that celebrates the narrator’s dead adopted son.169 Some of the last images of the poem inform us of the bio-­social origins of this same son. The boy was not a clever, glittering thing bought and then over-­rewarded (non ego mercatus Pharia de puppe loquaces | delicias doctumque sui conuicia Nili | infantem lingua nimium salibusque proteruum | dilexi; 5.5.66–69).170 The boy was “mine” because he was taken up from the very bed of his birth as the narrator’s son. The father-­to-­be was even singing during the birth, sings the narrator (meus ille, meus. tellure cadentem | aspexi atque unctum genitali carmine foui; 5.5.69–70). The song, in its way, is part of what made the boy “mine, mine, all mine” and which marks him all over again as “free, but possessed.” The question asked by the narrator at this juncture is, “What more could his (biological) parents have offered?” They offered less than the song, of course. And they offered something less than libertas. The narrator gives the just-­born child a re-­birth and liberty: “Verily I gave to you, little one, a different origin and freedom while you were at the very breast (quin alios ortus libertatemque sub ipsis | uberibus tibi, parue, dedi; 5.5.73–74).” The boy is, we are told in a textually defective passage that immediately follows, freed at once lest his “tiny liberty” should lose even a single day (sed merito properabat, amor, ne perderet | libertas tam parua diem; 5.5.77–78). Unfreedom would be a disaster. This “Caesarean section” of the poem cuts the boy away from one status and inserts him into another. The bard, the father, the emperor: they are guarantors of “liberty,” yes, but never “that other liberty,” namely the rights and privileges that constitute the autonomy of the free adult male citizenry of the Roman Republic. Beloved slave favorites and sons, that is, pueri and pueri, suffuse this world of Free Fathers who leave us free to admire their fathering while political independence itself is withheld. two, and the other party is no fool: “Enough of fiction. Let’s get real. We both know how it is between us . . .” (Henderson, 2007:272). 168 See, famously, Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2.23: “Passages consulted and judged. Segments from the comedies of Menander and Caecilius’ Plocium (Consultatio diiudicatioque locorum facta ex comoedia Menandri et Caecilii, quae Plocium inscripta est).” 169  “Liberty and slavery” is vital to understanding Siluae 2.6.10, but this poem needs to be treated at more length and so will be discussed in detail later. 170  The “saucy Egyptian chatterboxes” put this poem in communication with the homoeroticism of Siluae 2.1. See Asso, 2010:678–679.

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252  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Daddy politics surround our final example of “silvan liberty.” In Siluae 5.2 Crispinus is congratulated on becoming a military tribune and so officially starting his life of climbing the socio-­political ladder. He is more or less literally following in his father Vettius Bolanus’ footsteps.171 The man had been suffect consul in 66 ce and was the governor of Britain in 69–71 ce. The exempla that are the legacy left behind by exemplary ancestors are dunned into the kid by the family and by the poet himself (bibe talia pronis | auribus, haec certent tibi conciliare propinqui, | haec iterent comites praecepta senesque paterni; 5.2.58–60). The boy’s father has died and so has not been able to personally supervise his son’s passage through this and other stages of his life. This sort of situation is potentially risky for a young man. “Whom has an unbridled youth and hastened liberty of the newly donned toga not corrupted? Compare a forest that knows nothing of the sickle that brings forth its foliage and expends its fruits into shadowing foliage. But you have in your tender breast a concern for the muses and a sense of shame and a character that knows how to set a limit upon itself (quem non corrupit pubes effrena nouaeque | libertas properata togae? ceu nescia falcis | silua comas tollit fructumque exspirat in umbras. | at tibi Pieriae tenero sub pectore curae | et pudor et docti legem sibi dicere mores; 5.2.68–72).” In Cicero “liberty and the toga” as a pair would be a resolutely political pair and not a periphrasis for “boys sowing their wild oats.” In this poem “liberty” means “too much, too soon.” It means, “getting out from under father’s thumb and so into trouble.” The next lines compare this version of “unripe liberty” to a forest that is always also a human body. Bad liberty produces a certain kind of silua, says the Siluae. It is a singular, shaggy, unedited, uncastrated affair. It seems that we are imagining a tree that produces no real fruit because all of its productive energy is channeled into a riot of dense, unmanaged foliage. The cure for that bad, liberated silua, says the Siluae, is a love of the Muses.172

171  The situation is trickier than the poem itself lets on. And the poet is not following in the footsteps of the standard templates for praise. See Gibson, 2006:174: “Statius’ poem has little in common with this background.” Bernstein,  2007:184: “Though Statius chooses to praise Crispinus’s youth and ancestry, each of these forms of distinction can be read as a potential character flaw.” Nevertheless, using the father as a vehicle for praise is very old indeed (Gibson, 2006:176–177). 172  The significance of the title Siluae has itself attracted a fair amount of attention. Every commentary on the poems addresses this in its introduction. See also the more extensive account of Wray, 2007. “Statius makes that contest [between humans and nature] sound less like a grim struggle for mastery and more like a flashy talent show in which nature, when beaten, is bested by having its artwork incorporated into the design of the human artist.” (Wray, 2007:138)

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A student of the muses will tumble into the well of metapoetic references here and think back to all of the times that “the scythe” was used in other poems, especially ones about poetry. The “fruit” of the bibliomania is no shadowy affair. The fruit is harvested and set forth on a brightly lit table (of contents) at a bibliomaniac’s feast. A love of the muses means as well a species of ϲωφροϲύνη, a moderation that ensures autonomous compliance with the laws, the νόμοι. We see pudor here, and it is glossed as the “good use” of the fruits of youth. What matters more is subjective self-­ regulation via self-­legislation. Let us convert meta-­poetics into meta-­politics. When we do so we will see that the learned poet of learned poetry praises the self-­editing that cuts away liberty in the name of instilling the character-­of-­compliance. Poetic melodies teach us about social harmony and the good, law-­abiding citizen. That is, νόμοι praise νόμοι. Alexandrianism insists that Alexander is great, and that to Caesar one shall render that which is his, namely the self-­ subjected imperial sexual subject. If you care for the muses, then you hate the liberty of the toga. And note especially that the bestest boy in all the Siluae happens to be the castrated one, the super-­ subjected creature around which poetry riots: Earinus. We will spend some time with him later. “The liberation game” in the Siluae is a game of social positions. This comes as no surprise. It is also a game that privileges Caesar and erases the Republic. This occasions little surprise either. The Republic died a long time ago, after all. Nevertheless, the relationship to Lucan revivifies our interest in the outdated question of liberty. But our curiosity flags when we note that Statius seems to be riffing on Lucan’s poem qua aesthetic object and not as a political critique. Instead, we come to appreciate that “liberty” is a “private, personal affair.” But, the “privatization” of liberty is purchased at the very high price of a loss of the radical freedom to let one’s hair grow as it may. One is only free to be personally virtuous.173 And this is glossed as a freedom to be both the subject of Domitian and a self-­subjecting subject. People who are playing the game of empire, of family, and of poetry know better than to put forth fruitless energies that will have them spread diffusely into shadowy obscurity: nolite fructum in umbras expirare.

173 Newlands,  2002:259 on the way the fourth (and “last”) book of the Siluae ends: “Libertas now resides, if at all, in the realms of domesticity and aesthetics, not politics.” The fifth book seems to be posthumous. A review of the arguments for this can be found at Gibson, 2006:xxviii–xxx. He notes, however, that there does seem to be some sort of structure to the book. Statius was about to have something more to say?

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ii.  Faith (for those naive enough to believe) The grammar of our nouns reminds us of our lesson in the syntax of verbs: things tend to turn into their opposites. Freedom is not free. Similarly, “faith” is faithless and a word full of treachery. The story of fides is highly convergent with that of fateri. And, in general, the narrator freely confesses to a variety of unbelievable sentiments. Moreover, this hyperbolic gesture provides the (dis-)authenticating signature that is set upon a pile of empty promissory notes.174 The ejaculatory narrative of the pleasures of Manilius Vopiscus’ villa flags excitement from the outset: “WOW!” A sample: “O day long to be remembered! What joys do I bear back from it in my breast! How fatigued my vision by so many marvels! (O longum memoranda dies! quae mente reporto | gaudia, quam lassos per tot miracula uisus! 1.3.13–14).”175 One of the early items of note is the mirror images of the landscape that can be seen in the waters running through the estate (fallax responsat imago | frondibus; 1.3.18–19). And, given that there is little in Statius’ poetry that is not self-­referential, this beguiling false image serves as a species of self-­ praise too, especially if one wants to say of the “profound woods that brood over impetuous shallows” that they too remind the reader of the (allegedly) improvisational Siluae and their relationship to their own “deep learning” (nemora alta citatis | incubuere uadis; 1.3.12–13). And, while we are reading the poem backwards, we can even wonder if the idea that “nowhere else does nature indulge itself more copiously” (non largius usquam | indulsit natura sibi; 1.3.11–12) does not remind us of the poems in our hands and their cultivated genius. And so there is a strong sense that the poem about the place is also a poem about the poem about the place. And the sensation only grows stronger in the lines that follow, lines that take pains to insist that fides is a rhetorical trope and an amusing toy with which poets play. “The very 174  Quintilian on when too much becomes way too much: “Even if all hyperbole outstrips belief, it nevertheless ought not that go beyond measure. There is no surer path to willful affectation (κακοζηλία, lit. ‘zeal for terrible style’) . . . All you really need to remember is that hyperbole lies, but not in a manner that intends to hide the fact that it lies. (Quamuis enim est omnis hyperbole ultra fidem, non tamen esse debet ultra modum, nec alia uia magis in cacozelian itur. . . . Monere satis est mentiri hyperbolen, nec ita ut mendacio fallere uelit. Quintilian, Instiutio Oratoria 8.6.73–74).” 175  Newlands, 2002:124: “Through metonymy, for instance, the villa can act on one level as a model of the inner state [of its owner]; on another level it can act as model for society as a whole.”

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Anio — unbelievable but true! — though above and below | rocky, here sets aside his swollen madness and frothy | murmurs, as if he fears to upset placid Vopiscus’ | muse-­filled days and dreams filled with songs (ipse Anien (miranda fides) infraque superque | saxeus hic tumidam rabiem spumosaque ponit | murmura, ceu placidi ueritus turbare uopisci | Pieriosque dies et habentes carmina somnos; 1.3.20–24).” There is nothing unbelievable about building an estate at a naturally calm spot along a river. There is little that is unbelievable about the purging of a rocky riverbed in order to yield calm waters for a luxury estate. The fides we are supposed to marvel at is a pure construct of a markedly contrived poetic moment. Nobody was likely to express wonder at this feature of the estate. It strains credulity to believe that anyone’s credulity was ever taxed by the fact of the easy flow of the river. The evocation of fides is, then, nothing more than a marker of fiction itself and a warning that a variety of conceits that are all “just too much” are on the way. This river is personified in a manner that offers a warm-­up for the actual personification of a river in Siluae 4.3. The poem focusses on the implied psychic life of the river. It is raving mad in other locations. It murmurs gently here. Surely it fears/reveres Vopiscus. It can’t bring itself, says the muse-­sodden narrator in his dreamiest voice, to do injury to the muse-­filled days and dreams of Vopiscus. What one is supposed to admire here is the want of fidelity to a discourse of actual nature.176 One has swapped such a discourse out for a fidelity to the murmur of bards singing about bards singing about dreams about dreams. The mirror-­ river becomes an “acoustic mirror” that reflects a fidelity to a semiotic system, a forest of deep poetic symbols looming above.177 All questions of optics become a matter of visions conjured in verse dreams. Fides is in other authors and contexts frequently a deeply sociological term that evokes good faith, sincerity, conscientiousness, promises, confirmations, and guarantees. In the Siluae it is a word that keeps on

176  Compare Bright, 1980:46: “[T]he rules of nature may be suspended and nature thereby enhanced . . . [T]he poet assists in this process even as he reports it.” See also the pleasures that ensue when “conquered nature yields” at Siluae 2.2.52–53: “Nature smiles upon these lands. Here, conquered, she yields to the farmer and, docile, she is tamed and taught hitherto unfamiliar uses (fauit natura locis, hic uicta colenti | cessit et ignotos docilis mansueuit in usus).” Triumphs over nature are celebrated by Martial, Statius, and the Flavian regime itself. See Newmyer, 1984. 177  See Silverman,  1988:80 on the manner in which the soundscape can and should be understood as a functional element of the Lacanian notion of “the mirror stage.” She is following up on Rosolato, 1974.

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256  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity getting us back to art and the rules of art. One of the premises of this whole study is, of course, the notion that one should be sensitive to the sociology of art as well as its connection to its political moment. But in the Siluae any direct meditation on the relationship of art to the world tends to be blocked by the tendency of the narrative voice to make all of the things of the world into things of art and artifice. A further example, then: Siluae 3.1 is art about art.178 It praises a statue. And the transition into the body of the poem begins by deploying the “beyond faith” quality of “great art”: “It is hard to believe one’s eyes and understanding”, uix oculis animoque fides (3.1.8). In what follows we are pointedly dancing at the edge of the dreamscape of the “beyond belief ” all of which is nevertheless being made real to our hearts (animo fides) by the pure power of poetry and our complicit embrace of the pleasures of a surrender to that power. And we see the “artful” deployment of fidelity yet again in Siluae 4.7. The relationship of the Thebaid to the Aeneid is described with a stanza that contains both fido monitore and audaci fide: “Assuredly my Thebaid, much tortured by editorial polishing, has you as its trusty advisor and it makes an attempt at the joys of Vergilian fame with its bold lyre (quippe te fido monitore nostra | Thebais multa cruciata lima | temptat audaci fide Mantuanae | gaudia famae; 4.7.25–28).” The phrase contains an “artful” tension that is itself a meditation on art. What is “good advice” when it comes to a “bold lyre”? And is the “trusty advice” that the poem itself should evince a species of “bold fidelity”? What is the relationship between the adjacent lexical entries fides¹ and fides,² between, that is, fidelity and the lyre? And, in particular, can dedication to the latter suspend one’s fidelity to fidelity itself? Throughout the Siluae there is a sense that there is something surprising and improbable about the whole semantic zone in which fides resides. Mira fides, “marvelous-­but-­true,” “unbelievable-­but-­believe-­it,” appears twice in exclamatory outbursts (3.3.21; 5.1.33) There is nothing especially novel about the highly rhetorical deployment of “believability” after this fashion. But the frequency of the outbursts does attract attention, and so too do the contexts in which we see this trope. And so, similarly, in Siluae 5.2.117 we see the phrase si qua fides dictis, “if you can believe what I am saying,” that is, “please believe me even though this might sound incredible.” Perhaps it is not remarkable at first glance. Apuleius, Martial, Ovid, Petronius, Seneca Maior, Silius Italicus, 178 Taisne,  1994:257: “L’influence de Callimaque nous semble prépondérante dans ce poème avec quelques traits rappelant surtout Properce.”

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and Vergil all use si qua fides. But “believe me” is very often present in unbelievable circumstances. There is often a panegyrical quality to the phrase. That is, it appears exactly in places where one has motives to speak untruth to power for personal gain. Fides is, then, a word that also means (lyrical) “bad faith.” And so, Ovid’s use of the phrase comes in the Epistulae ex Ponto as part of an elaborate fiction whereby Ovid is all but teleported to Rome when Maximus Cotta reads him there: “Believe me, time spent thus with you is truly heavenly. Now please use your connections to Augustus and help to get me out of this shithole (Tum me, si qua fides, caelesti sede receptum | cum fortunatis suspicor esse deis; Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.5.53).” Si qua fides ueris, “if one can trust the (scarcely believable) truth,” appears in Martial when he is addressing Domitian. The “faithlessness” of Epigrams 5.19 has been discussed above. And in the Siluae too “trust me” pops up at a spectacularly unbelievable moment, at a moment where, frankly only a fool would take the fidelity of the narrative seriously.179 The phrase marks yet another moment where truth-­talk becomes just so many words., This is talk that is meant to be drowned out by the lyre. Only a rube looks for a philosopher’s fides when a well-­tempered fides is being strummed by a bard. Crispinus is being praised in Siluae 5.2. We have just finished an exceptionally interesting passage about his astounding rhetorical performance that left the patres gobsmacked in the course of his defense of a friend (stupuere patres temptamina tanta, 5.2.109). One is perhaps simultaneously amazed at the narrator as well: he has made wondrously bold trial of a desperately rare word like temptamina.180 Then the narrator cuts hard away from that episode to recount “another example” of the amazingness of the youth: “I myself did lately see you on the Tiber’s shore . . .  (ipse ego te nuper Tiberino in litore uidi, 5.2.113).” The young man was riding around doing some military drills. But, dear auditor, do not mistake this rather banal activity for anything other than an astounding sight to behold. The narrator says, “Believe me, this was EPIC.” Stupere has reappeared after just seven lines. The old men boggled. The

179  Contrast Gibson, 2006:233 on siqua fides dictis: “an admission of the implausibility of the comparison, which paradoxically adds weight to the poet’s demands for credibility.” 180  Lewis and Short, 1962, sv. tentamen: “a trial, essay, attempt (poet.; perh. only in the two foll. passages): prima uocis tentamina sumpsit, Ovid M. 3, 341: tentamina Repellere, id. ib. 7, 734.” See also Gibson, 2006:231.

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258  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity narrator boggled. Well, if you can believe him . . .181 “If you have any faith in my words, I was stunned. I thought him armed for war. | This is how the youth fair with his Gaetulian horse and shaking Trojan | weapons used to travel a-­hunting into his stepmother’s fields: | ASCANIUS. And he used to make poor Dido burn for his father. No differently did Troilus . . .  (si qua fides dictis, stupui armatumque putaui. | Gaetulo sic pulcher equo Troianaque quassans | tela nouercales ibat uenator in agros | Ascanius miseramque patri flagrabat Elissam. | Troilus haut aliter . . .  5.2.117–121).” The scene is done in highest style and plays every sort of game with Aeneid 4. And then, after Ascanius we pivot over to further mythical martial youths. The layers of fiction are many and patent.182 But another, familiar message is being transmitted as well. “Epic remoteness” is not really that remote. The epic is fully comparable to the immanent. “Trust me, this is true.” And, to the extent that you might insist that such a thesis is absurd, given that the epic is, you claim, the repository of the “truly great” and the contemporary inevitably furnishes just a bunch of rich people who like to pretend to be great and/or to be told that they are great, well, then you have read the moment in the wrong direction. It is the present that validates and gives value to the past. The full faith and credit of the poetic tradition and the poetic imagination has meaning only as something circulating within the marketplace of the here and now. Statius’ narrator makes it clear enough that poetry is all about “cashing in.” Poetry is itself a luxury item, one that is produced and consumed within a very specific zone. The narrator himself rides his poetry pony on the banks of the Tiber and says, “Look at me and marvel!” The formal situation of the Siluae matches the contents of the Siluae. Perhaps one wishes to abstract the “poetic genius” from the text in order to constitute some sublime remoteness of an orphic bard. But to do so is to rewrite the Siluae, to lop down the actual trees in the name of some fantasy of an Arcadian forest. “Be amazed” not at the sublimity but rather at the way the sublime has been so thoroughly pulled down from the sky. “Shut up and be happy” has as its analog “Believe in the patently fictive because I am telling you to suspend your disbelief.” In both cases, if you

181  Damon, 2002:179: “In the Siluae [Statius] refuses to allow readers any comfortable reliance on authorial sincerity.” 182  A critic would ask if Crispinus is immature, inexperienced, and in need of good guardianship (Bernstein, 2007:185). But there is need to worry. Bernstein, 2007:189: “Through the epic comparisons, Statius obviates the question of Crispinus’s competence or suitability for his career.”

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just do what you are told to do by the imperious poet, then everything will be fine.

iii.  Masters (so many, so marvelous) If freedom and liberty seem like oddly unstable terms in the Siluae that typically end up experiencing some sort of semantic reversal, one ought to note that, conversely, domination is a less protean concept. “The right hand” and “the master” appear with great regularity. And, even if one can note “tensions and ambiguities” in the evidence, it is nevertheless not the case that they are regularly deployed in an ironic, smirking manner. That is, in the Siluae “mastery” is deployed after a more reliably normative fashion than is “freedom.” While Domitian may well serve as The Master within the universe of the Siluae, his general, diffuse mastery is accompanied by a variety of concrete individual instances. There is an inter-­referentiality to the system of domination, and the warm and fuzzy feeling one feels about domestic mastery communicates with the affective valence of political subjectivity in the Domitianic age. The Siluae constantly affirm a “goodness of fit” between masters and the objects that they master. One could describe the same as a theory of a hierarchical “sympathy” that binds ruler and ruled provided that one cleaves closely to the etymology of the word sympathy itself: there is a “shared pathos,” even if the “experience” in question is not the same when viewed from one party’s perspective as against that of the other party. Unsurprisingly Domitianic greatness can be seen in his house, that is, the palace. It “quite freely” (liberior) swallows up the space of Rome, that city that once upon a time prized libertas. The house folds in its capacious embrace (no longer) open skies. The only thing larger than this mega-­ mansion is its master (tanta patet moles effusaeque impetus aulae | liberior, campi multumque amplexus operti | aetheros, et tantum domino minor; 4.2.23–25). Statius is predictably excessive when it comes to Domitianic excess, but The House of The Master is just an amplified version of the usual rhetorical amplifications that surround domini. A recherché conceit opens the poem on Manilius Vopiscus’ estate: split by a river, it has ­multiple villas that compete to claim their master for themselves.183 The 183  Two sets of buildings, one on each bank, I assume: “villas striving to claim the master as their own (certantisque sibi dominum defendere uillas; Statius, Siluae 1.3.4).” See

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260  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity property is given vibrancy and a struggling, striving character that ­selfishly aspires for the master’s love in a semi-­comic manner. Pollius Felix has a lovely estate too. The dazzling spectacle of the well-­designed and well-­ appointed estate causes the narrator to pause: should he marvel the more at the genius of the place or of its master? (quae rerum turba! locine | ingenium an domini mirer prius? haec domus ortus | aspicit et Phoebi tenerum iubar . . .  2.2.44–46).184 The waters of the bay the property embraces are (politically) pacific, and they discreetly keep a low profile. In so doing they imitate the character of their master.185 There is a lesson in here for us all, I suppose.186 “Tumultuousness” is made non-­political in Siluae 4.8. Julius Menecrates is congratulated on the birth of a third child. Look, the whole house is a soundscape filled up with “happy domination” (dulcis tremit ecce tumultus | tot dominis clamata domus; 4.8.15–16).187 “Shouting” (for joy, usually) and “domination” make for an interesting pair that one sees with a certain regularity.188 In fact, Statius’ systematic and ostentatious abuse of id­i­o­ matic Latin shows that he is himself very much a loud-­mouthed Lord and Master of Language: the clever lines are always a bit too clever, and they likewise make sure to announce their cleverness. Multiple effects are Newlands,  2002:146: reflections, echoes, and symmetry are key motifs in the account of the villa. 184  Zeiner, 2005:178: “[In Siluae 2.2] the villa is only a vehicle for the owner’s distinction.” And apt comparisons are drawn to Pliny’s real estate porn. Nevertheless, Pliny’s sense of distinction can and should be distinguished from Statius’, much as Bourdieu points out that there is every difference in the world between The Four Seasons and The Well-­Tempered Clavier. See Bourdieu,  1984:340. And, correspondingly, Henderson,  2002 on Pliny on art winds up looking a lot different from the sort of thing we see when people talk about Statius on Statius on art. 185  This is a somewhat forced translation of Statius, Siluae 2.2.28–29: nulloque tumultu | stagna modesta iacent dominique imitantia mores. 186  Newlands, 2002:169 on this passage: “Within Statius’ reformulation of literary tradition the villa is represented as a moral space protected from the unsettling passions that involve Aeneas, for instance, in the adventures of Empire.” Bodel on the literary monumentalization of domestic spaces in this era: “What was new was the notion that the domestic environment in which a gentleman cultivated his leisure was itself worthy of poetic commemoration” (Bodel, 1997:17). Bodel’s broader thesis is that estates are not just being represented as more monumental, they are literally becoming increasingly monumental in the imperial age. The “imperial monopoly in public display at the capital” lies behind this trend (Bodel, 1997:31). 187  Shackleton Bailey, 1987:279: “With this reading tumultus must be accusative, object of tremit . . . From another writer the house trembling at the row made by the children might be a touch of wry humor, but not the philobrephic Statius.” 188 Compare the domestic cries that are no whispers of Siluae 1.6.83: “With winning good-­will they cry out ‘Dominus’! (et dulci dominum fauore clamant).” Contrast the laments of the underworld and the master of tears in Siluae 2.6.82: “with what loud wails did the master cry over you! (quo domini clamate sono!)”

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deployed simultaneously and word order makes sure that the emphatic word gets an additional boost. The current moment is exemplary. Clamata “should” be negative—the word evokes unruly, outraged cries—but it has been twisted and made positive. We are amid a “gay riot” that sets the world a-­flutter with Domination Everywhere. A reader obsessed with saying that Statius is subtly subversive might find some way to claim that “too many masters” is a veiled critique of something or other. But perhaps the point of loud music is its loudness. Silly old Seneca may have asserted that great men lived in small houses, but Statius’ thesis is very much the converse: bigger implies better, and biggest is best of all.189 The narrator makes a big deal of how big everyone has made everything.190 He praises the big people for their lovely, clever objects that “speak volumes” about the men who master them.191 Presumably we are supposed to extend the same courtesy to the narrator as well. The wide-­open spaces of Septimius Severus’ estate resound in joy at being possessed by such a wonderful man: they echo back to him his own songs. And Statius’ poem echoes that echoing, it sings about things that “sing back in response” when duly sung to (unique siquando canenti | mutus ager domino reclamat; 4.5.20). Property is passively mute until masterful song fills it with a din of authoritative sound: the genius of the place

189 See Henderson’s meditation on Seneca’s meditations (Henderson,  2004). “In thus merging luxury with the intellectual life, Statius does what Seneca would never have done.” (Leach, 2003:154) 190  Leach, 2003:153: “Always using the narrative perspective of a visitor to dramatize spectatorship, Statius conveys images of Roman domestic interiors as a dazzle of light and a panorama of color.” 191  Baudrillard, 1981:37: “Thus there is never a place for listing an inventory of objects and the social significances (significations) attached to them: a code in such a case would hardly be more valuable than a ‘clef des songes.’ It is certain that objects are the carriers of indexed social significations, of a social and cultural hierarchy — and this in the very least of their details: form, material, colors, durability, arrangement in space — in short, it is certain that they constitute a code. But precisely for that reason there is every occasion to think that far from following the injunctions of this code undeviatingly, individuals and groups use it to their advantage. . . . [T]hey play with it, they break its rules, they speak it with their class dialect. This discourse must then be read in its class grammar.” Marx,  1906:85: “[W]hen we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogenous human labour. Quite the contrary; whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.” And the uates is the high priest whose own symbolic labor helps to propagate the mysteries of the Egyptians that are likewise mysteries to the Egyptians themselves. I.e., cf. Hegel, 1975b:354.

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262  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity (genium loci) is animated by the genius who sings about places (locos canentis ingenium) . . . 192 What we might think of as (mere) ownership is often articulated in the idiom of “mastery” by Statius. In fact, anything living or capable of being represented as if it were living is especially liable to turn into an element part of a master-­slave discourse that displaces the idioms of mere proprietorship. Again, this is not something that would necessarily set Statius apart from others. Of note is how he works within this zone, not its ex­ist­ ence in the first place. The lovely statuette of Hercules that is a brilliant piece of art has a current “master” rather than a current owner. Hercules is lucky to have such a fine master, a man of impeccable character.193 The puer delicatus, the “boy toy” is emblematic of precious subjectivated objects. These objects are possessed by masters who have been focalized by the verse in a sympathetic manner. The erotics of hierarchy is undeniable in the case of these boys. It is in fact the point of the whole exercise. The masterfully subservient as well as subserviently masterful narrator himself delights to tell of the top-­down delights of the power-­couple. As these poems will receive more individual attention later in the chapter, we can offer a somewhat abbreviated account of the issue here and now. “Alas, that milky white neck, | those arms, and that neck that never failed to feel its master’s embrace! (nil ueris adfingo bonis. heu lactea colla, brachiaque et numquam domini sine pondere ceruix; 2.1.49–50).” The narrator enters into sympathy with the addressee and shares the pleasure/pain of thinking about the boy’s erotically invested body. Our eye has slipped down from the boy’s mouth and his power of speech. We are reducing him to erogenous zones where the eros is fostered in the observer. The boy’s hopes and desires are irrelevant. If need be, they can be flatteringly falsified by the narrator to suit the master’s tastes. Our eye moves from his shoulder, to his arm, and then it jumps back to his neck. Hand and mouth, each a potent symbol of agency, have gone missing and are, effectively, meant to go missing as we look at pieces of the boy instead. And the narrator even shows the master himself as he clings to the youth: “There I am, hanging on his delicious, milky neck . . . ”

192  A fair amount of the “echoing” in the Siluae comes from the sound of contemporary building projects. That is, in the Siluae the Domitianic age hears itself rising up and expanding into the world. See Taisne, 1994:26. 193  It is not just the case that the work of art is a double for the owner (its decorum and his decorum are intertwined as per Zeiner, 2005:195), but we push things still further and say that it is also specifically subservient to him.

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Statius’ contrived Latin even manages to say something in addition to that which has been offered as an initial translation. The “master’s embrace” is, literally, “the (dead) weight of the master.” The boy’s neck is “permanently burdened” by servility itself. When authors are not seeking to strain the normative associations of the Latin language, the places where “neck” and “burden” appear near one another are more typically passages where a neck feels an unwelcome weight.194 But the inverse focalization produced Statius’ discourse of forever happy mastery-­and-­subjection flips all of this around: objects are thrilled to be owned and they relish in their own objectification, provided, of course, that they are felix enough to be dominated by the right sort of dominus. Thankfully, the masters within the Siluae are always also the masters to whom the Siluae themselves are offered. And so “the right sort of dominus” tends to be the “ideal reader,” a reader who is being fed the candy-­ colored and sugar-­coated deliciousness of power, of, ideally, his own power. Nothing has been added to the truth-­of-­goods/true goods (uera bona) because the truth of this truth is that mastery itself produces the sleight of hand whereby abstract bona and mercantile bona intersect.195 The beautiful body of the beautiful boy is the ideal object for a master’s desire. It also serves as the perfect target towards which a poet might direct his genius for invention. This body is pleasure-­ provoking and pleasure-­giving. The master’s subjectivity is as-­if alienated. He as-­it-­were “hangs off of/depends upon” the boy.196 But this is a specious alienation that exists only within a determinate specular realm, a realm that is conjured by power-­poetry. The master is shown seeing himself in a specific pose. One need add nothing to the discourse of mastery because merely parroting it is sufficient. Echoing mastery back to the master is enough to revivify its power of making, that is, the power of power itself to be the first and most important poet.197 “Allusions and intertexts,” when deployed within such a matrix, serve to reproduce the dominant discourse qua dominant and qua discursive. 194  A notable outlier that Statius surely knows is Ovid, Fasti, 2.760–61: “ ‘Have no fear. I  have come,’ says her spouse. She is restored and hung from her husband’s neck, a sweet burden (‘pone metum, ueni’ coniunx ait; illa reuixit, | deque uiri collo dulce pependit onus).” 195  “True goods”: see Siluae 2.1.50–51 again and its opening words: “No fiction do I add to things that are truly good . . . (Nil ueris adfingo bonis . . .).” 196  Obviously at this moment I am veering strongly towards the sexualized reading of the pair instead of the father-­son reading. Nevertheless, I feel that the core point does not change much if we imagine the most tepid version of the couple. In that version the master chose to give up his power only to take it up all over again but otherwise. 197  There will be much more on Siluae 2.4, the parrot poem.

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264  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Power itself animates a variety of figures of thought. And a strategic ­complicity with these figures breathes life into this self-­conscious artistry. This artistry is then in its turn complicit in the reproduction of a certain species of political obviousness. That is, the poet is one of ideology’s agents.198 Self-­consciousness should never be mistaken for omniscience or for an indication that its possessor has effected a full and complete objectification of the discourse with which he plays. The self-­consciousness held in reserve—a self-­consciousness, that is, that does not identify itself fully with the products of its genius but instead contemplates them at a distance—is not a critical, counter-­hegemonic, alienated presence. Instead, it is part of a larger, homologous field of power that contains poets and poetry, masters and mastery. “It’s complicated.” “It’s contradictory.” Such statements are part of an apologetics of complicity. “I knew better, but . . . ”199 The obsessive allegoresis of Statian poetics forces objects together: everything speaks of and for everything else. This very phenomenon itself serves as an index of complicity: hyper-­ integration under the imperial banner is a good thing says the hyper-­ integrated imagery. Everything (politically) can and should be referred back to the center say these images that constantly orient themselves by turning all gazes both internal and external towards Domitian. And a claim that Statius hates Domitian does nothing to disrupt the fundamental architectural point. In fact, it only highlights the residing place of a poetic will to power that is homologous to the imperial will to power: the ultimate point of integration becomes Statius Himself, master of the word, instead of Domitian Himself, master of the world. And this has to be true in as much as Domitian never really says or commands anything. He is not the author of the Siluae; he does not write its discourse of power. The entirety of the portrait mastery is a poetic projection that emanates out from the master artificer of the verses. And marveling at Statius’ unbelievable power and control of the sign system—whether we wonder at his compliance with or subversion of Domitianic authority—feeds an imperial thesis. The critic who marvels at and praises word-­power ends up sounding like the narrator of the Siluae in his relationship to Domitian’s

198  Althusser,  1971:172: “It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the ‘still, small voice of conscience’): ‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’ ” 199  See again Žižek, 1989:29: “They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”

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Rome. In short, the trap can be located in the very grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of praise that we have been exploring: “one marvels,” “a master,” “superlative,” “so bold” . . . Domitian’s horse surpasses the horses of myth. The statue of Domitian’s horse surpasses the horses of myth. There is a “chain of signifiers” here in that the signa of Arion and his belt have been yoked with the signum that is Domitian’s equestrian statue. And the first link of the chain is “Master Domitian.” Mythical heroes and their mythical steeds would tremble to see Domitian’s horse. But “this horse will never change the reins of mastery: eternally it will be subservient to the bit and to a single star (hic domini numquam mutabit habenas | perpetuus frenis atque uni seruiet astro; 1.1.54–55).” The permanence of the statue is the permanence of political subservience is the fixity of the stars. All of which is, naturally, quite contrived. It is a bold fantasy, but one that insists upon forcing together the idioms of masters and slaves, rulers and ruled, and the cosmos. The old metaphor of “the reins of government” has been made simultaneously all too literal and also all too abstract: the bit is in the mouth; the master is in the sky; the leader is a master, the follower a slave. In Siluae 1.6 we are told that Domitian refuses to allow us to call him “master” (but only after we have called him master . . . ). “Countless voices rise up to the stars and forge the soundscape of the emperor’s Saturnalia. With winning good-­will they cry out ‘Master.’ But this is the only thing that Caesar did not allow (tollunt innumeras ad astra uoces | Saturnalia principis sonantes, | et dulci dominum fauore clamant: | hoc solum uetuit licere Caesar).” A riot of sound that broke out at the party rang up to the heavens: ad astra . . . Prince, Saturnalia, shouting . . . The word dominus tasted sweet in everyone’s mouth, and it gave warmth to their hearts while also ending up as an agreeable and winning display of affection (dulci fauore). And yet the festival of inversion was both abrogated and confirmed by the master who refused to set down his mastery for the day. The master’s mastery abides-­and-­pauses. Our submission does the same. The dominus forbids that he be called dominus. It is his one and only prohibition, the only restriction on the license of the day. But the word has already been spoken. In fact, the pastness of the prohibition is in tension with the presentness of the outcries (uetuit versus dominum clamant). He was too late. He could not stop our submission. Perhaps he still struggles to do so. And so the Siluae are “bold” and “transgressive” in that they show subjects falling all over themselves to be recognized as slaves of this master only to have their longing for submission rebuffed by him. But in their hearts Domitian is dominus. Moreover, they already said as much at least once.

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266  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity They might even say it again. And even if he somehow stops their tongues, he cannot over-­master their fond attachment to him in his mastery, says this tongue that is doubtless not giving quite the full contents of the head of the narrator of these verses.200 The two poems that speak the most about masters are also poems that talk about Domitian as a master. And in each case the subject of the poem is himself someone who is or has been attached to Domitian in a master-­ slave relationship. The topic is prominent in Siluae 3.4, the poem about Earinus. This poem will be discussed at length later. Domitian’s mastery is also mentioned several times in Siluae 5.1. The consolatory poem to Abascantus on the death of his wife Priscilla evokes Domitian as the censorious ideal spectator of Abascantus’ pietas.201 The gestures Abascantus makes to the memory of his dead wife are familiar and commendable, but the same have been disembedded from their older context and re-­situated within a new Domitianic realm that swallowed up the previous schema whole: “This is the most chaste passion, | this love deserved to meet with approval from the MasterCensor (hic est castissimus ardor, | hic amor a domino meritus censore probari. 5.1.41–42).” Here the narrator-­addressee pair positions itself and its value system relative to MasterCensor. Domino censore is “bad Latin” in several simultaneous senses. First, Abascantus is a freedman, so Domitian is his patronus. But, of course, Domitian is really the dominus relative to one and all, so such a naive complaint effectively misses the political point of his sovereignty. But putting two nouns in apposition like that shows an interesting ­syntactical resistance to subordination, as if the very word “master” should itself never be grammatically demoted. In standard Latin we should have “adjective + noun” and not “noun + noun.” “Imperial censor” or “Censorious emperor” is the way such compound ideas get formulated and expressed. MasterCensor offers a sort of template for the attachment of a Master Signifier to all particular aspects of Domitian: MasterEmperor, MasterWarrior, MasterCensor, . . . And the wordsmith is forging this armature and fitting 200  Note how Newlands, 2002:249 exempts the narrator from this moment and so spares Statius. “The people’s use of the term dominus on the Saturnalia, the one occasion of the year when such a title should surely have been avoided, dramatises the startling resignification of a festival of popular liberty that has been commandeered by the emperor with the complicity of his people. It is they, after all, who shout out that the Saturnalia is the emperor’s.” 201  Zeiner, 2005:209–225 shows the ways in which a poem ostensibly about a wife’s pietas is also very much about a (soon to be disgraced) courtier’s pietas to the emperor. And so, “of course,” Domitian is the ideal spectator at this moment and throughout the whole: the poem is about the husband, not the wife.

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out this panoply seemingly unbidden. Domitian is not the addressee of the opening of the fifth book. He is not the addressee of this poem. He is, though, constructed as the “ideal spectator” of everything that we are doing and saying to one another. A whole symbolic system is being put in order not because “it was ordered that things be so,” but rather because the spark of imagination and inspiration that feeds the Siluae centers itself here rather than somewhere else.

H.  Domitianic time all the time As was discussed above, the Siluae evoke an ecstatic present. That earlier discussion emphasized the jubilation. But it is worth considering the question of verb tenses in a little more detail as we round out our overview of Domitianic grammar. The Siluae themselves are implicated in ambiguities of time. They claim to be improvisational and ephemeral. They are studied, seek to endure, and in fact do endure. They are cousins of Martial’s Epigrams in this regard. They are proffered as a paradox but are in fact elements of a stage-­managed affair where something Bold and Surprising is being presented. Here too one might think of Martial. In the Siluae the past is mere prelude to the present. And the present will last forever, or, such is claimed at any rate. The discussion of “yielding” should suffice to illustrate core aspects of the role that the past is asked to play. The present is affectively supercharged. And the happiness of the here and now allows one to imply that breaks from the past and Roman traditions are indications of progress and improvement. At best the cultural legacy of the past provides an adumbration of possibilities that have been realized in the present. This is to say that one has an ad hoc and ad loc relationship to the past and to tradition itself: it is a resource to be appropriated and exploited in the here and now. The future is here now. The poems insist that tomorrow can be seen and known. What will come is a certainty. Domitian’s horse will never change its master (hic domini numquam mutabit habenas; 1.1.54). Domitian’s statue will last as long as Rome itself (stabit, dum terra polusque, |dum Romana dies; 1.1.93–94). The poem on Domitian’s party closes by saying that neither day (nor poem) will ever really end: “This day will travel far across a span of so many years! Sacred as it is no amount of time will see it erased! (Quos ibit procul hic dies per annos! | quam nullo sacer exolescet aeuo! 1.6.98–99).” Indeed this moment will last as long as there is a Rome and a (restored) Capitoline hill (dum montes Latii paterque Thybris, | dum

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268  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity stabit tua Roma dumque terris | quod reddis Capitolium manebit; 1.6.100–102). PermaYouth Domitian both breaks and defines time: “you, young man, have outstripped our ancestors (tu iuuenis praegressus auos; 4.1.33).” He has surpassed old Augustus.202 We slide from possible futures to declarations about futurity: we do not see a prayer that hopes for more consulships for Domitian, there is instead a declaration that they are going to happen (flectere tamen precibusque senatus | permittes hunc saepe diem. manet insuper ordo | longior, et totidem felix tibi Roma curules | terque quaterque dabit; 4.1.34–36). The poetry is here to give you indicatives about the future, not optatives. You, Domitian, are going to found a new age of men, one distinct from all other ages (mecum altera saecula condes, | et tibi longaeui renouabitur ara parentis . . .  4.1.37–38). The poetry can be so sure because it has conjured a god as a speaker in Siluae 4.1. This is a contrived confidence, but, if this sort of poetry is itself something of a “confidence game,” then such is only fitting. “Let there be glitter!” Fiat ingenii lux. The ostentatious evocation of Vergil’s Sibyl late in the poem on Domitian’s road is a bit of literary fun. But it also implies that she who had sung of Aeneas’ future and of the future of Rome itself is now the only fitting person to sing of the Domitianic present.203 “I told you time and again. He will come — await ye fields | and rivers — he will come with the heavens favoring him . . .  (‘dicebam, ueniet (manete campi | atque amnis), ueniet fauente caelo . . .  4.3.124–125)” There is a riot of moods and tenses in a single line. An imperfect sits next to an imperative and a future. The past-­of-­speech makes a command to the present audience about the future SovereignSavior. Those who know their Vergil consummately know that Domitianic panegyric is coming: “Just you wait!” And the long wait is over: the Domitianic “force of nature” is rewriting the surface of the world, and we, that world reformed, are happy to see that that promised future has arrived and with it DivineDomitian: “Look! He is a god!” (en hic est deus, . . . ! 4.3.128). Domitian is nowhere to be seen, but look, the poetry itself is summoning him as a figure of thought: en hic est . . .  The “promise” of literature is its ability to bring to life the lived sensation of “the 202  Notice, then, that the poet is outstripping the traditional “official story” of imperial legitimacy, namely that the emperor is “Another Augustus.” Leberl, 2004:71: “Augustus als das ideale Kaiservorbild und das julisch-­claudische Herrscherhaus als die Principatsdynastie schlechthin hatten für Domitian legitimierende und die eigene Herrschaft idealisierende Funktion.” 203 Newlands,  2002:310: “As ‘epicising’ climax, Statius’ Sibyl is over the top.” Lovatt, 2007:146: “Here the Sibyl explicitly replaces Statius as the mouthpiece of the poem; sanctior marks her role as prophetic, and she provides a guarantee of the authority of Statius’ praise of Domitian, while also offering distance, a release from imperial control.”

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Domitianic promise” in the hearts of its auditors. “I tell you that you should make way for Domitian.” That is, “yielding” and “awaiting” are intimately connected in this scene. And they are not just connected by implication. The poet will have shown you the way to the glorious future that is the present. One needs to avoid the deflection and apology that arises if we say that the Siluae represent “light poetry” or “occasional” poetry. This is true, but by no means exhaustive as an observation.204 In fact the “lightness” lends itself to the imperial program that it praises: nothing other than the emperor is substantial. A specific set of objects, themes, and persons preoccupies us. We have a varied relationship to them—for the poems are not monochrome, monotonous, or uniform in exposition. Nevertheless, there is a set of excluded possibilities on the one hand and a collection of silent revolutions on the other. The leading intellectual lights of this age set themselves the task of figuring out how to shed the cleverest light on the already well illuminated palace. The palace may be teeming with a regular rogue’s gallery of cour­ tiers, freedmen, and eunuchs if you ask Juvenal, an author from the next generation, a generation that is going to spring into existence more or less wholly formed within a couple of years. But if you ask someone from this generation, the answer comes back that these people are The Beautiful People.205 Golden verses vouch for the authenticity of a gilded age. And more or less everyone knows which way the winds blow today and that, were they to change tomorrow, adjustments would be promptly made. Domitian’s alleged paranoia seems perfectly justified. Soon enough everyone will claim that they never liked him at all. Ephemeral: of the day/for the day/for a day. The Domitianic age is itself captured in an impossible oscillation between its “momentariness” and its “eternity.” This is the chronological analog of the flatness of symbolic space: shallow time syncs up with a world of depthless surfaces. And this very same temporal oscillation between the instant and the permanent is the hallmark of the aesthetic of the Siluae themselves: deathless improvisation pieces one and all. The infinite, surpassing richness of this very moment—say the poets and not, one will note, the emperor himself . . . —makes of it something 204  Newlands, 2002:1–2, adducing the remarks of Gunn, 1982 that the occasion is a mere starting point of the poem, explains that “what matters are the ‘adventures’ that the poet draws out from the occasion, ‘adventures that consist of the experience of writing.’ ” 205  Wallace-­Hadrill, 1996:292: “Because integrated into the social and cultural life of the Roman upper class, the court not only served to reflect existing norms but dictated the tone of society.”

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270  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity transcendent. The symptomatic feature of this aesthetic is its alienation. Unaffected sincerity has gone missing in order that we might offer all of these erudite and ornate songs of praise. The net result is a dominated beauty that emerges from the poets. They have not been commanded to write these verses, but they have prostituted their muse that it might be welcomed at the tables of the rich as a prize guest/abject pleasure-­worker. This poetry finds itself reflected back to itself in all of the objects of the world that it catalogues. The poem about the well ordered villa of a poet is also a poem about the poem itself. The poem about the dead parrot is also a poem about the poem itself. The poem about the statuette of Hercules and its new owner is also a poem about the poem itself. And, most glaringly, the hypertrophic descriptions of pueri delicati capture the impossible condition of the poetry: fresh, new, glorious, astounding, dominated, derivative, sordid, . . .

I.  Mastering the submission game: six case studies The narrator of the Siluae is preoccupied with the psychic life of things. His “materialist” bent would, in a sort of anti-­Marxist burlesque, have every table turn around and speak the happy truth of its ideological function.206 The Siluae aggregate stories of alienation only to celebrate them. For example, there are many moments of mourning. These arise when death overmasters the master’s mastery. The narrative gambit at this juncture? The precious thing has been taken from the master, oh how sad the thing must be to know that the master is sad. That is, the focalization on the master and his mastery is so resolute that even when death might mean that mastery has been lost forever, the poetry strives to re-­inscribe power’s potency and to re-­subject those who might have found freedom in oblivion. The eternity of poetic memory restores to the master his own. Meanwhile poetry transmits the image of the poet’s own masterful ability down through the ages. Be not proud, Death, because poetry is here to ensure the primacy of dominion over word-­and-­world. 206  Marx as a reader of Statius’ baroque rhetoric of objects: “But, so soon as [the table] steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-­turning’ ever was.” (Marx, 1906:82)

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i.  Parroting and the mastery of affect (Siluae 2.4) Caged next to one another in the forest we find a bird and a lion. In Siluae 2.4 and 2.5, we find two “light touch” poems that bite (peck?) the hand that reads them too closely. This is Statius doing Martial: an amiable literary circus act adds a bit of fun to the middle of a book that has more than a few somber moments. There are three consolations among the seven poems if we count the poem about Lucan as consolatory. The death of the parrot allows us to be ironically sad. To the extent that there is something calculating about the emotions in the “serious” poems about death, Siluae 2.4 in fact exposes the ideal state of affective affairs for the narrator. If he is going to be “playing the game,” this is the game he would prefer to play. He gets to stage a fully ludic version of feigned emotion.207 This joking poem is, when read next to other songs of loss, revelatory of an earnest premise on the narrator’s part: his imagination is omnipotent. But that same imagination exercises a will to power that advances its own cause by repeating back to the master the messages of the master. Psittace dux uolucrum, domini facunda uoluptas, humanae sollers imitator, psittace, linguae, quis tua tam subito praeclusit murmura fato? hesternas, miserande, dapes moriturus inisti nobiscum, et gratae carpentem munera mensae errantemque toris mediae plus tempore noctis uidimus. adfatus etiam meditataque uerba reddideras. at nunc aeterna silentia Lethes ille canorus habes. cedat Phaethontia uulgi fabula: non soli celebrant sua funera cygni.  Parrot, Leader of the Birds, eloquent delight of your master, cunning imitator, parrot, of the human voice, who cut short your murmurs with so sudden a doom? Just yesterday, poor thing, soon to die you dined 207  Newlands, 2011:180: “St. takes a playful approach to consolatory conventions with his consistent anthropomorphism and hyperbolic style.” Rühl, 2015:103: “This poem uses metaliterary levels more than any other poem in the Siluae.”

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272  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity with us. Foraging among the gifts of glad table, wandering amid the couches well past midnight we saw you. Addresses and calculated phrases you repeated. But now the eternal silences of Lethe hast thou, the melodious one. Yield now, commonplace tale of Phaethon: it is not swans alone who celebrate their own doom. Statius, Siluae 2.4.1–10

The ironic stance of the narrator is signaled at once. The parrot is forced by the narrator to imitate the eagle, the proper Leader of Birdkind. The same eagle usually soars over scenes of political allegory. Here the allegory may well be political in the end, but this dead a-­political allusive bird is not obviously flying off in that direction. Instead, he is clearly shown flying over to Helicon. We are already thinking about Ovid thinking about Catullus by this point.208 The pleasure of mastery has flitted over to the pleasure of word-­mastery. The eloquent narrator, master of his craft, offers a portrait of dead poet sociality to the addressee, a man who is likewise a poet. The narrator doubles the vocative and so stammers with mock ineloquence after using the phrase “eloquent delight of your master.” But the imitation is pleasurable and clever at the same time: the real tongue is separated from its imitation by the word “parrot.” The game of echoes is afoot. And so, we see that adducing the mock-­eloquence of the bird serves to highlight the actual eloquence of the man singing about the bird. The narrator is an “imitator of sincerity,” and in so imitating he consistently drives a wedge between the world represented (which is always mere representation and mere thing-­of-­words) and the precious substance of the art of imitation, an art that has the sovereign power to constitute by fiat its own distinct world. The address to the dead bird continues: “Why just yesterday you went to dinner with us, though your death was already on the way . . . .” The doomed bird is a happy party guest whom we all see having a good time. The Siluae contain two simultaneous messages. These parties seem like joyous 208  Myers, 2002:189: “Statius’ description of Melior’s parrot as an imitator at the opening of Siluae 2.4 (line 2) draws attention to its status as an allusion in the first of many Ovidian verbal echoes in the poem. The beginning of Ovid’s Amores 2.6.1–2 . . . is imitated both in Statius’ first two lines . . . and at the beginning of the song within the poem . . . Statius also embeds an allusion to Ovid’s model, Catullus 3.3–4.”

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occasions, but tomorrow’s fate might not resemble today’s dispensation. These parties are joyous occasions, and tomorrow’s fate will perpetuate unto eternity today’s dispensation. But a bird-­brained courtier is quite courtly indeed, and he is not going to go out on a limb and declare which message is the real message. Instead, he has nothing to say for himself. Speak to him and you will get back words that are “on message” (adfatus etiam meditataque uerba | reddideras; 2.4.7–8). The clever cleverly speak only when spoken to, and even then, they say nothing more than well-­ rehearsed phrases. The first verse paragraph closes with what one might call a declamatory sententia. That is, it ends with a paradoxical and epigrammatic formulation that is meant to attract attention to itself for its flash and cleverness. “Let the vulgar Phaethontian tale make way: it is not just swans who celebrate their impending dooms (cedat Phaethontia uulgi | fabula: non soli celebrant sua funera cygni; 2.4.9–10).”209 We are playing with High Art and teasing it.210 The grand genres and the loveliest birds are not so unique and special as is pretended. A contemptible Phaethon is a surprising formulation at first glance, but then one appreciates that the sentence participates in the discourse of “yielding” that we see in the Siluae more generally: some old object that has an accumulated cultural capital is marked out as being not all that special; instead a new object is more significant.211 The twist here is that something lowly, repetitive, and subservient is inserting itself as the new focal point whereas elsewhere something most marvelous indeed is being celebrated. Like many figures of thought in Statius, this one also has a doubleness to it. For we are not simply inverting the usual schema with our parrot. Instead, we are also exposing the “vulgarity” of the other high-­style poems as well.212 It is all of it rather trite and repetitive, when you come to think of it. However poetic, fiat can and will move things around the cultural field of play precisely to show that the field is a mere field, the play is mere 209  Coleman,  1988:xxvii: “One of the most striking features of the Siluae is St.’s love of antithesis and paradox, ranging from verbal collocations . . . to an innate incongruity pervading an entire scene.” 210  The phrase would sit rather easily among the survey of failed sententiae that Quintilian offers at Institutio Oratoria 8.5.20–24. 211  Newlands, 2011:183: “The juxtaposition of the grand adjective and uulgi humorously dismisses Ovid’s Phaethon myth.” 212  See Dietrich, 2002:96: “The similarity in the forms of Siluae 2.1, 2.4, and 2.6 creates a problem for the interpretation of the poems.” And she notes that this poem is effectively the middle of the whole book and so perhaps its “heart” (Dietrich, 2002:97).

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274  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity play, and that the poetic genius is the one who is freest to manipulate the rules, strategically pushing this item forward, cleverly outflanking and demoting that one. This ostentatiously ludic poem makes sure that we see that a game is afoot and just who is playing it and, indeed, just how savvy a player he is. The game for a moment looks like it might be more than facile inversions, more than mere allusion and metapoetics when we start the next stanza: at tibi . . . “But now you are dead . . . ” And this is succeeded by “But, oh what a luxury cage you had”: At tibi quanta domus rutila testudine fulgens, . . . (2.4.11). This cage is a mini-­palace. It is also a prison. And we even see the “imperial” word augustus: “Empty that blessed | prison and gone is the uproar of your glorious abode (uacat ille beatus | carcer, et augusti nusquam conuicia tecti; 2.4.14–15).” Conuicia are loud cries, usually of reproach. Here they indicate the squawks of a bird. The harsh, low noun is amusingly connected to the highest-­of-­high adjectives, “august.” Given that dapes inire was to be found in Siluae 1.6, the poem about Domitian’s dinner party, and given the ironic deployment of augustus here, maybe we have some sort of veiled critique of the emperor on our hands. But does this poem as a whole really say anything especially bad about Domitian while also implying something good about some non-­ Domitianic standard of evaluation? It is not clear that this is the case. Instead, we have a manifest message that says something a bit like, “But you are dead, and wow, it is a shame to have lost all of that stuff.” The “dangerous” over-­inflation of the cage may not be so much targeted at the emperor as it is a token of a rather pathetic here-­and-­nowness that itself reminds us of Petronius’ Trimalchio: “You can’t take it with you, so you might as well get as much as you can out of costly parties here and now.” So, yes, there is something edgy here if the “you” of “you went to dinner” is Domitian in one poem and a parrot in another. But the parrot is also the courtier. And the parrot is also the poet. To the extent that the poem depicts the ultimate bathos of a Domitian, it also shows that all of us are not really much better than that. We are playing the game and getting ours, hopping among the couches and pecking at crumbs while mouthing empty phrases. Personally, I doubt that there is some sort of pointed connection between Siluae 1.6 and this poem even if there is indeed an interesting subterranean connection. The absurd parrot is something we are supposed to laugh at without really picking away too hard at him because, if we did, we would not stop until we had said genuinely bad things about everyone in sight. If we let our interpretive eye follow a different train of birdseed we

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will end up somewhere that is much more familiar and comforting to the vanity of both the narrative voice and the man to whom the poem is addressed. Let us imagine that this is all “just a joke,” then, even if, like so many jokes, it really does reveal something serious and disturbing about the community of the witticism. Specifically, the concrete living things of the world are not in fact objects of sympathy. The tuneful bird from the first stanza when seen in his gilded cage is in fact a squawking vulgarity. The sound of the bird’s beak rattling its cage replaces and displaces his eloquent speech (argutumque tuo stridentia limina cornu; 2.4.13). And even if the cage was “august,” it was filled with loud and contentious sounds (augusti nusquam conuicia tecti; 2.4.15). At best our sympathy aligns with the luxury object. And the same sympathy is fading away relative to the bird himself. Just a bird, but, oh, what a cage . . . We said that Lethe might take him. And, indeed, he is being forgotten right in front of our very eyes. The funeral of the bird is conducted by birds. This is a witty conceit and not a moment of actual pathos. They gather and lament. They are “learned” birds, Alexandrian birds, doctae aues.213 Then an erudite catalog of erudite birds ensues. The narrator repeats a list of birds who know how to repeat. High-­style syntax accompanies each introduction that registers a name on the roster of talking birds. But the roster withholds in the same gesture that it grants. The imperfections and, worse, “insincerity” of each bird’s speech is marked. The birds sound a lot like the poets who write the myths of these birds. And, at the same time, the poets themselves come to sound contrived. If we wanted to do an allegorical reading that was unflattering to poets rather than to emperors, then we might observe that there is a nice meal in it for not just a starling but so too a man who is mindful about storing up the poems one has heard (auditasque memor penitus demittere uoces; 2.4.18). The magpies are there, and we announce their arrival by recalling that they became magpies because they used to be over-­proud maidens who thought their speech more musical than it was (Aonio uersae certamine picae; 2.4.19). The partridge repeats but in a somewhat overdone manner. The narrator orders these repeater birds to “repeat after me” (et hoc cunctae miserandum addiscite carmen; 2.4.23). Learn it; sing it; be heard singing; get your praise; go away. There is an imperiousness folded into the jocularity. 213  Dietrich, 2002 works through the details, many of which are not merely Alexandrian in import. Compare Myers, 2002:193–195. Vollmer, 1898:361: “die Aufforderung an die doctae aues parodiert den Appell an die poetae docti V 3.89–103.”

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276  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity The song dictated to the birds is the song we have been hearing already. The narrator self-­parrots as he dictates to the mimetic birds the verses of their song.214 This is clever as a conceit. One is free to smile at it. But the contents of this repeated song repeat the repetition noted earlier: favored tropes of the Siluae as a whole are on display here. Contrafactual hyperbole is one of the first things that the birds are told to sing: Juno’s peacock had nothing on the parrot . . . (quem non gemmata uolucris Iunonia cauda | uinceret aspectu; 2.4.26–27). The mise-­en-­abîme here may well betoken a very clever poet, but it also conjures an image that could haunt poetic genius with its double throughout the collection: “What a clever little magpie our poet is . . . ”215 The narrator orders the birds to praise the parrot for the way he said now this and now that, for the way his speech was matched to the situation, for a sort of gilded linguistic cage that he got cozy in and made his home. He said hello to kings. He spoke the name of Caesar.216 He played the part of a substitute-­friend. He was an easy-­going guy at a party. Tell him what to say, and he sure said it. And when that bird was out of his cage, you, beloved Melior, were never alone (ille salutator regum nomenque locutus | Caesareum et queruli quondam uice functus amici, | nunc conuiua leuis monstrataque reddere uerba | tam facilis, quo tu, Melior dilecte, recluso | numquam solus eras; 2.4.29–33). It is funny, but also not so funny, how much “we” are like the parrot. A charming witticism as well as a disconcerting confession resides at this location. This is just a joke, until it isn’t. The joke is: “the parrots are pretending to be men (who really can seem like parrots sometimes).” The not so funny idea is: “men think they are men and not parrots, and they even try to tease parrots as a means of establishing their humanity.” Of whom does the glorious closing of the parrot funeral make a mockery? Phoenix-­like the parrot will rise eternal, we say (2.4.37). This is silly. But the poem and its “authentic,” un-­parroted voice is potentially eternal.

214  Myers, 2002:196: “By means of this clever and tendentious gesture of literary duplication Statius restarts his poem, and in this embedded song he repeats the structure of [Ovid] Am. 2.6.” 215  Dietrich, 2002:108: “Statius must have been well aware of his dependence on the goodwill of Domitian and, in adopting the imitative voice of the parrot, he presents himself as self-­consciously playing the role of a poet of the imperial court.” 216  See Martial, Epigrams 14.73 for a parrot who “taught himself ” to say “Hail, Caesar” and whom you can teach new/other names (Psittacus a uobis aliorum nomina discam:| hoc didici per me dicere Caesar haue). The “take-­away” from this bit of the apophoreta is that the reader can count on poets putting radically false “spontaneous” words into the mouths of others.

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And so, we see the typical Statian split between the thing enunciated and the subject who is doing the enunciating. The narrator will be eternal: all one has to do is to read back the words that the MasterPoet put on the page, just as he told us to. Phoenix-­like his fiery genius will blaze forth yet again. The masterful poet is the primary self that is written into the verse, a second-­to-­none self. The actual dead-­as-­a-­dodo bird really can head off to Lethe for all any of us care. Meanwhile the narrator gives every indication that the one who truly and perhaps exclusively deserves praise is the poet, the real wingèd king, the dux uolucrum. And he expects praise for having imitated humanity by means of a variety of meditata uerba, and he did so without ever being so foolish or so naive as to in fact be a real, live human being. Instead, he was just a Sing-­thing squawking in his amazing cage.

ii.  The lion that was tamed (Siluae 2.5) Perhaps there is a forest somewhere where lions and parrots can be found together, living in the wild. In the Siluae the two have been placed side by side. Each is domesticated. And we are praising domestication itself. But we are also noting that, in the end, one can never yield so thoroughly so as to be guaranteed much of anything. The post-­savage world of submission is itself fraught with problems. The bird died. So did the lion. Quid tibi monstrata mansuescere profuit ira? quid scelus humanasque animo dediscere caedes imperiumque pati et domino parere minori? quid, quod abire domo rursusque in claustra reuerti suetus et a capta iam sponte recedere praeda insertasque manus laxo dimittere morsu? occidis, altarum uastator docte ferarum . . .    After that show of rage what good did becoming tame do you? What good did it do you to unlearn in your heart of hearts crime and human slaughter and to endure being an imperial subject and to yield to a lesser lord? And what about leaving home and returning again into your cage habitually and presently withdrawing spontaneously from the prey you caught and releasing with slackened jaws hands thrust in your mouth? You are fallen, erudite devastator of lofty beasts . . .  Statius, Siluae 2.5.1–7

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278  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Siluae 2.5 opens with a question: “After that show of rage what good did becoming tame do you?” We are reminded of the allegorical world of Martial’s epigrams on lions, but we are sounding a grim note rather than a triumphal one.217 There were shows, but they are over. And, in fact, there was either a show before the show or a show within the show. The Latin tells of a monstrata ira, a rage that burst forth, burnt out, and went away.218 But now all is nothing. So much for being a loyal imperial subject.219 Or maybe we are not especially focussed on this sort of line of thought. The opening may well be so heavily ironic that we become distracted by all of the smirking. It takes time to pause and to think through what is being said. For the poem is a “joke.” We are mourning a mere thing. We give him a high-­style send-­off because it is amusing to speak ornately about the fate of an exotic luxury item. There is a faux sympathy here and an insincere identification with the position of the lion. And that identification is used only against the lion. This is the sort of friend that the narrator proves himself to be at the wake. Nevertheless, we find in this poem another scene where the rhetoric of the narrator does not exhaust all of the valences of the situation of the poem. In fact, as with Martial, if we pursue the full implications of the collection of images on display we end up with a second narrative level that can act as an index of our own rage, disappointment, humiliation, and fear even as ironic laughter and glib erudition are ringing in our ears. In short, what if a collection of anthropomorphic jokes about a lion is not all that funny if you are yourself a bested beast who long since settled for a cage? After the first question a second: “What good did it do you to unlearn in your heart of hearts crime and human slaughter | and to endure being an imperial subject and to yield to a lesser lord?” The first sentiment is highly contrived: “man-­eating” lion has been amped up almost risibly: the lion was lusting to commit homicide (scelus; caedes). But lions do not

217  Newlands, 2011:23 detects competition with Martial and one-­upmanship in this poem. 218 “Show of rage”: despite the confident “monstrata ist nicht zu ändern” of Vollmer, 1898:363 many have modified the text. See Liberman,  2010 which obelizes monstrata and reviews the editorial bibliography. 219  Augoustakis, 2007:208: “[The poem] addresses the problematic aspects of the domesticated and acculturated natural world and, by extension, the impact of imperial politics on various social strata.”

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ordinarily meet up with people. When they do, it is perhaps unlikely that they will attempt to kill them. And if they do make this attempt, the lion’s intention is not murder. This is a pedantic observation, but it does draw out the manner in which the world of the poem glibly detaches itself from “nature.” This overly domesticated verse has no use for “the real wilderness.” Its mockery of the lion’s surrender of the same speaks also to the poetry’s own over-­comfortable “unlearning” of the way the concrete world actually works, an unlearning that is the predicate of its (self-)captivated condition (dediscere). In fact, one might do well to ponder the fundamental relationship between “unlearning” and “learning” among the poetae docti. Nature has become “nature” for them. The field of culture-­play displaces any interest in the literal fields and the sort of material struggles for dominion that might occur in them. Mastering the poetry-­game is what really matters. With the second of the two cited verses we have perhaps said only “take commands” with imperium pati. But the “lesser lord” only makes sense when we decide that the “greater lord” is present, namely the emperor. The beast-­wrangler wrangles by proxy. The MasterMaster’s presence is inserted into this moment. There are no “private lions,” just ones destined for Caesar’s amphitheater. Of course, there is such a thing as a non-­Caesarean lion: local magistrates can and will put on shows. But that banal fact is not part of the imagined world of the poem and has been foreclosed from it. As the questions continue their flow, we sink deeper into submission. Set aside any boring, practical narrative where a lion got caught, submitted to its cage, and then fought other animals in the arena. That is far too pedestrian. Instead, the poem dials everything up. This lion has fully submitted to imperial domesticity. He “leaves home and returns,” but his home is a cage. His domesticity is supervised, constrained, regulated (quid, quod abire domo rursusque in claustra reuerti | suetus . . . 2.5.4–5). He has gotten used to it all: suetus. It only gets worse, though, this life under imperium: one gives up one’s gains “now voluntarily” (et a capta iam sponte recedere praeda; 2.5.5). The unnatural act of surrendering one’s winnings is “now” a new, second and spontaneous nature. “What good did it do you to give in? They kept on asking you to submit ever more.” This is not what the poem says. The poem only asks the first question over and over again. And the narrative voice is teasing us with where it is really going to go with all of this. Nevertheless, we are going

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280  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity somewhere even if an exact name is not being set upon that destination by the narrator. Abject submission might be one possible label. For not only does the lion spontaneously let you take the food out of its mouth, the lion even lets you ram your hand down its throat without biting your arm off. One can almost feel the will to murder in the attenuated words for biting put into an oblique case, laxu morsu, a bite that has lost its bite. A spontaneous, reflexive will to murder quavers faintly underneath the verse and through the denatured heart of the beast: “It would feel so good to contract my jaws right about now . . . ” But that is a wild over-­reading of what we are told about our mild-­mannered beast. Let us not accuse him or his poet of harboring such thoughts. The questioning ends. A single, devastating word opens the new line of the rest of the poem: “You are fallen (occidis).” What good did all of the glorious humiliation do him? He died anyway. But he did not die in vain because he gave rise to an occasion for the occasional poem to mock his suffering while pretending to sympathize with it. “You have died” only opens out onto a collection of grandiose words that recall the glorious, free-­spirited, imperious possibilities of a lion’s uncaged life. And secreted among these titles is the prized poetic self-­appellation: docte. “You are fallen, learned devastator of lofty beasts” (2.5.7). Perhaps we are talking about giraffes, but we are also talking about “high style” and “profundity” when we use words like doctus and altus near to one another. The death is presaged by a catalog of non-­deaths that the lion did not die, specifically the deaths that a lion in the wild might “hope” to meet as he fights gloriously against man and beast. Instead, the lion died because of some beast in flight: uictus fugiente fera (2.5.11). Here we see that this poem really is a lot like a Martial poem. “You had to be there!”, but, also, “You, dear reader, were not there!” What exactly happened is not at all clear. But we seem to be commemorating a specific episode in the shows. We are free to imagine a situation such as the horns of an impala killing the lion as it leaps for its prey.220 As in Martial, the narrative voice revels in the irony and the surprise. The arena is a factory of occasions for clever occasional verse, and the death of this lion proves as much. “We never saw it coming!” “King of the jungle indeed!” But the actual line of thought traversed is somewhat to the side of those two in that it lingers with the idea of “the submissive lion” and the way that he 220  Augoustakis, 2007:214: “The identification of the lion’s killer . . . remains intentionally elusive.”

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was cheated of his due. He had learned to play his part in the Big Show, and this is what he got. The anxieties of Martial’s narrator are also creeping into this verse even though they are cloaked in irony and derision. The remaining lions are confined to their cage. They are angry that such a crime as the death of their fellow was permitted (hoc licuisse nefas, 2.5.13). But theirs is a very peculiar sort of anger that never turns into anything substantive. With placidi tumuere leones (2.5.13) a domesticated aristocracy of the jungle swells with anger, but it is too pacific to actually express the same.221 Doing and avenging have been reserved for another. The narrator lingers with his portrait of the morose lion community: their manes droop; they scowl; they feel shame as they behold their fallen member. Then the narrator jumps back out to the scene of death that had been hidden before in the simple declaration of “you have fallen.” This is an emotional-cum-ethical description of the event that explores the psychic life of the lion that has been invented for him. “But . . . ” But when the deadly blow was struck, “That Shame so new to you did not overwhelm you when laid low by the initial blow (at non te primo fusum nouus obruit ictu | ille pudor; 2.5.16–17).”222 We then linger with the courage and valor that abided even as the animal died. Shame has been evoked twice in rapid succession. The lion community was ashamed to see the dead lion. And then, emphatically enjambed, ille pudor is thrust at the reader at the head of 2.5.17. What has happened is shameful. But the lion who died failed to fully recognize his own shame: he fought on, “not initially overcome by That Shame.” The other lions felt the full measure of his shame for him after his death. At first glance the shame is the shame of a warrior losing to a fleeing foe: fugiente fera. But the poem is suffused with things about which one might be ashamed even as we are not exactly allowed to name them. For isn’t it shameful to have been reduced to fighting in the arena in the first place?223 Isn’t the cage-­home shameful? Isn’t the dominus and his revolting, intrusive touching the sort of thing that makes one blush? Are we not to feel some sort of ugly feeling when the same dominus steals our spoils from our very mouth? What good did any of it do us? After endless humiliations, we made a final bid to live out our “wild nature,” but that only 221  See Taisne, 1994:96–99 on the “contagion de l’apaisement” in the Siluae. The present example offers a sinister take on her observations. 222  Newlands, 2011:198: “[C]ontrastive at and the three monosyllables marks the shift to consolation at the exact mid-­point of the poem.” 223  See Barton, 1989.

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282  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity ended in disaster. The lesser beast won. The audience went wild. The parrot poet sings derisively at us. Hear, ye, lion, of the shame of the caged life: you will either be humiliated when you die or humiliated when you fail to die. “That shame” in 2.5.17 then names “that radically defective shame-­screen that I the narrator am throwing up to distract from That Other Utterly Devastating Shame that suffuses the rest of the poem.” The ideology of optics comes into focus as the poem closes and we at last see the poem’s real point of emphasis: Domitian. “You” can feel your death as a thing valorized precisely because (quod) Caesar was there and he felt something about your death. Caesar saw a rich imperial display before him. He saw the spoils of the world being wasted for his pleasure (quas perdere uile est; 2.5.29). But, says the last line of the poem, he did finally feel something, namely the loss of a single lion: unius amissi tetigit iactura leonis (2.5.30). “You” are a luxury item, and “you” are fruits of empire. The poem’s portrait of “you, the lion” occludes all of the other things someone might wish to be. People who mistake themselves for precious individuals are just an indifferent crowd of thousands if you step back and sit in the emperor’s box. You need to dispense with your own sense of preciousness and yield to this topology of power that turns your beloved home into a cage. You need to see yourself being seen as a cheap, disposable thing that nevertheless in a trice sets aside its indifferent cheapness when “the one who matters” sees and briefly feels.224 The sublimation of the mundane can only be meaningful and profound where this specific eye of power looks on. The society of the spectacle which is also a society that is itself a spectacle cannot be figured without positing a specific ideal spectator. And even readings that ultimately ­re-­focalize their sense of the meanings of the narrative in these poems must themselves start from this ideal, centering position. The poem works just like one of Martial’s epigrams. It is light. It is jocular. It is occasional. One is free to make any and every excuse for it. But something more is getting said than “just kidding.” “Can’t you take a joke?” is something that one might say about over-­reading Siluae 2.5. But one of the agenda items for a poem like this is to teach people how to take precisely this set of horrible ideas as something that might somehow be a joke. That is, the poem reproduces as well as taps into a set of structures 224  Newlands,  2011:202 on leonis in 2.5.30: “[T]he last word in the poem and its first occurrence. St. abandons his anthropomorphic approach. Dead, the lion is now material for poetry.”

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that make its own ironic detachment emblematic for a whole mode of appropriating the world-­spectacle organized for the Caesarean eye. The poem is inviting us to a complicit resignation and in exchange for taking up this position we get to savor an urbane jocularity about resignation, ours, theirs, everyone’s. Folded into this poem about detached spectatorship we also have an engaged policing of the subject position of the person who is subjected to the society of the spectacle. If you are not learned enough to laugh . . . If you can’t get with the imperial/poetic program . . . then you are a bad reader and bad subject. Nevertheless, despite all of his irony, the narrator has no choice but to partially identify with as well as distance himself from the lion. For this very poem is also the sort of precious object whose loss is potentially cheap for the likes of a Caesar. But if Caesar were to somehow be “touched” by all of this talk about affect, then perhaps all of the groveling sycophancy of the Siluae would somehow have some sort of meaning. But what meaning might that be, exactly? Don’t ask the narrator for the answer to that question: he is too busy telling clever half-­truths.

iii.  As free as a freedman (Siluae 3.3) Statius’ poems frequently revel in the homologies between their expressed contents and features that pertain to the articulation of these contents. This is an elaborate way of observing that Statian song loves to sing of scenes of singing. But the question of homology is broader than that. These poems do not just celebrate poetry. Nor is this merely high culture celebrating high culture or even verbal luxury celebrating concrete luxury. Instead, the Siluae are fascinated by the players of the imperial game even as the poems are playing this very game in the course of their rapturous description of it. This is a fraught zone of convergence. And, accordingly, the “fraught” biography of Etruscus’ father makes for an excellent item with which to linger.225 The “sincerity” of the poem can be set to one side in as much as sincerity is not what courtiers are all about. They are preoccupied with issues such as distinction, accomplishment, and making the system work for 225 A brief overview: “Etruscus’ father had begun his service under Tiberius. Gaius retained him, Claudius promoted him and handed him on to Nero. He presumably continued under the Flavii until Domitian dismissed him.” (Shackleton Bailey, 1987:276)

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284  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity themselves. Siluae 3.3 sets to work on working up a story about a man who “made it all work.” And in so doing sings a song about the importance of the imperial court as such. Given the rapturous praise of Caesars that follows them everywhere, it is something of a scandal that they nevertheless die and are replaced. But this is only a seeming scandal and the sort of thing that marks politesse rather than any real occasion for shame. The courtiers are committed to ensuring the continuity of the general system that makes their own concrete success possible.226 And, naturally, they would be fools to in fact love the Republic and Republican values in anything other than the most hollow and formal sense: libertas had no room for liberti as members of the highest ranks of society.227 Juvenal might well scowl, but how many in his circle of readers advanced by being anything other than good at the imperial game?228 In a manner not unlike—but also very much unlike . . . —our two preceding poems, Siluae 3.3 celebrates “noble necessity” and “the beauty of submission.” Perhaps one should look at its flattery as insincere and then claim that the poet was only “yielding to conventional dictates.” But that same claim fails to see the importance of the formal qualities of the situation, qualities that of themselves say something no matter what the intentions of any given speaker or actor might be. The poem connives at a formal level with the courtier: the ratio (“logic”) that subtends the narrator’s portrait of the emperor’s a rationibus (“secretary of finance”) converges with the theory and practice of the father himself. The freedman “lived a beautiful life” precisely because he did the done thing superlatively. A critic of the poem cannot escape the orbit of this

226 Wallace-­ Hadrill,  1996:308: “[E]mperors inevitably took over their predecessors’ friends and servants, good or bad, since these made themselves indispensable. . . . [D]espite its conflicts and distasteful features, the court was a system of power which tended to its own perpetuation.” 227  Saller,  1982:66: “As is often noted, the power of these freedmen resulted not from any official positions, but from their personal contact and influence with the emperor. Though this has been denied, it seems to me to be the only sound conclusion in view of the nature of the senatorial complaints.” The official prominence of imperial freedmen is on the wane in the Flavian period. But decreased prominence is not the same thing as a lack of influence. See Eck, 2000:210. 228  The old hierarchical map does not correspond to the new imperial way of doing things. See Wallace-­Hadrill, 1996:301–302: “[The senators] were as much creatures of the court as the imperial freedmen. Patronage cut across status barriers: senators enlisted the support of equites and freedmen, but conversely equestrian and freedmen posts might be owed to the brokerage of senators.” Wallace-­Hadrill,  2011:101: “The imperial court is the space within which newcomers gained access to power. Corrupt it may have been, and painful to those who found paying court to influential ex-­slaves distasteful. But it drew together diverse elites from across the empire and enabled them to network, ally, and bargain.”

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parallel by claiming that imperious genre dictated so much of what the reader will find. Meanwhile in reserve there would be “the precious independent essence of Statius.” Which is what, exactly? And how can one tell? And isn’t the critic about to fill out this literary biography with precisely the same special pleading that the narrator himself offers to Etruscus’ father? If this poem, as with all the others, is also about itself, then Siluae 3.3. teaches the complicit critic how to exculpate the complicit poet (for exculpating a bunch of shady imperial operators). One will note that “the father” has hitherto gone unnamed. In fact, he is unnamed in the poem. And it is not exactly clear what his name was.229 Father is dead. The name of the father is gone. But the poem asserts that Piety can and should be shown for the absent, defective father. For the father is multiply defective, as becomes clear when we consider the poem’s architecture. We are celebrating a man whose life is full of difficulties and rough edges. But the narrator insists time and again—that is, too many times . . . —that there is no problem at all here, that everything was wonderful indeed. The poem becomes a portrait of pious reactions and reflections that paper over the grubby truths of imperial literature. The standard ironies of the universe of the Siluae have been transmuted. Typically, the narrative voice cleverly hints that one thing is being said but another is meant. Here the structure of rhetorical displacement has itself been displaced. Now everything is inverted instead of being “quoted.” The net result is a problematic performance of fidelity to a “bad dad” that becomes emblematic of the sorts of performances that are demanded of all of us, if we are to participate in this discursive formation more generally. The troubled ultimate referent motivates a panoply of pious displays of fidelity to this absent center. This structural compliance illustrates a “deep complicity”: one is faithful to the apparatus even and especially when the object at the heart of it—an object that purportedly gives it its legitimacy—is nevertheless defective or even illegitimate. The spectacular concept that brackets the whole poem is pietas. The poem opens and closes by showing a show of piety. Pietas herself is summoned as a witness to Etruscus’ grief: ades . . . cerne . . . . (3.3.6, 3.3.7) The death of a very modern sort of man nevertheless provokes the invocation of a pointedly anachronistic piety in as much as she is summoned “as she used to be” back in a golden age that is disjoint from the decadent present 229 Martial, Epigrams 7.40 similarly omits the name. See Weaver, 1965:145 on the name problem.

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286  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity (qualis adhuc praesens nullaque expulsa nocentum | fraude rudes populos atque aurea regna colebas; 3.3.4–5). The narrative voice straddles the mythological representation of fallen time and a politics of the same, but it stays mostly within the domain of the former rather than the latter: the aurea regna of 3.3.5 are the golden ages of the poets. Forgotten, at least for the moment, is the tendency of the Siluae to represent the Domitianic era as itself a new golden age that surpasses both history and myth. Piety should be present that she might behold Etruscus’ piety. The abstraction is invoked as a witness to the concrete instantiation. The poem is highly normalizing in as much as piety, fathers and sons are among the most common words in the whole piece. Forms of pius and pietas occur ten times, forms of pater and natus nine and seven times. In this sense the diction of the poem is very much what one might guess it would be given the occasion. The narrator offers to Piety and to the reader a vivid in-­the-­moment portrait of the son clutching at his dead father (tenet ecce seniles | leniter implicitos uultus . . . 3.3.17–18). The woven verses point out the mingling of bodies in a tender scene. So far, so good. But then the narrator concludes his verse paragraph with a showy rhetorical interruption. A parenthetical arrives that destabilizes the very same category that the expostulation would seem to be propping up: (mira fides!). A lot happens in a small span: “Amazingly true, amazingly faithful, unbelievable that a son did not wish his father dead. Trust me!” Inserted into our heads is an idea that was not necessarily going to be there. We are praising a son for his want of malice towards his father: “Thinks the son: swift-­passing were the years of his father | — Oh what fidelity! — and the black sisters hasty (celeres genitoris filius annos | (mira fides!) nigrasque putat properasse sorores; 3.3.20–21).” The narrative push for a superlative conceit undermines the idea that there is a normative father-­son bond that is not somehow fraught. This “fallen age” is apparently full of sons who loath their fathers, so full, I suppose, that Piety has to be summoned to look at the unexpected sight of a son who is not spiteful. Amazing! What is being shown off is not quite what one thought the spectacle would be. The tender last embrace is not the point of emphasis. Instead a guarantee by an untrustworthy narrator—do we really trust the narrator of the Siluae any longer?—assures us of the amazing full faith and credit tucked away in the heart of the son: “Thinks the son . . . ” The hyperbolic drive of the poem transitions us to a next recherché conceit. The underworld thinks itself lucky to get such a ghost. Three lines are expended on this improbable image. It is party time down below. The

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ghosts are leaping for joy. Or at least they should be: “Let them leap up . . . ”, “Delight . . . ”, “Strew garlands . . . ” (Exsultent placidi Lethaea ad flumina manes, | Elysiae gaudete domus, date serta per aras, | festaque pallentes hilarent altaria lucos; 3.3.22–24). Was there ever so happy an occasion as dad’s death? The interruptive exclamations start heaping up: “Happy, oh so excessively happy . . .” (felix a!, nimium felix. . . . 3.3.25) “Blessed be your pious woe!” (Macte pio gemitu! . . ., 3.3.31) There will even be a second ostentatiously oxymoronic felix a! . . . later (3.3.124): “happy-­ sad!” This exclamatory poem is so excited that it is unafraid to repeat itself and so evince what one might otherwise call an infelicitous poverty of invention. If the poem’s frame hyper-­frames “filial piety,” the contents of this frame are sociologically awkward. The poem will in fact be filled with a number of disturbed figures that displace and replace standard questions about fathers and sons. Instead masters and slaves and the attendant delicate issues of birth and status arrive upon the scene. Among the more salient features of this difficult portrait is the fact that Etruscus’ father was a slave. On the one hand, the man was one of the most important individuals in the empire. But, on the other, one cannot deploy the standard template according to which a good man from a good family is praised for his political successes. This laudatio funebris needs some massaging. One is hardly surprised that a collection of meditations on status should crop up. What is more surprising is the way that the excessive reassurances that “his status is not a problem” tend only to give the impression that, yes, his status is indeed a problem.230 Furthermore, the various mediations on The Master in this same segment of the poem say difficult things about the common lot of Romans. Propping up this father entails nibbling away at everyone else. When we think about how dominus works for a man like this—it is both literally apt and figuratively appropriate—it makes one reconsider the structure of “lordship” elsewhere. Specifically, perhaps the acme of accomplishment really is savoring the freedom of an imperial freedman: one ought to aspire to be the most important of the not-­exactly free. Just don’t let Cato Uticensis hear you say that. Non tibi clara quidem, senior placidissime, gentis linea nec proauis demissum stemma, sed ingens suppleuit fortuna genus culpamque parentum occuluit. nec enim dominos de plebe tulisti, 230  White,  1975:276: “To escape the taint of past humilitas and to possess respectability must have been this family’s most urgent ambition.”

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288  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity sed quibus occasus pariter famulantur et ortus. nec pudor iste tibi: quid enim terrisque poloque parendi sine lege manet? uice cuncta reguntur alternisque premunt. . . .  Of course, most gentle sir, your lineage was not resplendent nor did you have an ancient pedigree, but massive good fortune made good your stock and your parents’ sin concealed. Nor did you bear lords who came from the masses. Instead they were men to whom sunrise and sunset alike submit in service. Nor should this make you feel any shame: for what in heaven or earth remains separate from the law of submission? All things are ruled in turn, and they alternately constrain one another . . . Statius, Siluae 3.3.43–50

The biography of Etruscus’ father begins, in familiar fashion, with his birth. The poem at once starts spinning straw into gold: “Of course, most gentle sir, your lineage was not resplendent . . .” Imperial fiat conjures a claritudo generis where there had been none: “Let there be illustrious birth.” The gens problem at the end of one line is “solved” by the ingens (. . . fortuna) that comes at the end of the next: lots of money-­and-­or-­luck can achieve anything. The possessors of an illustrious genus, the old names of old houses are radically devalued even as they are notionally praised. In concrete fact an obsession with great grandparents is all but an atavism in this world. There are few truly old families left. And, more to the point, new luminaries can and will step forth out of the palace whenever such is desired by the princeps. Similarly, a Gracchus who harkens back to his distinguished ancestors has just been put on notice that imperial secretaries are every bit as important as actual magistrates. A franker voice might assert that these last are in fact more important. Nevertheless, the praise of the father besmirches even in the course of providing luster. It reveals the very thing concealed. In fact, it emphasizes and highlights the very idea of “to conceal” by enjambing the verb: . . . | occuluit. It was perhaps enough to say that the emperor “supplemented” the man’s stock, but, in this world enough is never enough. Only more-­ than-­enough will do. And so the poem continues by saying that this

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supplement made good the “crime” (culpa) of the unnamed father’s unnamed parents. Their crime is a most peculiar one. Specifically, it is being obscure and, in being obscure, threatening to leave in obscurity a man like Etruscus’ father. How dare a slave couple consign to slavery a man like him by bringing him into this world? The nonsensical quality of the conceit is onion-­like in that one is free to keep peeling away at the layers of absurdity here only to reveal more of the same. For, if we wish to push at the moment, we see that it was really a great boon that the unnamed parents of the unnamed parent conferred upon the man. He could never have become an imperial freedman had he not been a slave first. And so just as the poem “showcases” the hiding of the scandalous birth, so too does it hide the fact that the scandal was required in the first place. The poem continues to revel in the paradoxes of the man’s position and to celebrate them. First it declared that the “sin of the father’s father” was hidden. And then the very next idea is that the “life of sin” to which he was condemned was in fact glorious: “Nor did you bear lords who came from the masses . . . .” The whole world has been enslaved by the emperors, and it is glorious to serve the MasterMaster rather than some mere everyman master. The poem again marks its own risibility by emphatically denying the same: “Nor should this make you feel any shame (nec pudor iste tibi; 3.3.48).” This means, of course, that it is quite easy to imagine that it could or maybe even should be an occasion for shame were it not for the miracle of the imperial adjective itself, a quality that transmogrifies all modes of appraisal. The line of thought is further fleshed out by a rhetorical question that “answers itself ” provided a certain kind of “good subject” is there to fill in the blanks: “For what in all the lands and under the heavens | remains free from the law of yielding?”. If one assumes universal submission, then somehow the shame of submitting vanishes. Presumably one is likewise forbidden from hearing a dirty joke in the phrase dominos ferre as used above. The narrator throughout the Siluae tells people, things, and institutions to “yield.” And the world that this voice is so conjuring qua fiction and fiction of domination itself stands to gain every time a reader passively accepts this verbiage about the gloriously inevitable non-­shame of the principate. That is, the “willing suspension of disbelief ” that is more or less required of readers of literature more generally in the Siluae mixes and

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290  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity mingles with the specifically political issue of the “law of yielding.” To read is to yield. We are still in the middle of a verse paragraph. The sentences proper end in the middle of verses. The ideas are rushing forward. More explanations and justifications are on their way. A quasi-­philosophical turn comes next. It offers a flight into unsettling abstractions that will be replaced by concrete, imperial realities. “All things are governed alternately | and they impose upon one another by turns.” But this idea is just a prologue. It is universal in its first formulation, but it turns out to be more specific in force. The narrator immediately restricts the proposition: “Everything” is really just “all of the nations of the world,” and the chaos of mutual succession and imposition is something that has ended with the advent of Rome. And then we find an ascending chain of submission. The world submits to Rome. Rome submits to its emperors. Its emperors submit to the gods. The gods yield to cosmic laws.231 The complete line of thought is muddy, and strategically so. We have drifted from an unacknowledged shame of servile birth, to the glory of submission, to necessity made palatable by a brief flash of the sort of chaotic war of all against all that afflicts those who think they might possibly stand outside imperium. Then this imperium itself is hoisted up a logical ladder to reach a climax where we find servile gods. Thus, the dead father was “godlike” in as much as his submission to the highest necessity reminds us not of an abused piece of property but instead of a celestial body keeping its heavenly orbit: seruit . . . seruit . . . . All is well with the cosmos. A sublime litotes encapsulates the (in)human condition of the superlative subjected subject: “Not unbidden . . .” (nec iniussae . . .  3.3.55) “Not unbidden” is that which we heavenly creatures all do when we serve the still higher heavenly law. The narrator is praising the Great Chain of Yielding, a very particular modulation of the concept of the Great Chain of Being. The narrator lingers with still further stories of gods who were slaves: Hercules once served; so did Apollo. These fall outside of the main logical point about cosmic necessity, but the examples argue towards the affective point at issue throughout the tendentious argument of the whole poem: “servitude is grand.” 231  All of which is but a rough paraphrase of Statius, Siluae 3.3:50–55: propriis sub regibus omnis | terra; premit felix regum diademata Roma; | hanc ducibus frenare datum; mox crescit in illos | imperium superis. sed habent et numina legem: | seruit et astrorum uelox chorus et uaga seruit | luna, nec iniussae totiens redit orbita luci.

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After giving a poetically charged account of the father’s Homeric place of birth, the narrator transitions to his account of a specifically Caesarean curriculum uitae. The “happy” series of his successive services is set up front. And prominence is thrust upon the idea of progress through the ranks: “Thereafter a propitious succession of offices and dignity magnified by various duties in succession (laeta dehinc series uariisque ex ordine curis | auctus honos (3.3.63–64).” The presentation here is closely parallel to the language of the old cursus honorum, it is just that now we have a freedman ascending through the ranks in his service to the emperor rather than a man who moves from quaestor to aedile to praetor to consul.232 That outdated sort of man, could he be brought back from the dead, would likely feel that his own honos had been tainted by any suggestion that his career was comparable to that of an ex-­slave. Meanwhile the poem presents the “high offices” of this freedman as very high indeed: to walk in the palace is to be in the company of gods (semperque gradi prope numina; 3.3.64). The actual names of the specific offices are suppressed: the bundle suffices, “a variety, held in a sequence.” Instead, we move through a collection of Caesars. This is the real career trajectory. We hear about Tiberius as the first of the father’s Caesars. Then we note that, madman though he was, Caligula did not drive out this trusty official. We linger with his service to this emperor. This service brought personal danger, and we are celebrating risks surmounted. We are not, that is, talking about auctus honos (“political ascent,” more or less) in any simple sense. And the uariis curis that we were told about have turned into “various anxieties” even if one initially thought that the phrase was an elaborate way of gesturing towards “diverse administrative responsibilities.” The father is praised for his ability to negotiate the trickiest of emperors and to still come out “on top,” where “the top” is presupposed to be the top of the heap of courtiers rather than the pinnacle of actual state power. This is not a poem about a statesman or a lawgiver, it is a poem about a master of palace intrigue. A striking simile is offered to help us make sense of the father’s accomplishment. As already described above, he was a lot like a man who knows how to shove his arm into the maw of a ravenous beast and to withdraw it unharmed.233 We are at once reminded of Martial’s poems on the shows

232  Curis shows that we are not talking about a senator. But honos nevertheless assimilates the situation to the more elite path. See Vollmer, 1898:411 on the force of cura here. 233  See again Statius, Siluae 3.3.73–75. Newlands,  2002 argues that one can discern two major classes of poems: portraits of genteel and affable retreat and poems of dangerous participation. See, for example, Newlands, 2002:223–224.

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292  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity and so too Statius’ fallen lion.234 The over-­rich and hyper-­associative ­possibilities of the arena have been flipped around. Now the emperor is not the ideal spectator. Instead, he is the beast himself.235 In Martial a rabbit hops around in and returns unharmed from the lion’s mouth. This sort of lion-­taming is a courtier’s art, says Siluae 3.3. We are celebrating the star performers in a Society of the Spectacle. And in this society Caesar is either the beast or the giver of the shows, but he is not “a senator” or a “first among equals.” He is a monster or a god, but he is not a man. “Men” are the creatures that either perform on the sands or sit in the stands and watch the show. A moment like this taps into a matrix of images that exile republican figures of thought about state and service in the name of a qualitatively different system of evaluation. Nevertheless, self-­serving stories of “lion-­taming” like these do seem to be the more useful zone for a critic to explore rather than republican anachronisms. For we are con­sist­ ently praising a contemporary “aristocracy of talent” that is talented at specifically this highly artificial social configuration. Parrots, poets, and freedmen all know how to “work the system” and they do so with panache and flair. The more they “work it” the more work they get within it: laeta dehinc series . . . Etruscus’ father found a place for himself in one reign after another. He served the divine Claudius. He served Nero. And he survived the chaos of Nero’s fall. The last notion is only expressed obliquely. But the close of the verse paragraph makes it clear what “felicity” is: always coming out near the top no matter who is in charge: “You changed and bore properly so many times princes’ yokes | safely/irreproachably (integer), and fortunate was your ship as it navigated every depth (tu totiens mutata ducum iuga rite tulisti | integer, inque omni felix tua cumba profundo; 3.3.83–85).” Almost every word of this celebration of success hits the ear with a funny ring. A potentially unremarkable word, rite becomes freighted with possibilities if one asks too many questions of it. The “right way of submitting,” “the holy way of submitting,” “the legally prescribed way of submitting,” . . . “Yoke” is an exceptionally common term among the idioms of slavery. The freedman is never really free. Nor, as a poem like this makes clear, are the free themselves really all that free. But this “necessity” also has an aleatory quality to it: one must bear the yoke, but it is rather difficult to know which god and/or lion is coming next. The savvy will guess right. 234  See pages 40–66 and 277–83. 235  Compare the way the gladiator both is and is not a double for a normative Roman man at Gunderson, 1996:144–145.

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And we will praise their canniness as if such made them distinguished men of state. As usual, the emphatic word only emphasizes the forced quality of the conceptual apparatus that it highlights: integer. What does that mean? Is anyone here really all that pure, spotless, and honest? It would be nice to say of a dead man that he had “integrity,” that he was honest, impartial, spotless, and sound, but all we really seem to be committing ourselves to here is a declaration that he escaped “unscathed.” The final image makes us think of a boat surviving stormy seas. But we could re-­invoke and generalize the Caligula moment: in went the arm; out came the arm. Every time things “got deep,” his little ship—which was not, remember, all that little, given that he held a series of extremely powerful positions—sailed along unharmed. He mastered the wine-­dark sea of imperial service. He was a man of many wiles. He was a hero of our times. He bore the yoke time and again, but that yoke never “touched” his happiness. This may well all be bullshit, but it is “our bullshit.” That is, the more we bullshit about bullshitters, the more we sink into this world rather than separating ourselves from it.236 Irony is dying a painful death as the gap between what we say and what we mean is starting to no longer matter.237 For the contemporary power game is predicated not on sincerity but rather upon the observance of formalities. The poem recapitulates the courtiers’ courtly practice by denying that there is ever anything wrong and by asserting that everything was always for the best. Only a tactless ugliness would ask just how it is that the man negotiated the Year of Four Emperors and its reversals and purges. The poem pivots instead to the list of official responsibilities with which the father had been entrusted. The Flavian offices arrive in a radiant burst. Julio-­Claudian history fades away like the memory of a stormy day. The transition is forced: “And now Lofty Light and Fabulously High Fortune entered his pious home at full stride (iamque piam lux alta domum praecelsaque toto | intrauit Fortuna gradu; 3.3.86–87).” The poem is “about” piety in as much as the piety of a grieving son is on display from the 236  And it feels good. We find in this bog the site of our freedom and the fertilizer for the flowers of our genius: “[The bullshitter] does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well . . . This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the ‘bullshit artist.’” (Frankfurt, 2005:52–53) 237  Frankfurt, 2005:61: “[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

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294  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity outset. But this image of the “pious home” of the father has appeared from nowhere and is more or less completely unmotivated. The adjective arrives in the wake of the jubilant language that marks the arrival of the current regime. It is not something that emerges out of the house or finds its source in the father but instead piety is plastered onto both by the language of the (imperial) moment which is also language for the (mere) moment. The tendentiousness of silvan time has reappeared. The ecstatic celebration of power is not supposed to submit itself to a tedious ac­count­ ancy. That is not how miracles work. Pius Aeneas is a creature constructed by Vergil over twelve long books in which one seeks to justify the contemporary polity in terms that are legible as part of the old order of things. Today’s pietas is the “piety” of fatherless men who are proud to be good at serving the biggest masters. The word can be whipped out at any given moment and slapped onto any old house that happens to be in favor. The next segment of the poem is quite famous for being a detailed description of the sorts of things an imperial freedman actually did. That is, a historian relishes the passage. But, for our purposes, the interest of the catalog lies in its form. For cataloging itself is an “Alexandrian” habit. Learned poets love to gather, sort, and redistribute the account books of the verse empire. In short, what the father did is what the poet is doing. The cataloger of spoils has his spoil-­cataloging cataloged: “Presently to him alone is entrusted the disposition of sacred treasures and the riches gotten from all the peoples and the expenses of the great world. Whatever the Iberia casts forth from its gold-­bearing furrows . . . (iam creditur uni | sanctarum digestus opum partaeque per omnis | diuitiae populos magnique impendia mundi. | quicquid ab auriferis eiectat Hiberia fossis, . . . 3.3.86–89).” One might say that “of course”, Statius himself—whoever that was . . .— is not really so craven and he should not be depicted as “just another successful freedman.” Nevertheless, it is “of course” also the case that all of the clever things that the father himself said or did for now this emperor and now that emperor was really a species of craven self-­service. The father was doing the done thing by offering to power a thorough accounting of power’s own resources-­and-­logic: rationes/ratio. And the poet? The poet of the father: “He was wakeful, attentive, and wise: swift did he unroll . . . (uigil iste animique sagacis | et citus euoluit . . . 3.3.98–99).” But the learned poet unrolls volumes too, and he narrates/spins out (euoluere) an erudite account of a man who unrolls imperial ledgers (euoluere) so as to figure out how to balance the account books of empire. And the poet can do so because he constantly unrolls (euoluere) bookish books that inform

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his erudite poetry. The same phrase Statius uses of the father would be a metapoetic self-­ description in an Augustan author. Here it is a poet describing a bookkeeper while also exposing the extent to which poetry itself is very much about real profits and real losses. It is in fact playing the very same games despite all of the euphemism, metaphor, and irony that make it seem that it is perhaps playing some very different game. The flow of ideas in the poem obeys a logic that only loosely parallels the seeming plot of the poem. The account of the accountant poring over the riches of the world shifts into an ethical portrait of the man. It begins with an illogical connection that pretends to be a logical one: hinc. The man was busy looking after imperial treasures: “Accordingly, you had scant rest.” That part makes sense: he had a lot of work to do. The next part does not: “ . . . and pleasure was debarred from your spirit | and meager were your meals and never wounded by deep | wine was your care (hinc tibi rara quies animoque exclusa uoluptas, | exiguaeque dapes et numquam laesa profundo | cura mero; 3.3.106–108).” We transition from “hard at work” over towards a familiar discourse of virtuous self-­restraint. The latter trope is often connected to the former: Cato, one says, both worked hard and he avoided lavish parties. Seneca’s Moral Letters offer endless meditations on how hard work and self-­restraint can and should be correlated. But it is not at all obvious that a philosopher gentleman who reminds us of the best Romans of yore makes for a good fit with Etruscus’ father. We have slipped into affable clichés while also eliding any detailed arguments that show us why this might be true.238 Hinc is a weak word that cannot do enough of the requisite work for us. The poem is full of “nice sounding” phrases that all “work” if one allows for a soft-­focus cultural logic to substitute for logical logic. He was good. Good people are associated with good things like this. And so, let us say that these good things were his good things. Just do not look too closely at any of it. We slip quickly past this more or less unconvincing thumbnail sketch of an upstanding, moderate gentleman. Next comes another under-­motivated transition that again leans on the commonsensical. Instead of getting drunk, the man had sex. Or, as the genteel poem says of the not-­drunkard: “But you laid to heart the laws of 238  Gibson,  2015:134: “Even though this preceding passage includes a lavish summary from Statius of the wealth from across the empire which came through the hands of Domitian’s a rationibus, it is essential for Statius to set this in counterpoint with the personal simplicity of Etruscus’ father, to avoid the lurking possibility of any kind of critique of an imperial freedman who had doubtless succeeded in gaining extraordinary riches.”

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296  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity generation, | the binding of heart by bed, and the joining of joyous | matrimony and the generation of trusty clients for your Master (sed iura tamen genialia cordi | et mentem uincire toris ac iungere festa | conubia et fidos domino genuisse clientes; 3.3.108–110).” This is a polite but implausible portrait of human psychology. The man pondered the good laws of the state, reflected on the ideology of mutual affection within matrimony, and so got married. But the poem does not even commit itself to that fiction. Instead, it adds in one more item as last that is not at all least: Etruscus’ father was keen to sire clients for his master, and that is why he took a wife. Love, marriage, and procreation have been warped by the narrator. The three functions are all made into “Caesarean” questions. Marriage laws were dear to the father (cordi erant ei). The idea of heeding the law motivates him. He loves his wife as a means of offering (slave-)babies to MasterCaesar. An over-­read of the situation leads us to that ugly conceit. He has been freed for/into a greater servitude, a sublime one. And he is keen to produce children that might show his adoration for this wonderful yoke that he bears. The words are very much off here. Etruscus was manumitted under Tiberius (libertas oblata uenit; 3.3.69). Etruscus does not have a dominus any longer. His dominus was Tiberius. Then, upon manumission, he had libertas, and Tiberius was his patronus. And next, after the death of his patron, the freedman continued to serve the Masters of the World in an official capacity. But none of these men were “his master” sensu stricto. Dominus here does, though, pick up on the narrative voice of the frame to the Siluae: Domitian is “the master” of us all (4.pr.30, again).239 All the free are like slaves. The freedman is the perfect intermediary on this retrograde route towards bondage in as much as his history includes servitude and his “glory” is in fact fundamentally tied up with the notion of subjection. The staggering incoherence of the argument continues apace. What stitches the poem together is a specific ideological conceit about power and service to power. And, if we maliciously cut that golden thread, the seams of the patchwork become apparent while the expensive collection of purple patches comes tumbling off the body of the poem. We have just said that he wanted to give birth to kids “for Caesar’s sake.” But the very next idea is the “lofty, noble stock and beauty of Etrusca.” She is the mother of the son addressed by the poem. The defective birth of the unnamed father is both made up for by the fine pedigree of the mother even as this 239  See Scott, 1933:250 on the ambiguous, manifold deployment of dominus in the Siluae.

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same pedigree is trampled in the mire. First, aristocratic fathers do not really dream of important freedmen as the husbands to their daughters, at least not in the Rome of yesteryear. And, next, this well-­born lady is being asked to use her body to generate clients for the dominus. Even if one elects to be modern, permissive, and so forth when it comes to the fact of the marriage, the reading of the marriage through the discourse of the dominus reduces a lady of some standing to a freedwoman or even slave. Genus-arguments are used three times in rapid succession in this passage. And this rapid-­fire return of the idea of “good birth” after all of our assurances that we have addressed the status problem only reinforces our sense that the status problem is a serious one indeed. First: “Who the lofty birth and distinguished beauty of Etrusca | fails to know? (quis sublime genus formamque insignis Etruscae | nesciat? (3.3.111–112)” Next: “no common stock” (nec uulgare genus; 3.3.115).” Yet again: “and so whatever was remiss in the father’s blood the mother | restored (sic quicquid patrio cessatum a sanguine, mater | reddidit (3.3.120).” But nothing was wanting, of course. And, in any case, the mother was only “giving back” to the son his natural due rather than being the sole source. A reader’s complicity is required here: if you offer the least push to the euphemism of “idle blood” (cessatum a sanguine) or tug even gently at what “restore” (reddidit) might really mean here, then things get ugly fast. But do consider for a bit longer this fiction that our empty present’s fullness was already waiting for us to begin with. Legitimacy is something I “get back.” What we arrivistes have is not stolen or usurped or lucked into or acquired by sufficient groveling. This is a line of thought that enables us to underwrite a self-­ siring and entitled modernism more generally: “Whatever was missing — but nothing was missing . . . — has been restored to me.” The poem allows itself to be obliquely liable to the old evaluative matrix that would say, bluntly, that imperial freedmen are a disgusting innovation that has been grafted upon our proud aristocratic traditions. But the poem can never actually come out and address such critics. And it cannot refute them for more than one reason. First, it is hopeless to try to answer that sort of objection. The argument is lost before it is begun. Compare: “When did you stop beating your wife?” But the poem cannot refute such critics for a second and more interesting reason, namely it is so invested in the world of aristocratic values that it cannot repudiate the presuppositions that will forever condemn men like Etruscus. For these same presuppositions help us to elevate in song men such as Domitian.

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298  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity The story of Etruscus’ father is given over for a while to the story of the mother. She is “making whole” whatever was defective about the main funeral oration via her own good birth and noble death. Felix a! is used to lament her premature death. The word felix appears six times in the poem and only thirty-­six times in all of the Siluae. So, this is our “happiest” poem of them all. But two of the appearances of felix are in this same stilted phrase: felix a!.240 Each is about the death of a parent. This mini consolation for the mother lodged inside the consolation for the loss of the father—indeed, it has been placed in the middle of the main consolation— fills in the “felicity gap” that hovers over the whole. It is easy to write verses that lament the premature death of an attractive young woman from an important political family.241 One can offer bitter ruminations about the happiness that would have been hers had she lived. The poem is very much pleased to linger here after the hard sailing of the father’s biography. Aliquid cessatum a sanguine is a phrase that haunts the poem as a whole. We keep on conjuring away defects and even celebrating failures as triumphs. The freedman father turned a losing hand into a winning one: his blood was bad, but his life was good. The poem turns a loser of a topic into a poetic triumph. Lemons become lemonade: his blood was bad, but the verses about his life are good. Genus and genre become ­sublimely/ridiculously entangled. Nevertheless, there is something defective even in this happy life and even in this happy poem. Something bad happened, but this defective moment has to be written out of the life. After endlessly returning to the defective birth, the poem elides and races past the unspeakable moment where service to the dominus somehow failed and broke down. Weaver’s reconstruction of the situation is plausible and more or less completely at odds with what the poem itself has to say: “In 82 or 83 came the thunderbolt from Domitian (146ff.). The causes of disgrace are not unnaturally left obscure in the poem (156 ff.); but the downfall and banishment of the a rationibus so soon after the accession of Domitian may be compared with that of Pallas himself. Both were too closely involved with the policies and

240  The underworld was lucky to get such a wondrous shade as Etruscus father, a shade that was “fortunate, ah, so excessively fortunate and so lamented by his son”: felix a!, nimium felix plorataque nato | umbra uenit (3.3.25–26). The wife’s happiness is completely inverted. She “would have been happy” had she lived to see her children grow up: felix a! si longa dies, si cernere uultus . . . (3.3.124). He is lucky to die. She would have been lucky had she lived. 241  Quoth the Poe, “The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” And I suppose that we are here ourselves also exploring “The philosophy of composition.” See then, at your leisure, Poe, 1986.

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personalities of the previous reign to have the full confidence of the new regime . . . What is clear is that the banishment lasted for at least seven years, despite Statius’ blurring of the interval.”242 Contemporaries likely had their own understanding of the facts of the man’s political biography. But readers of this poem are not invited to speculate about exactly what happened and why. Instead, they have just seen a moment where Vespasian makes the father into a knight and gives him a share of a triumph (3.3.138ff). Then they get “the fall.” Then the poem lingers on the magnanimous forgiveness of Domitian. Seven years of “infelicity” disappear and are transformed into a brief phrase: “he stayed not long . . .” (nec longa moratus; 3.3.164). Even the proper words for the man’s situation can emerge only via a negation: “and he was a guest, not an exile (atque hospes, non exsul, erat; 3.3.164).” He could not be both a guest and an exile? Yes, that is very much possible. The whole poem is stamped with the mark of Verneinung, No-­saying.243 Throughout we deflect. We are assured that something that one might guess was a problem was not a problem at all: “your masters were not commoners (nec enim dominos de plebe tulisti; 3.3.46)”; “THIS shame was not yours (nec pudor iste tibi; 3.3.48)”; “Apollo’s pipe did not blush at his servitude (nec erubuit famulantis fistula Phoebi; 3.3.58)”; “nor did he stay long (nec longa moratus; 3.3.164).” One is told that “instead” something else should offer the framework for our understanding of a variety of situations. The preceding denials abut corrections that are themselves evasive and euphemistic: “But . . . but . . . but . . .” You may have been a slave . . . “but massive | fortune made your family stock full (sed ingens | suppleuit fortuna genus; 3.3.44–45).” You may have been a slave . . . “but the world serves the Caesars from sunset to sunrise (sed quibus occasus pariter famulantur et ortus; 3.3.47).” We even have a mixed denial-­and-­correction: You may have been a slave . . . “but you were not sent over to Latium from savage lands: your native soil is Smyrna (sed neque barbaricis Latio transmissus ab oris | Smyrna tibi gentile solum; 3.3.59–60).” A whole other alternate but deprecated version of the life story is simultaneously present in the poem. All one has to do is refuse to follow the narrator’s instructions and turn left where one is told to turn right.244 242 Weaver, 1965:150. 243  See Freud, 2001b. 244  For example: did Etruscus long for his father’s death? He did not cause his father’s death and yet he is compared to a man who did: “Not otherwise did Theseus groan at his faithlessness, he who had deceived Aegeus with his false sails (haud aliter gemuit periuria Theseus | litore qui falsis deceperat Aegea uelis; 3.3.179–180).”

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300  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity This “sinister” mode of reading is easy enough to decry, but perhaps it could and should instead be described as a refusal of an invitation to complicity. Throughout we are assured that a few more courteous supplements will make good the defects of the courtier’s life. The cure for what ails the absent, unnamed, exiled, dead father is just a little more fiction. The center of the biography contains the mother who is used to supplement the problem-­that-­is-­not-­a-­problem of the father’s birth.245 But even the mother herself is in need of some clever fakery if she is going to be inserted as the “sure thing” that props up the thing that needs-­but-­does-­ not-­need propping up. The narrator knows that she was a stunning beauty because art told him that she was beautiful. Or, at any rate, this is what he tells us: “I never came to know her with my own two eyes: | but a portrait of her that is equal to her reputation reproduces her exceptional beauty.” This moment is all the more marked if we note that the preceding line asked, “Who does not know of the beauty of Etrusca?” To the extent that “everyone knows” about Etrusca, it is because we have all agreed upon a shared fiction: quis sublime genus formamque insignis Etruscae | nesciat? haudquaquam proprio mihi cognita uisu, | sed decus eximium famae par reddit imago, | et sibimet similis natorum gratia monstrat; 3.3.111–114. Indeed, we have agreed to share fictions with one another even as we know them to be fictions. Just around the corner one can make out the shadow of another way of describing everyone and everything. The poem’s empty core is full of a “generic sublime,” a sublime genus that fills up a hollowed-­out specific space with voice and image, the image of the voice, and the voice of the image.246 The loss of the defective father animates a song of consolation that “makes good” the defects of the world.247 But the ascent on offer is only the image of a moment of elevation and escape. One escapes from slavery, rises through the ranks, becomes a knight, shares a triumph . . . only to learn that there is always another master set over us. The celebration of service in general hides without really hiding the 245  Bernstein,  2015:146: “This emphasis on the contributions of the maternal line to a descendant’s status . . . reflects a wider shift in attitudes toward descent. The new upper class of the first century CE no longer made descent through males the sole maker of noble ancestry, and could highlight wealth, connoisseurship, and philosophical accomplishment as other important indices of distinction.” 246  Echoes of Echo in imago: Vergil, Georgica 4.49–50: cubi concaua pulsu | saxa sonant uocisque offensa resultat imago. Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.385: alternae deceptus imagine uocis. Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 3.596–97: rursus Hylan et rursus Hylan per longa reclamat | auia: responsant siluae et uaga certat imago. 247  Zupančič, 2003:151: “[T]here are walls or defenses that humanity has erected as shields against the central field of das Ding (connoted as evil): the first protective barrier is the good; the second is the beautiful or the sublime.”

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­ orrors of service in particular: nec . . . The praise of the accountant of the h spoils of empire steers us away from a narrative path that runs in parallel: one might be offering only an account of spoliation itself. But the narrator promises readers that they can be the happy sons of this happy father provided that they are ready to shoulder the burden of submission. Meanwhile, do fill in the blanks and make good the defects of the narrative by means of the echoing melodies of the sublime genus: a beautiful word-­ image-­of-­life is yours for the taking. In so doing you will have learned the political philosophy of poetic composition.

iv.  Dead boy: poor master, says the poet (Siluae 2.6) The Siluae celebrate a variety of “marvelous possessions.”248 A substantial proportion of the poems have as their subject the celebration of a luxury item. Readers are invited to be amazed by amazing things. Flowery verse is strewn over gilt lilies. Poems tightly attached to a person and his life are less common than poems about things: birthday poems and poems about voyages and poems about the loss of a husband are more the exception than the rule. The catalog of objects is long. We celebrate a villa (1.3), some baths (1.5), another villa (2.2), a nice tree on a fine estate (2.3), a bird (2.4), a lion (2.5), and a statuette of Hercules (4.6). We celebrate more public wonders as well, usually things Domitianic: his equestrian statue (1.1), his party in December (1.6), his seventeenth consulship (4.1), his road (4.4). The consolation poems at first seem like a place where one is talking about people. But a number of them are consolations for a loss of a thing. A nasty take on Siluae 3.3 might even assert that the son is being consoled for the loss of a slave, namely his own father. Other poems fit this template more cleanly. Specifically, in both Siluae 2.1 and Siluae 2.6 we have consolations for the loss of a thing-­person. Putting things this way seems cruel, especially since the boy in Siluae 2.1 is an ex-­slave and the foster son of Melior. Should the critic make light of the fate of a slave and deny him his humanity? Should we even force an ex-­slave back into slavery? But we 248  See Greenblatt, 1991 on the marvels of the New World. Beyond the felicitous phrase, the more productive point of contact with his book perhaps comes with his assertions about the reproductive power of images and his ideas about “the reproduction and circulation of mimetic capital” (Greenblatt, 1991:6). He continues on the same page, “I want to suggest that mimesis, as Marx said of capital, is a social relation of production. . . . This means that representations are not only products but producers.”

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302  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity need to ask ourselves if the actual personality of these people is being lamented—“There will never be another . . .!”—or if the focus does not fall squarely on the master. In fact, at Siluae 2.1.51 we talk about a boy who constantly clung to the master’s neck, the domini ceruix. Melior is asked to console himself by remembering how the boy touched his master, not how he loved his father. In both poems the story of the dead person serves as a means of enhancing the account of the suffering of the powerful living one.249 The affecting narrative of the slave is wrenched from him and handed over to the master. The sad narrative reminds the master of his mastery and that the loss is specifically his own loss. Meanwhile the subjectivity imputed to the slave is highly contrived. The psychic life of a dead slave ends up sounding a lot like the psychic life of a dead bird or a dead lion. And, it will be noted, the story of one dead slave comes immediately after the story of the bird and the lion: Siluae 2.4, 2.5, . . . . 2.6. We seem to be talking about things that loved being owned more than people who led full, rich lives. But, once again, a question arises in the wake of reading these poems: “Does the elite male with all of his privilege somehow also see himself as a thing that is being asked to say that he loves being owned?” That is, these poems of agony-­and-­ecstasy that offer hyperbolic and easy answers also ask some hard questions and whisper sotto voce that things may well have reached a fairly sorry state. The master’s self-­understanding might somehow lie inside his (mere) possessions. The glib and voluble rhetoric of the narrative surface, though, means that one is all but encouraged not to think about any such whispers. Let us look first at the youth from Siluae 2.6 since he is part of a sequence we have already been exploring.250 After lamenting this loss we can go backwards and look at our earlier tears from Siluae 2.1. The story of the boy from Siluae 2.6 also contains a number of points of convergence with the biography of Etruscus’ father. And so he makes for a very con­ven­ ient first approach to the problem of unraveling the knotted strands of power, desire, resentment, and submission. The “you” who would say that there should be no such poem as Siluae 2.6 are denounced as cruel. The opening lines say, “Cruel, excessively so, you who impose distinctions upon tears | and make measures of mourning (Saeue nimis, lacrimis quisquis discrimina ponis | lugendique modos; 249  Accordingly, although it is true that, in the choice of a topic like the death of a low-­ status individual, we are seeing “new approaches to personal themes” (Newlands, 2011:11); I do not think that we have really recast certain core ideological dispositions. 250  See Newlands, 2002:35 on “the dialectical nature of the collection” qua ordered collection of poems.

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2.6.1–2).” Once “you” have left poet and mourner alone together, the fiction can commence. “You” put a limit on morning: ponis lugendi modos. But the words that offer a negation of the possibility of the poem also articulate the making of the very same poem. Measure-­ putting and measure-­making is another way of talking about versification. If you would stop putting structures around grief, then the poet could be left alone to build a well-­measured and well-­structured poem about grief.251 As ever, the poetry is obsessed with itself and its artistry. What follows is a list of distinctions that have to be overcome if we are going to do the work of making-­and-­mourning that the poem has on offer. And one will note that making-­and-­mourning is an unexpected affine of one of our major concerns, that is power-­poetry. The poetic work on display in Siluae 2.6 is convergent with the labors of Siluae 3.3 in that it con­ sist­ ently conjures the problematic question of social status and then rewrites the traditional rubrics of evaluation. On the one hand the recasting of these rules can look “liberal” from a modern standpoint—why should we sneer at slaves?—but, on the other hand, these poems are not articulated from the standpoint of a philosophy of the worth of the human individual. They instead are playing around with categories for the sake of exploring configurations of socio-­political power.252 And these explorations are themselves highly strategic. They are not motivated by a noble spirit that longs to see all men free. On the contrary, we keep on wondering if almost everyone should not be considered somehow “slavish” in Domitian’s Rome. Saying too much that is too fair about these lovely boys promulgates an implied thesis that exceptional people get to make exceptions to the rules. This, in fact, is one of the real signs of high status, the ability to rewrite the rules. And, naturally, the poet’s own bid for a parallel species of status is herein implicated. After complaining that some might set limits upon sorrow, the opening of the poem imagines a collection of scenes of parents lamenting dead children and siblings lamenting lost brothers. Included is a histrionic single-­ word parenthetical exclamation: (nefas!).253 Perish the thought! (2.6.3) This sets us up for the thesis. It is permitted to lament for other 251  See Hardie, 1983:103–110 on the close connections between this poem and the prescriptions that rhetorical handbooks offer on how to handle the topic of consolation. That is, this is not only “well-­structured,” it is structured after a familiar manner. 252  For example, setting a limit on mourning is a constant refrain of the philosophers. So the poem opens up with a pointedly anti-­philosophical pose. 253 Newlands,  2011:203: “[T]he following fourth-­ foot strong caesura dramatises the breaking of the natural order.”

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304  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity categories of person with whom one has an intimate connection. And so, by extension . . . The poet-­advocate boldly steps forth and gives us the scandalous word first, provoking our outrage and then confronting it: “A slave . . . .” Once again, we find parenthetical remarks deployed in the Siluae to highlight key terms by suspending syntax: famulum (quia rerum nomina caeca sic miscet Fortuna manu nec pectora nouit), sed famulum gemis, urse, pium, sed amore fideque has meritum lacrimas, cui maior stemmate iuncto libertas ex mente fuit.  A slave — because the names for things blindly are mixed by Fortune’s hand nor does she know human hearts — a slave, but a pious slave, Ursus, you mourn. With his love and good faith he earned these tears. Greater than what comes of aristocratic pedigree, his Liberty arose from his heart.” Statius, Siluae 2.6.8–12

Statius has concocted an artful collection of ironies and paradoxes relative to freedom. One can compare something like Seneca’s Epistulae Morales. There we are constantly enjoined to free ourselves. But Seneca is ringing the changes on a specifically Stoic paradox: only the wise man is free. And Seneca’s addressee is a free man who thinks that he is not a slave because, in law, he is not. And yet, in his spirit, he is.254 That was Seneca, though. This poem is addressed to a free man, but it does not tell him that he is secretly a slave. Instead, it tells him that his own slave was secretly free. “Deep down” the slave was free. His freedom defied fortune’s dictates that had made him a slave. But all of this distracts us from the obvious point that Ursus who really did know at first hand the mens, amor, and fides of the boy—his thoughts, his passions, and his sincerity—could have righted Fortune’s wrong by manumitting the youth. The psychic life of the boy “earns” Ursus’ tears. But that is all it earns. 254  There are many examples of arguments that unfold according to this premise in the Epistulae Morales, but, since “fortune” is mentioned in the following, it makes for a useful item to discuss in the context of Statius’ poem: “You ask for a definition of liberty? To serve no thing, no necessity, no chance, to draw fortune into a fight on a level field (Quae sit libertas quaeris? Nulli rei seruire, nulli necessitati, nullis casibus, fortunam in aequum deducere (Seneca, Epistulae Morales 51.9).”

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Birth means nothing when it comes to the question of freedom, chance means nothing either, but only provided that this freedom remains both abstract and internal rather than concrete and external. This conceit frees up the narrator himself: he may well be yielding to necessity and falling in line with the circumstances in which he finds himself, but he can nevertheless cling to a freedom of spirit, a freedom that arises specifically out of spirit (ex mente). But this initial reconfiguration of the problem only makes things worse upon close inspection. This kind of private freedom on the part of the narrator means that amor and fides need to be suspended. He is likely lying when he says, “trust me.” But the whole poem is built on a certain species of trust. If the arguments about the good faith of slaves that binds them to masters are not themselves made in good faith, then the hidden heart is a black heart. This is “fine” on the one hand. All the poem really requires is a situation where a master can feel sorry for himself for the loss of a pretty boy whom he tells himself was fond of him. That is, from the master’s perspective, false fides is more or less acceptable provided he elects to satisfy himself with the semblance of love rather than love itself. I take it for granted that relationships to pueri delicati were routinely structured by this same logic: in practice the boy hated being the sexual plaything of the man; meanwhile the man told himself that the boy loved him. The narrator positions himself as a replacement puer delicatus for Ursus: he will say fides and amor now that the boy is dead.255 And, because he says these words, a social game will keep on circulating. Pectora non nouisse and gemere will be able to co-­exist: blindness to interiority and lamentation connive. The resistant subjectivity of the ironic narrator will reproduce the dominant paradigm by reproducing a situation where the master masters and the resistant person feels something opaque but says something quite

255 Newlands, 2011:202: puer delicatus is only in the (non-­Statian) title to the poem, and the poem’s contents do not contain any unambiguous indications of an erotic relationship. But Newlands goes on to note that there are (at least) two instances of play with the tropes of language of “love slavery” in the poem. See Newlands, 2011:206–207 on Siluae 2.6.15–16 and 2.6.22. An actual sexual relationship gives much more motivation to that sort of choice. In fact, Newlands does not really offer any alternative to her “no sex” thesis. Ursus was deeply moved. He really cared. But why? What was the exact connection a rich, free man had to such a (vaguely, but positively described) boy? We do spend a decent amount of time on his good looks too . . . I am not myself comfortable affording to Statius and Ursus a broad, capacious “humanism” that explains his relationship to Philetus. For Hardie, 1983:104 the boy is quite simply, “the puer delicatus of Flavius Ursus.”

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306  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity pleasing about his feelings.256 This “self-­siring mental freedom” that needs no stemmata, no family tree, also works as another way of talking about “poetic license.” It is the freedom to freely invent tendentious and semi-­ sincere verses that start with outré conceits about setting meters/measures on tears. The glorious/abject puer delicatus offers the double for the ­narrator himself. The narrative structure of this poem—and of so many of the poems of the Siluae . . . —so intensely focalizes the drama of the master’s affect that a whole host of baroque and implausible psychological conceits springs up around it. Having begun with a wholly unlikely account of the dead boy’s heart, the narrator continues to fill that cold organ with poetic passions. The focal point remains the master who is given a collection of unphilosophical injunctions to revel in woe: “Do not check your tears. | Be unashamed. Let this day’s woe break its bonds, | if such hardships please the gods. You are lamenting a human being — Woe is me! I supply | the torches myself! — a human being, Ursus, who was yours, to whom of his own free will | servitude was sweet, to whom nothing was sad, who of his own accord to himself | was a stern sovereign (ne comprime fletus, | ne pudeat; rumpat frenos dolor iste diesque, | si tam dura placent, hominem gemis (heu mihi! subdo | ipse faces), hominem, Vrse, tuum, cui dulce uolenti | seruitium, cui triste nihil, qui sponte sibique | imperiosus erat; 2.6.12–17).”257 Homo is leveraged to make a quasi-­philosophical claim: slaves are human beings and so are worthy of our affection.258 But the point emerges only as part of a tendentious whole. For, after evoking the “humanity” of the slave, we at once pivot back to his particular status rather than lingering with reflections about the universal lot of mankind. This time we invert the initial formulation: “the boy was self-­liberating” turns into “the boy was self-­subjecting.” The qualities we assign to the abstract “human being” are concrete particulars that situate him within the institution of slavery: homo cui . . . cui . . . And before we even get to

256  Kojève,  1969:24: “The Master, who does not work, produces nothing stable outside himself. He merely destroys the products of the Slave’s work. Thus, his enjoyment and his satisfaction remain purely subjective: they are of interest only to him and therefore can be recognized only by him; they have no ‘truth,’ no objective reality revealed to all.” 257  Hardie, 1983:107 is content to summarize the rhetoric of this moment without commenting on its implications: “The submersion of his own personality in that of Ursus was a voluntary action.” 258  A famous antecedent for this thesis is Seneca, Epistulae Morales 47.1: “ ‘They are slaves.’ No: human beings. ‘They are slaves.’ No: comrades on campaign. ‘They are slaves.’ No: friends of lesser station. ‘They are slaves.’ No: fellow slaves . . . (‘Serui sunt.’ Immo homines. ‘Serui sunt.’ Immo contubernales. ‘Serui sunt.’ Immo humiles amici. ‘Serui sunt.’ Immo conserui . . .).

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those modifiers that are all about the boy and his feelings, we first build an emphatic bracket: hominem, Vrse, tuum (2.6.15). “A human being, Ursus, who was your human being.” Ursus “interrupts” the abstract humanity of the boy and converts it into subjected humanity. The person is property. But, he was also still a person. And so the “living tool” is spoken of first as a tool and then “animated” precisely so that the “possessedness” of the possession can be made all the more secure: “Yours whom . . .” This line ends with “sweet + volition” and the next gives the noun that goes with the adjective “sweet,” namely slavery. So, the boy who had libertas ex mente now has seruitium ex uoluntate. He was both “free at heart” as well as “a slave by choice.” This is a subjective-­ and-­objective claim. The boy did not feel bad on the inside and the boy did not manifestly sulk and so make the master feel the bitterness of his own mastery: “Perhaps he thinks his serving is not so sweet . . .” The third point emphasizes the contrived quality of the whole situation by using over-­strong language to generate a forced image. Not only was he a willing-­slave, but he self-­tyrannized “spontaneously” in his love of being-­dominated (qui sponte sibique imperiosus erat; 2.6.16–17). The specific situation of servitude has been systematically rewritten by the narrator. The unsentimental would say that an imperious master imposes himself upon the slave against the latter’s will. “Sweet volition” is all the more wretched in the case of a slave such as this given that these are erotic terms as well, and the boy’s service would have been specifically sexual. “Woe is me!”, indeed. The narrator’s endless interruptions tend to work as symptomatic tics. They are a clever feature of the poetry that tends to become over-­clever in as much as they give rise to recherché secondary meanings while also spawning still further associations that cut against the grain. The principal subtext of the doubleness in that interruption works as follows. Subdo ipse faces means both that I am lighting the pyre of the boy and that I am thereby enflaming Ursus’ sense of loss. This is the meaning that is just beneath the surface and that in fact has to be excavated by the reader in order to get the point of the verse. But “adding faces” also works as an image for fanning the flames of erotic desire. And so the phrase also exposes the manner in which the narrative is re-­generating the “delicateness” of the puer delicatus and doing so precisely in the context of a discourse of voluntary submission. “Woe is me” is a marker of patent artifice: the narrator feels no woe. He is only drawing attention to a gesture that marks him as a participant in a specifically constructed social ritual that is oriented around the master and his own fantasies of mastery. “Woe is me” is totally insincere, but, were

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308  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity the narrator capable of sincerity, one might ask him to lament his own complicity in the reproduction of a discourse of domination. His “spontaneous” outburst of fake affect acts as an in-­advance marker of the problematic status of sponte sibi imperiosus erat as applied to the boy. The narrator also “spontaneously” orders himself to “do what it takes” to produce a poem for the occasion. Nihil triste and omnia tristia superimpose themselves here. Nothing was gloomy for the boy, but now everything is gloomy for the master. Nothing is bad about the formal excellence of Siluae 2.6, but everything is hideous when one thinks about what it means to have prostituted one’s own beauty to an Ursus and to smile while handing to him the lovely goods. But the narrator himself fails to smile: heu mihi! And this fake lament on the part of a poeta delicatus shows a text that straddles mastery-­and-­slavery. The narrator’s voice takes the side of the master, sympathizes with him, and claims to feel more or less just as he feels, but the very gesture of “siding with the master” is itself servile. The argument that began with the boy’s libertas and then slipped into his seruitium while acknowledging his humanity, presently transitions to his thingishness. Once again, we are both emphasizing the idea while repudiating the very same notion. Once again, the argument proper has a forced, almost absurd quality. We return to the hypothesis that someone might complain about Ursus’ sorrow. But, goes the argument, if one permits a Parthian to lament his dead horse, then a fortiore . . . The long list of “dead pets” even includes birds. In fact, it even includes the words “even includes” (et uolucres habuere rogum; 2.6.20). This line of argumentation points us right back to Siluae 2.4 and 2.5. We have what amounts to a self-­ citation. And, similarly, it is implied that we are “ascending” some sort of chain of lost objects: the bird, the lion, the boy. Each is more noble and precious than the last. And perhaps the affects are more affecting each time. Still, the boy is keeping a very specific sort of company. The poem repudiates the idea that the boy should be considered a slave, but in so doing it keeps on putting him into the wrong class of item. We do not escape from the slur ASAP and up front. Instead, the poem keeps reminding us of the problem. And the psuedo-­solutions to this problem keep on reinscribing the structure of the problem. A question arrives: “What if he is not even a slave? (quid, si nec famulus? 2.6.21).” Note that the implied verb is est and not erat. He notionally lives again for a flickering measure of versified time. The elision of est both brings him to life and reproduces his death. This is all well and good, but, the question is easily answered: he was a slave. In fact, the word famulus was pointedly underlined as part of the opening of the poem. The

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sophistical word-­play of the narrator shows off his linguistic freedom, his untrammeled liberty to play with ideas. But the same word play keeps on anchoring itself to a bedrock premise: the boy is a thing, but words will move him “beyond” that thing-­like condition. The boy’s death in fact fixes his status and so makes all the more loathsome the free play of the imagination that the narrator sets moving: the occasion dictates that the utterances can never be “performative” in the sense of changing something in the world, instead they are mere performances that mime an as-­ if performativity. The question is designed to resume and extend the first evocation and refutation that the poem offered. The narrator proffered famulus and then swaps it for homo. Now we wonder if famulus should not be removed even more radically and swapped for some other term. The notion that arrives to offer us both our substitution and our justification is “desire.” The slave’s own “spontaneous” (implicitly . . . ) desire for Ursus is the very thing that justifies the “bold” suggestion that he was not really a slave. The amor famuli (“a slave’s love”) offers a master-­flattering reconfiguration of the sort of self-­pitying seruitium amoris (“a slave to love”) trope through which the hegemonic figure their erotic sorrows as being akin to social subordination and humiliation. “I myself saw him and took note of the bearing | of the boy who desired just you as his master (uidi ipse habitusque notaui | te tantum cupientis erum, sed maior in ore | spiritus et tenero manifesti in sanguine mores; 2.6.21–23).” The untrustworthy narrator—and we know he is untrustworthy precisely because he says “trust me” so often . . . —bears hyperbolic witness to the content of the boy’s heart. The narrator shows himself watching, shows himself taking notes. And what he saw was someone who desired you . . . just you. . . and he desired just you as his master (te tantum cupientis erum). “What if he was not a slave” is, in the space of a single line, “refuted” by the fantasy of seeing him lusting after his own subjection. The object of his desire is “you . . . his master” and “you . . . as his master.”259 This paragraph continues by looking at the boy’s character. Then it says the boy was the sort that anyone would wish to have as a son. The figures of myth would themselves have been proud to have such a child.260 This is all the stock and trade of “legitimate, proper” social relations. There is no 259  The idea returns later in inverted form: the master “willed” it when the boy would scold him (saepe ille uolentem | castigabat erum; 2.6.51). Subjection is turned into amicable give-­and-­take in the poem. 260  Asso,  2010:682: “[T]he dividing line between myth and reality is often blurred and myth becomes a means for constructing reality.”

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310  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity need to pick apart the details of the presentation. A systematic refutation of the endless lies of a pathological liar can miss the key point, namely that the lying is programmatic and a core feature of the discourse as a whole, not some sort of supposititious verbal layer that cloaks something else that is “actually true.” The excessive asseverations of the narrator make the point that “I am not lying” is one of the constitutive features of the poem as a whole. “I am not lying. The usual license does not guide my song. | I saw him and I still see him . . . (non fallo aut cantus assueta licentia ducit: | uidi et adhuc uideo . . . 2.6.29–30).” But he is lying. And this song is all about a self-­ licensing license that lets one “speak freely” precisely because the boy is dead and nothing will come of all of this talking other than heavy sighs. In fact, one has every motive to make the sighs as heavy as possible and to indulge tears to their fullest. It’s a poem about life and death and freedom and slavery, but nothing at all is really on the line. What one “still sees” is a projection into the past of “missed opportunities and wasted potential.” Lamenting the missed encounter substitutes for having an actual confrontation with the facts of the world (fallit). As with any good servant, the boy is here to serve the master. The narrator constantly reproduces the structures of domination. He always casts the master into the foreground. The “meaning” of the slave is extracted from him and made over to the legitimate owner of the same, Ursus.261 The lost “quality” (qualis eras . . . ) of the boy is used to expose the here and now greatness of his erstwhile owner. The narrator who sees all and notes all invites us to look for ourselves: “Oh how you were! Lo, by far of all boys and men | the most fair and second only to your master! He alone | exceeds your beauty, as much as there precedes the lesser fires the shining | moon and the evening star checks the other heavenly fires (qualis eras! procul en cunctis puerisque uirisque | pulchrior et tantum domino minor! illius unus | ante decor, quantum praecedit clara minores | luna faces quantumque alios premit Hesperos ignes; 2.6.34–37).” The praise of the boy pivots towards a praise of the master. The prettiest man owned the prettiest boy. The figure of thought is “Domitianic” in that the very same requirement that the socially superior surpass the socially inferior in all things is on display in the emperor poems too. And, naturally, one has every reason to doubt that a boy chosen specifically for his beauty is really so thoroughly eclipsed by an older man’s good looks. 261  See Hegel, 1977:111–119. See also Gunderson, 2000b:93–94.

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The claritas of Ursus that outshines that of his slave comes from social claritudo, and Statius’ verses reveal a need for socially sensitive sight-­ organs as the means of seeing the “truth” of the poem. That is, it is the social fiction writ large that underwrites the non-­objective optics that structures the praise of the boy, a praise that means that “his” praise will never be “his own” for long since whatever might seem to be owned by a slave always belongs already to the master instead. And this is true “in law”—an injustice in its own right . . . —but also “in verse.” The poet remakes the bonds that subject the inferior, gilds these bonds, and then hands them back to the master. The distraught master is being “consoled” for the loss of his slave by being reminded of the glory of his own mastery. A beautiful aspect of himself is gone, but his own resplendent beauty remains. As a consolatory strategy there is something to be said for drawing the person affected away from his grief and towards more abstract considerations. Some higher meaning should be adduced. But in this instance the abstraction the master embraces is the narcissistic satisfaction he derives from being bathed in an ambrosial song about his own power. If the boy’s surface is mastered by his master, the boy’s interiority has also been fully appropriated by him as well. We have already been informed that he “wants” to be a slave, but we also learn that his psychic life follows his master’s lead. Or, rather, we are told that the surface from which one infers depth was always tracking the master’s psychic state. This more refined version of the first thesis allows us to set in parallel the ultimately opaque “true feelings” of the boy with the likewise inscrutable “true feelings” of the poet. “It was with you that he was both gloomy and gay not ever | was he his own: he used to take his own expression from your face (tecum tristisque hilarisque nec umquam | ille suus, uultumque tuo sumebat ab ore; 2.6.52–53).” The poem is everywhere obsessed with taking its cue from the master’s face. The master is tristis. The poem takes on the appropriate uultus. The poem is “never its own” even as we know, of course, that there is some other self held in reserve: the poet is not really sad; he may not even like Ursus; and, significantly, the person reading the poem at this moment is not Ursus, and Statius fully expects a non-­Ursine readership. But this just reproduces the structure of the poem out at the next level: all of us “yous” of a certain station can and should expect to perform elaborate displays of psychic mimicry as a fitting gesture of submission. The rest of us “yous” are asked to admire the skill with which such varied expressions are put on (so as to be shown off to another).

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312  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity The most precious thing is not the boy, says this precious poem. The most precious thing to be found in the poem is the master’s sorrow itself. The narrator conjures a lavish, expensive funeral offered to the youth: “No servile flame was offered to the departed (sed nec seruilis adempto | ignis; 2.6.85–86).” The poem again deploys its logic of negation: “It was not . . . but then again it was.” The poem again gives the boy his glorious “liberated” due without ever really offering it to him. He was free in spirit. His funeral was not that of a slave. But, when alive, he was a seruus. Expensive incense burned for him. A catalog of exotic luxuries is unfurled.262 The final item, though, offers the transcendent climax of the list: “AND the master’s tears (et domini fletus; 2.6.89). As the spices smoke and waft away, these tears become the one, true offering: “these alone the ashes absorbed, | these the pyre continuously drinks (hos tantum hausere fauillae, | hos bibit usque rogus; 2.6.89–90).” The past shifts to the present. Hausere is succeeded by “forever drinking.” Against the “exhaustion” of mere material wealth (exhausit; 2.6.86) we set the infinitude of the master’s precious tears. The narrator avers that he knows just how the dead boy felt. Nothing was more pleasing to him than this offering of sorrow (miseris acceptius umbris | quam gemitus; 2.6.92–93). The poem ends with an end to tears. A measure is set upon grief: Pone, precor, questus (2.6.103). The thing that allows one to stop weeping? Why, it is the prospect of getting another boy. The poem does not put it so crassly, but the underlying conceit is indeed gross. “Perhaps The Fates and the very boy himself will give you another . . . (alium tibi Fata Phileton, | forsan et ipse dabit; 2.6.103–104).”263 To a certain sort of bereft person, this notion cannot come as the satisfactory close to a poem of consolation. “But there will never be another such as my brother!” is what a different species of grief replies. Here, though, we are assured that one really could just find another pretty boy. And the ghost of the dead boy will, “perhaps” (forsan), lend a hand in finding another happy victim of the master’s lusts. More politely the poem instead says that Fate will be so kind as to furnish him with “a fine character and bearing.” And a happy-­faced Fate (gaudens) will also be so kind as to “teach” the boy a “similar love.” Amor is the poem’s last word. The situation has been strategically refigured throughout 262  See Zeiner, 2005:102–106 for a discussion of the details of these luxury offerings. 263  It is gross, but with a fine intertextual pedigree. Compare the end of Vergil’s second Eclogue: “You will find another Alexis, if this one scorns you (inuenies alium, si te hic fastidit, Alexin. 2.73).” Nevertheless the sociology of the original is very much different: a shepherd longed for his master’s pretty boy-­toy (Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin, | delicias domini; 2.1–2). The boy does not die; the master does not lose.

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this scene. The not especially pleasant idea that one can go out and buy love and beauty has turned into Fate looking after her favorites by providing them with ethically wonderful favorites to have and to hold. The poem teaches us to fall in love with love and so forget our tears. The thing’s easily done, provided you’ve got the cash.

v.  Dead boy: poor master-­dad, said the master-­poet (Siluae 2.1) Who knows if Ursus ever got another pretty boy? But the Fates have already supplied the reader with an equally pretty poem of Statius. The second book of the Siluae began with a consolation to Melior on the occasion of the death of a puer who had been a puer, of a boy who had been a slave but become a son.264 Many of the figures of thought present in 2.6 have already been deployed in the course of 2.1.265 In fact Siluae 2.6 is in many ways merely a compressed version of Siluae 2.1.266 Given that Melior is the dedicatee of the second book, we are forced to conclude that there is something special and programmatic about “losing the boy and gaining the poem” within the Siluae. A survey of some of the most salient repetitions will be useful. But we will try to focus directly on the question of the “poetics of masterly sorrow” throughout. As has been argued more than once, the language and thought of the Siluae is highly contrived. And the constant display of cleverness tends to defuse one’s subjective engagement with the topics at hand: the narrator’s radiant wit tends to eclipse the narrated contents. The parrot poem is paradigmatic in this regard. And the end of Siluae 2.6 is not especially affecting in any case. The implication that the boy is easily replaced blunts one’s passions which were likely not very keen to begin with: he was not your boy; he was Ursus’ boy. In fact—and we will see a version of this same

264 Newlands,  2011:65: “Antiquity offers few literary parallels for commemorating the death of a child; Glaucias moreover was of low status, the son of freed slaves.” 265  For example, in both poems we have a comparison of the boy to classical beauties who inspire homoerotic desire. This is somewhat unnerving in the case of a foster-­son. See Statius, Siluae 2.1.112–2.1.113: “Apollo would rush to swap him for Hyacinthus. Hercules would make good his loss of Hylas (Oebaliden illo praeceps mutaret Apollo, | Alcides pensaret Hylan).” Asso, 2010:684: “There is no doubt that Statius’ strategy in consoling Melior relies heavily on authorizing his patron to mourn his boy as one would mourn a son; but why would Statius mention Hercules and Hylas, and Apollo and Hyacinthus, and thereby complicate the fostering frame?” 266  Hardie, 1983:67: “[T]he poem is a clear twin for 2,1.”

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314  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity theme with the Earinus poem—it is not clear that we are not supposed to be thinking of these boys as “soon to die” one way or the other. They are certain to “lose their bloom” in relatively short order. Each beautiful boy is always already inviting a beautiful poem, a poem that will replace and displace the boy, a poem that will, in its crystalline permanence, capture forever the (for the master) profound experience of savoring, losing, and replacing that surrounds these precious objects. These poems articulate and celebrate the luxurious affective indulgence of the master who loves-­ and-­loses, who savors the spring knowing that (alas!) it will end soon enough. The poem is the bitter-­sweet rival of the boy: it kills him off all the while offering sweet solace. Quod tibi praerepti, Melior, solamen alumni improbus ante rogos et adhuc uiuente fauilla ordiar? abruptis etiam nunc flebile uenis uulnus hiat, magnaeque patet uia lubrica plagae, cum iam egomet cantus et uerba medentia saeuus consero, tu planctus lamentaque fortia mauis odistique chelyn surdaque auerteris aure. intempesta cano: citius me tigris abactis fetibus orbatique uelint audire leones. nec si tergeminum Sicula de uirgine carmen affluat aut siluis chelys intellecta ferisque, mulceat insanos gemitus. stat pectore demens luctus et admoto latrant praecordia tactu.  What solace for the fosterling stolen from you, Melior, impudently before the very pyre and as the embers yet live do I undertake? With severed arteries even now a tearful wound gapes. The treacherous passage of the great wound lies exposed. While presently I myself incantations (cantus) and healing words fiercely weave together, you for your part wailing and mighty laments prefer. You hate my lyre and turn away with deaf ear. Untimely is my song. Sooner would a tiger deprived of his cubs or destitute lions wish to hear me. Not if the triple song of the Sirens

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Mastering the submission game: six case studies  315 did wash over you nor if the lyre to which forests and beasts gave ear, would it sooth your mad groans of woe. Fixed in your breast is mad grief and your breast roars at the soothing touch brought to it. Statius, Siluae 2.1.1-­13

Siluae 2.1 composes the now-­ familiar triangle in its first two lines: addressee, dead boy, narrator.267 The addressee is sad; the boy is precious; the narrator is “bold” and “transgressive” in daring to speak on such an occasion. As ever, the enjambed words shout the key terms at the reader: improbus (“brazen”), starts the second line; ordiar (“to start”) starts the third and so ends the syntax of the first sentence. He sings of dead boys and a man. All of the programmatic words for the project more generally are here at the opening: “I myself,” “song,” “lyre,” “I sing,” “poem,” and (yet again) “lyre” (egomet, cantus, chelys, cano, carmen, chelys) are piled one atop the other in a contrived concatenation of canorousness. See 2.1.5, 2.1.7, 2.1.8, 2.1.10, and 2.1.11. The “untimely” and “bold” qualities of the poem have the scare quotes set about them by the narrator himself. Song as magic incantation as healing spell is old news for the poetry crowd. What boldness is on offer can be seen in the poem’s stylistic temerity rather than in any sociological risk-­taking.268 As far as the Siluae in general are concerned, now is always a good time for just this sort of verse. With a little huffing and puffing, the ashes of the fire that cremated the boy can be kept alive at least long enough for us to sing about them: “while the spark of the funeral pyre yet lives (adhuc uiuente fauilla; 2.1.2).”269 And

267  See Zeiner’s collection of contrasts between the treatment of the boys in 2.1 and 2.6 (Zeiner, 2005:170–171). 268  For example, Statius has chosen to deploy a literal and almost prosaic language of wounds in connection with psychic suffering. And praecordia latrare (“barking breast”) is either ridiculous or sublime, depending on your mood. Odysseus’ heart did something very like this at the opening of Odyssey 20: κραδίη δέ οἱ ἔνδον ὑλάκτει (20.13). The image was bold. It is readily excused in Homer since it opens onto an epic simile: ὡϲ δὲ κύων ἀμαλῇϲι περὶ ϲκυλάκεϲϲι βεβῶϲα (20.14). Now we push the idea further by trying to touch a mad dog. No apology is, it would seem, needed since people who complain about hearts-­as-­barking-­dogs are in fact indicting themselves on a charge of not knowing their Homer. 269  Note also the use and placement of improbus in the line: a “presumptuous” poet is speaking. See Newlands, 2011:66.

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316  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity those who care more about poems than boys—and who among us does not?—will have noted that we seem to be reworking Ovid’s Fasti in this line.270 The permanence of the poem itself, its claim upon the memory of future generations, stands as a ϲῆμα-­upon-­the-­ϲῆμα of the boy, a supposititious memorial that insinuates itself in the place of real memories for a dead person: “left to us is remembrance” (nobis meminisse relictum; 2.1.55). And what we remember is another allusion, another intertext. The real improbity would be to in fact care about the fate of boys. The narrator “frees” the addressee to indulge in his sorrows. Only an oxymoron will do on an occasion such as this: “Master your savage sorrow by setting it free (aegrumque dolorem | libertate doma; 2.1.14–15).” The dead boy would probably have preferred never to have been mastered. And he would likely also have liked to have been given his own radical libertas. The boy was freed, but he was also only “freed up” to be Melior’s boy.271 What if he and his parents were freed and allowed to go off to their own little farm? That is, what if they had been freed to go lead their lives as specifically their own lives and not lives lived on someone else’s terms? But the narrator extends no sympathy to the ex-­slave as he plays around with the language of lordship and bondage for the master’s amusement. In short, the boy arrives as something pre-­forgotten within the conceptual framework of the poem’s self-­satisfied rhetoric. His perspective does not matter. When we do get to the life of the boy it is suffused with euphemism, special pleading and bald fiction.272 We are only able to reach that point by first passing through the gate of false dreams. In this case we signal our preference for that passage with a (by now familiar) assertion that the narrator is not lying when he tells us these tall tales (nil ueris adfingo bonis; 2.1.50). And yet we know that he is lying. Given the amazing facts of the situation, is it any surprise that the words “Is it any surprise that . . .?” 270 Ovid, Fasti 4.553–54 of Triptolemus and the successful-­but-­not-­successful bid to make him immortal: “And on the hearth she covered the boy’s body with living embers (inque foco corpus pueri uiuente fauilla | obruit).” 271  See the first line of Martial, Epigrams 6.28: “That famed freedman of Melior . . . (Libertus Melioris ille notus, . . . )” But what if he was only freed on his death-­bed? 272  See Bernstein, 2007:195 on the metamythology of the poem: “Servile birth is no longer a cause of shame in the world Statius has constructed from mythological comparisons.” Implicit in the following remark of Asso is an insight that addressing an unexpressed anxiety—namely, “What will polite society say about your connection to this person?”—is a key guiding principle of the poem. Meanwhile, “Let me celebrate your relationship” is a mask that the poem wears. Asso, 2010:666: “We may conclude that what might have required Statius’ discretion and nuanced language is not the actual bond that Melior and Glaucias might have shared but the effeminate style (mollitia) of Melior’s mourning and the lavish funerals to grieve for the loss of a socially inferior person.”

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(Quid mirium?) appear twice in this poem. The question is only posed one more time in the whole of the Siluae.273 But the reader may well admire the chutzpah of the narrator who is foisting upon us this narration. As with Siluae 3.3 and Siluae 2.6, the biography of the dead individual is turned into a tendentious collection of recherché conceits that rewrite the sort of social scripts that are more familiar in our elite sources. The straw is spun into golden verses. In fact, that seems to be the service that the Siluae are regularly providing, a sort of verse transmogrification that is designed to sync up with a specific social fiction. The master owes the slave such a lavish funeral because he was his “quiet place” and “port of refuge amidst old age”: tu domino requies portusque senectae (2.1.70). This description seems pleasant enough provided one is willing to accept a specific vision of the domain of “private life” to which the boy appertains. But, rather than sinking into such reveries, we are probably supposed to note instead that requies and portus have been deployed unusually and “poetically.” This is High Style. Such refined delights represent the acme of luxury, good taste, and distinction. The narrator jumps to his next agenda item: the boy was a “noble slave.”274 In fact, the narrator has already put us on notice that this was coming by speaking of daddy Melior as dominus in 2.1.70.275 Glaucias was freed but he still has a dominus. A complex and scrupulous social accounting has been suppressed. We do not lay out the situation by saying, “You were a slave who was a comfort for his old master, but then you became a free person who became a son.” Several lines are dedicated to refusing the idea that this boy was bought and sold the way other boys are. The vulgar flesh-­market is conjured and shooed away. But in the course of conjuring this abomination, the narrator offers a moment of potential self-­ description. Creepy servility involves polished little pros who know how to hawk themselves. They are too canny and too knowing: “speaking premeditated witticisms and studied phrases (compositosque sales 273  Seek out and fail to marvel at Siluae 2.1.69, 2.1.175, and 5.3.162. 274  Bernstein,  2005:267: “Statius emphasizes Glaucias’ ethical qualities and the elevated register of his speech in order to address the potential inconsistency between his servile birth and his present high status in Melior’s household.” Zeiner, 2005:167: “Statius’ description may be defensive, as the repeated phrase quid mirum (69, 175) may imply. Perhaps Statius is responding to onlookers who had criticized the degree of Melior’s affection, as manifested through excessive lamentation and a particularly expensive funeral.” 275  Can we really summarize this as a poem about the pain of losing a foster-­child when the social terminology is so fluid throughout? Zeiner,  2005:162: “Statius alternately calls Melior dominus (51, 70, 76, 80), pater (103, 119), and erus (129), while Glaucias is puer, a word that can mean both son and slave. Despite this deliberate ambiguity, their paternal-­filial affection is portrayed as purely nature, serious, and sincere.”

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318  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity meditataque uerba locutus; 2.1.74).”276 This vile-­and-­cheap type of slave hunts for his own master with an over-­free, wanton, and even precociously sexual spirit: he is lasciuus and he is trying to put himself in charge of the transaction. But an unsympathetic reader of the Siluae might be tempted to use very similar language of the narrator himself.277 Note, for example, that meditataque uerba is going to be used of the parrot later in the book (2.4.7). So, our narrator himself is performing “premeditated witticisms” and “studied phrases” even as he parrots the very words “studied phrases.” The boy’s origin is praised for its distance from that sort of world. He is a domestic in every sense of the word: Melior’s home was his home. In fact, the boy’s parents were themselves beloved parts of the master’s property. One pauses to note that they are “dear to the master’s household” and not “dear to the master” (dominique penatibus olim carus uterque parens; 2.1.76–77). It would not do to suggest that they were not, after all, property. The parents were freed at the boy’s request, or, rather, for his pleasure (in tua gaudia liber; 2.1.77). The delightful boy is given something to delight him, his parents’ freedom. And the moment is motivated by the narrator. They were freed, “lest you should complain about your family stock (ne quererere genus; 2.1.78).” The boy was an Etruscus in the making. The poem then expends a great deal of energy painting the portrait of the happy mother and father handing over their baby to Melior. The scene of birth is re-­written to star the master who excitedly grabs the boy, raises him to the sky, and claims him for his own: “But snatched at once from the womb, the master exultantly raised the boy aloft and, as the boy greeted the stars with his first glorious cry, mentally made him his own (raptum sed protinus aluo | sustulit exsultans ac prima lucida uoce | astra salutantem dominus sibi mente dicauit; 2.1.78–80).”278 He cuddles the baby and, simply because he has bestowed his masterly affection upon it, believes himself to be the “birth father” (et genuisse putauit; 2.2.81). Narrator and master “exult” (exultans) in their act of appropriation of the boy. Grab him, raise him to the stars, and he is yours!279 276  Martial uses a number of the same images in his second poem about Glaucia. See the catastae in the opening line of Martial, Epigrams 6.29.1. 277  “Lascivious Statius, the Author of the Siluae (and Thebaid)”: paulum arma nocentia, Thebae, | ponite: dilecto uolo lasciuire sodali. (Statius, Siluae 1.5.8–9). 278  Notice that raptus itself is “harsh”: it reminds us of people snatched away by death or raped or otherwise done some sort of violence. It is even used thus in this same poem as line 208: in the phrase hic finis rapto, rapto means “the boy who was snatched away by death.” Or, if you want to give the words a sexy gothic twist, it means “the boy who was ravished by death.” 279  Zeiner,  2005:164: “Glaucias’ ‘naturalization’ into Melior’s household culminates in a recounting of the ritualistic susceptio or tollere liberos by which normally the paterfamilias

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Dominus sibi mente dicauit is thoroughly bizarre and only gets odder the longer one looks at it. Why would a master need to appropriate and mark out for himself something that was already his (sibi dicare)? And why would the moment of vocal appropriation be described as somehow also silent and internal (mente)?280 Such only confesses to some odd defect in the moment of (re- and hyper-)appropriation by a man of that which is already “by rights” his own. As if the (imperfect) (over-)appropriation of the boy were not creepy enough, the religious valences of dicauit mean that one hears both “he proclaimed the child his own” and “he consecrated the child to himself,” with the odd proviso, mente tossed in. In many ways the absurdity of the over-­wrought phrase is better justified if we take this moment too as another scene of self-­description, of “metapoetics.” It is the poet who has snatched the historical moment of birth away into an Elysian grove of which he is the lord. He has psychically appropriated the scene. He has re- and over-­written it. And in so doing he masters both the voice of the baby—“a clear voice greeting the stars” is a poeticism and works as poetry about poetry—as well as the voice of the master. And both voices are “consecrated to the Muses (of hyperbolic praise poetry) in his own name.” That is, the phrase sibi dicauit is of itself something that the poet “appropriates-­and-­sacralizes for his own benefit.” Later, during the funeral we learn that the parents were sad, but they “marveled” when they beheld Melior’s sorrow (sed attoniti te spectauere parentes; 2.1.174). The biological mother and father are summoned in ­precisely to be witnesses to the Melior show: his pain matters, and it is the focal point of the scene. The narrator takes Melior’s violent appropriation (raptus . . . ) and reconfigures it as a moment where a sort of justice was done.281 The narrator “boldly” asks that Nature allow him to claim that the closest kinship need not be furnished by blood.282 In fact, giving birth to kids is in its own way and seen from the right angle—that is, from the perspective of this and only this contrived argument . . . —quite vulgar.

legitimates his natural-­ born child as his own by raising it up and naming it.” Vollmer, 1898:326: “sustulit: term. techn. vom Vater, der das Kind als sein eigenes anerkennt.” 280  Vollmer, 1898:326: “mente: vgl. Verg. A. X 628; hier Gegensatz natu.” 281  If one were to decide that Glaucias was a sexual favorite of Melior then the use of that word is all the more appalling: raped from the mother’s breast that he might be raped . . . 282  See Newlands, 2002:164 for an introduction to the way Statius celebrates the domination of nature. One need only extend the thesis from the narrow question of real estate and out to all places where even the most attenuated sense of “ownership”—even the ownership of a mere poetical conceit . . .—eventuates in a “right” to bend nature to one’s will.

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320  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity The best sort of filiation is “elective,” but only where it is the master who is doing the selecting (natos genuisse necesse est, | elegisse iuuat; 2.1.85).283 The spectacular funeral of the boy takes up a substantial percentage of the poem’s lines. The expensive spoils of the world are consumed upon his pyre. Scents from around the globe surround him. The narrator asserts that Melior was ready to spend the entirety of his now loathed riches upon the affair. And so our focus shifts from the pyre to Melior’s purse to, unsurprisingly, Melior himself. The narrator steps forth again as an eye-­witness who guarantees the veracity of his fantastical tale. Melior was so distraught that “ . . . | I was afraid for him!”: “A sense of dread lays hold of my heart. How you seemed at the funeral’s end, standing next to the pyre, Melior who once upon a time was superlatively serene: I was deeply afraid for you. (Horror habet sensus. qualem te funere summo | atque rogum iuxta, Melior placidissime quondam, | extimui! 2.1.166–168).” We can note the contrived articulation of “A sense of dread lays hold of my heart” in horror habet sensus. The narrator now (pretends that he) shudders to look back on how he (pretended that he) shuddered when . . .: these are meditata uerba if ever I heard them. Flip the phrase around instead: the sensus itself here contains a species of horror. The poem’s meaning, common sense, and sentimentality (sensus) are full of something horrific and at which we probably should tremble, namely the poem evinces a wanton disregard for anything other than a forced perspective that is complicit with the social forces that structure the moment. The final segment of the poem resembles a philosophical consolation. But this resemblance need not be mistaken for any deep engagement with philosophy. We are just doing the done thing, deploying some high-­culture commonplaces about death, and adding, of course, a few Statian twists. The poem “interrupts” its own flow to announce that Mercury has announced, and very much to the narrator’s own delight, that the boy has gone to Elysium (Quid mihi gaudenti proles Cyllenia uirga|nuntiat? . . .  2.1.189–190). A distinguished already-­dead gentleman has taken the boy under his wing. Blaesus, a deceased friend of Melior, was seen shepherding the youth around the underworld, assuaging his worries, and introducing him to all of the right people. Blaesus even initially thinks the boy 283  Newlands, 2011:87: “A pithy concluding sententia whose sentiment reflects contemporary imperial discourse about the political advantages of adoption.” Still, expedient ad hoc cleverness is not the same thing as a coherent theory of family. Zeiner, 2005:171: “[In Siluae 4.8] the distinction between natural-­born and adopted children is paramount, despite Statius’ earlier dismissal of the importance of paternal bloodline (2.1.82–105).” What is coherent is the desire to exploit the possibilities of family when praising an addressee (Zeiner, 2005:172).

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to be one of his own grandchildren, that is how non-­servile the child seems to him (et ignota credit de stirpe nepotum; 2.1.199). The general plot of this moment can be compared to the climax of Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam: the dead son’s grandfather greets him in heaven and teaches him the course of the stars, etc.284 But the emphasis in the Siluae is on social respectability and the legitimate reproduction of social relations. The “cosmic perspective” as such has been replaced by an obsession with respectability.285 The next segment of the poem likewise feels vaguely philosophical, but it will not do to push the discourse too hard in that direction. The narrator reminds us that all things pass. And so the cosmic perspective does indeed make it into Siluae 2.1.286 But the narrator at once slips in a key term and twists it: genus and status emerge as concerns, but again as concerns of the socially sensitive and not the philosopher. “The people is a mortal race. And who would lament the death of a commons destined to die? (nam populus mortale genus, plebisque caducae | quis fleat interitus? 2.1.212–213).” The claim is slightly off from the tragico-­philosophical meditations on human nature in Seneca.287 The shift is narratological: “the people” is not “we the people” or “we” more simply. The word populus is too political. It objectifies and distances. The same can and should be said of plebs in this same line. The net result is a verse that, to the uncharitable, reads a lot more like, “Why bother crying over common folk” than it does like a broader reflection on the human condition as offered by one who shares it. “We all die” does appear eventually—ibimus omnes, | ibimus . . . (2.1.218–219) and nos anxia plebes, | nos miseri (2.1.223–224)—but the notion does not arrive before one suspects that a different relationship to the death-­genre is possible. Namely, in contradistinction to the vulgar bodily politic, the poetic genus is capable of offering a species of immortality. And this conceit will offer us our close to the poem. The dead Glaucias is finally named, but only so that he can be summoned as a not-­dead consoler of Melior as the poem draws to a close: tu . . . tu . . . The boy is 284  See Seneca, Consolatio ad Marciam 25.2. 285  The poem’s interest in respectability orients much of Bernstein, 2005. 286 See Seneca, Consolatio ad Marciam 26.6: the cosmos itself is going to give way when the Stoic ecpyrosis arrives. “And when the time arrives at which the cosmos set upon self-­renewal extinguishes itself . . . (Et cum tempus aduenerit quo se mundus renouaturus extinguat . . .).” 287  See, for example, the Chorus in Seneca’s Oedipus: “Whatever we mortals suffer, whatever we do, it comes from on high . . . (quidquid patimur mortale genus, | quidquid facimus uenit ex alto, . . . 983–984).

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322  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity commanded to appear and to dry Melior’s tears. The narrator orders Glaucias to make joyful Melior’s nights and to fill them with sweet, face-­to face conversations. Glaucias is even told to say that he has not died (tu pectora mulce, | tu prohibe manare genas noctesque beatas | dulcibus alloquiis et uiuis uultibus imple | et periisse nega, . . . 2.1.230–233). The memory of Glaucias lives on and this same memory will comfort Melior. That is perhaps the way one might put it today in a more contemporary rhetoric of consolation. The poem’s much more vivid way of expressing this idea is effectively over-­vivid. Viuis uultibus implies an undead Glaucias: the bloom is still in his cheeks. And the words, “I am not dead” are a sweet lie. The narrator uses tricks of the poetic trade to do away with the sad fact of the mortale genus, the race of man, a race fated to die. The end of the poem silently reiterates and rewrites the earlier injunction with its new imperatives. Ne quererere genus, said line 78. The boy was not going to complain about his stock. But now his genus has not only risen out from the slave quarters but transcended the common lot of “mankind,” or, rather, “we, the populus.” The puppet-­ master narrator orders the dead boy to serve the master-­and-­father’s happiness all over again. Tell him sweet lies. Smile at him. Chat with him. Serve his pleasure. Behind the smiling ghost, the narrator who ensures that the ghost smiles. The poem’s final image turns, it seems, to Glaucias’ biological family. Glaucias is told to “go and recommend, as you are able, wretched parents and bereft sister (desolatamque sororem, | qui potes, miseros perge insinuare parentes; 2.1.233–234).” The poem has a one-­and-­a-­half-­line coda that momentarily seems to back away from Melior. The ambiguities of this almost-­couplet offer a fitting climax to a poem about beginnings, endings, birth, death, dissembled servility, and hapless, helpless authority. Insinuare means too many things. With perge it could assuredly mean go to and reach and then make your way into. But in that case we would expect a preposition: insinuare + in . . .  . This absolute use with neither a preposition nor a dative is a clipped sociological use: “make A favorably known to B.” The narrator says, “Look after your folks and their interests.” Accordingly, though Glaucias sinks into the soul of Melior and talks to him, he never reaches into the hearts of his likewise mourning kin. Instead Glaucias is ordered to set them too into the thoughts of Melior. The only sinus is Melior’s. Just as he snatched the baby away at the moment of birth and tucked it into his sinus (amplexusque sinu tulit; 2.1.81), so here too, tucking people into the folds of the master and his feelings is all that really matters. Meanwhile the poem as a whole is full of “insinuations.” These various strategies at self-­recommendation hide the poem’s own rather suspect

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“genealogy.” The poem recommends itself to Melior by underwriting a variety of self-­serving disappropriations: “It is fully and legitimately yours, if it makes you happy.” The poem recommends itself to Melior by claiming that origins can be erased by fiat and that ascents to the sublime are readily achieved. The endless song that keeps the poem alive and so too the memory of this beautiful love of Melior for Glaucias insinuates itself into the reader’s good graces by ensuring that it will do what it takes to get the job done and that it has what it takes to get the job done (qui possum, cf. 2.1.234). The ennobled cultural object that is this poem is a self-­siring supposititious child that insinuates itself into the place of Glaucias, the disappropriated child of servile parents. And this very same object argues for a non-­ normative poetics of genealogy. That almost sounds appealing. However, we need to note that in practice this poetics is determined to cater to the already powerful. It panders to them with “premeditated witticisms and studied phrases” even as it sneers at the sort who would do that and claims that the magic triangle of occasion, addressee, and narrator are so very far removed from that sort of vulgar marketplace. The luxuriant pleasure of weeping gets the second book of the Siluae started. Dulcibus alloquiis et uiuis uultibus, “sweet, intimate conversations and a face full of life,” will accompany use through the remainder of the book’s body. The narrator indulges our passion for self-­indulgence. And he assures us that wherever it is we want to say our delicious, delightful deliciae come from and whatever it is we want to do with and about them, nobody hereabouts is going to complain. Indeed, the pleasures themselves and the “biological parents” of those pleasures can be counted upon to participate in this (for the master) pleasant fiction. The mastered world assures the master that it cannot be happy unless and until he is happy. And so we see the pleasure of Domitianic fiction more generally: everything will be for the best (for some) if everyone just agrees to pretend that everything is in fact for the best. The fine-­spun poetry of a deductum carmen knows full well to be indifferent to the revolting indecorousness of everybody’s everything. And I suppose that that means we are finally ready to fail to take a look at the mangled genitals of Earinus.

vi.  Castrated boy: lucky master, says the poet (Siluae 3.4) The loss of the beautiful boy when coupled with the purported emotional saturation of the boy’s owner has given us one of our key figures of the

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324  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity poetic project and its self-­staging. The narrative voice springs to life at the moment of this death and it leaps into a very specific gap as a mediating figure that makes good a hole in the world by spinning a specific set of fictions about this same world. The correlate of the dead boys and grieving masters is the happy, healthy boy and the exalted emperor, or, to give them names, Earinus and Domitian.288 The twist in this case, though, is that the boy is castrated and that, instead of a hyperbolic portrait of a master’s sorrow, we see the disavowal of any defect, loss, or pain on the boy’s part. Neither boy nor master is sad. In fact, they have never been happier. Siluae 3.4 is one of the more “charming” pieces in the collection. This poem has it all: the humorous and light (for Statius . . . ) touches, the allusions, the intertexts, the political highs, the radiant boy.289 It comes immediately after the poem to Etruscus about his loss. And accordingly, it juxtaposes the son who lost a glorious imperial freedman father with an emperor who has and holds a sublimely beautiful castrated slave boy. The consolatory poem about happy submission is succeeded by a celebratory poem about happy submission. And like the consolatory poems, Siluae 3.4 is also a poem about reparations and the irreparable. The opening of the poem addresses the locks of Earinus. His lovely hair has just been cut and his curls are being sent to a shrine of Aesculapius as  an offering. One has no choice but to think of Catullus 66 and its Callimachean antecedent: “That same Conon saw me in the heavenly abode, hair from Berenice’s head, shining brightly . . . (idem me ille Conon caelesti in limine uidit | e Bereniceo uertice caesariem | fulgentem clare . . . Carmina 66.7–9).” We are in the palace of High Art. And within this palace we find ourselves in the salon that has been set aside for lavish, self-­aware poems on “small topics” that are in fact simultaneously speaking of the most lofty affairs.290 A salient difference, though: when Catullus writes caesaries, it is unlikely that one will promptly think of Julius Caesar. 288  Henricksén,  1997 attempts to build a biography of the youth out of what we know from the poems about him. 289 Hardie,  1983:121: this is an epic-­ style expansion of an epigrammatic genre, the anathematikon. 290  Newlands, 2002:106: “[T]his poem lies fully within a distinguished literary tradition of court poetry that uses fantasy to play upon the ruler’s sexuality and divinity. In particular, with its metaphorical theme of haircutting, Silv. 3.4 looks to Callimachus’ Coma Berenices

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But head-­and-­Caesar is precisely what Statius’ poem is all about, as, of course, is the original story: Berenice “sacrifices” her hair that the king might be safe. But in Statius’ poem nothing bad could ever happen to Caesar. And the hair has been lost as a glorious, free gift and not owing to a moment where someone felt anxious, at least there was no anxiety about the fate of power itself. Accipe laudatos, iuuenis Phoebeie, crines quos tibi Caesareus donat puer, accipe laetus intonsoque ostende patri. sine dulce nitentes comparet atque diu fratris putet esse Lyaei. forsan et ipse comae numquam labentis honorem praemetet atque alio clusum tibi ponet in auro. Pergame, pinifera multum felicior Ida, illa licet sacrae placeat sibi nube rapinae (nempe dedit superis illum quem turbida semper Iuno uidet refugitque manum nectarque recusat), at tu grata deis pulchroque insignis alumno misisti Latio, placida quem fronte ministrum Iuppiter Ausonius pariter Romanaque Iuno aspiciunt et uterque probant.  Accept, Apolline youth, these celebrated locks which the Caesarean boy/slave (puer) gives to you, receive them gladly and show them to your father with his unshorn hair. Let him their sweet sheen compare and long imagine that they belong to his brother Bacchus, perhaps even he will the glory of his never falling hair cut short and for you deposit it enclosed in a second golden box. Pergamum, so much more blessed than pine-­covered Ida no matter how pleased with itself it might be at its cloud that hid the sacred plunder (assuredly the same gave to the gods he whom ever-­scowling Juno beholds. She avoids his touch. She refuses the nectar he pours.) But you, (Venus), pleasing to the gods and distinguished by your fair foster-­son, and to Catullus’ Carmen 66, court poems which deal with highly sensitive topics with imagination, and also pathos.”

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326  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity sent to Latium a steward with calm brow at whom the Ausonian Juppiter and Roman Juno alike look and of whom each approves. Statius, Siluae 3.4.6–19

The focus on the sublime register early in the poem presents to the reader a super-­human dimension that is evaluating itself in terms of the human. The celestial hopes to live up to what one can find down here. As written, the gods are imagined as finding this hair offering so wondrous that they are confused and perhaps even rivalrous. Such, at least, is the conceit. Apollo, when he sees the hair, is likely to imagine that these are the tresses of his brother Bacchus (3.4.9). Apollo might well elect to cut off some of his own hair and add it as a supplemental gift (3.4.10–11). Ida may be proud of its rape-­story, but Pergamum is much more felix still. Here one’s brow might well furrow, and not for the same reason that kill-­joy Juno frowns (quem turbida semper | Iuno uidet; 3.4.14–15).291 On the one hand, things are better on earth than in heaven, so it is perhaps misguided to worry too much about the shabby state of affairs up above when there are much more satisfying things to ponder here below. But, on the other hand, this story of “the less good” version tells us something we are not acknowledging about the better version. Namely, Ida’s felicity— and smug self-­ satisfaction (licet . . . placeat sibi . . . 3.4.13)—comes from being the site of a sexual assault. Of course, it is a “sacred plunder” (sacrae rapinae), so that changes everything. Or does it? The Siluae constantly deploy this sort of thinking, a species of argument that lets the consequent rewrite the meaning of the antecedent. It is an honor to serve Jove and to give him so much pleasure. Then comes a chain of rewrites: “Therefore” is an honor to have so pleased Jove that Jove was moved to rape. But Jove did not rape, instead there was a “holy rapine.” Nobody has a problem with any of this other than Juno, “of course.” And, further, maybe it’s not such a big story in any case: placeat sibi . . . This is all clever and breezy, but in the Siluae we see a cleverness that keeps on being applied to a certain kind of project, namely the post facto legitimation of power’s impositions and the deprecation of any voice or 291  The idea itself is quite familiar. Compare Ovid, Fasti 6.43 and Metamorphoses 10.161. But fun is afoot: “[Statius establishes] a humorous contrast in marital concord between the imperial couple . . . and their imperial counterparts . . . : Juno could only sulk in jealousy over her consort’s Ganymede, but the new imperial cup-­ bearer secured the whole-­ hearted approval of both the emperor and empress.” (Verstraete, 1983:200)

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perspective that might complain: shrewish; humorless; insensitive to the literary tradition and its harmless clichés; uneducated in the Alexandrian refinements . . . Ganymede appears only so that he—and a collection of problematic associations that surround him . . . —can be made to disappear just as quickly as he arrived. The focus returns to Pergamum, to the lucky thing that is associated with the lucky thing. Here we have another trope that is no mere trope: there is a contagion of good luck. Much in this world is “blessed by association.” And this is because the world itself hopes to also be “blessed by association.” That is, the lucky poet who sings a lucky song of a lucky boy stands to get in on a bit of the action. Only an illogical logic—but one that is by now very familiar—allows us to say that Pergamum is lucky. It is lucky because it sent to Latium a boy at whom the Ausonian Jupiter and Roman Juno both look and of whom they both approve. The placida fronte that hovers at the front of this sentence is “revelatory” in as much as it is a symptomatic moment where a smiling story is being told just as a sad one is being hidden away. Whose brow is calm? The most natural object to attach it to is the minister: this is the next noun and we have a line ending. So, the boy is at peace. But it also looks like we should attach the phrase to the emperor and his wife. Fine: everyone is cool, calm, and collected. And this is part of why things on earth are better than they are in heaven. But, then again, things on earth are just like they are in heaven. How else could Domitian turn into Ausonian Jove if there were not such a strong parallel? And so, the “calm brow” is more a rhetorical conjuring of a situation than a concrete description of a fact: the lone turbida hold-­out figure from Olympus has been “pacified” at Rome. There is no scowling Ausonian Juno. Instead, we have nothing but a collection of people who are quietly satisfied: the boy does not complain; the wife is pleased; and the man, well, licet placeat sibi . . . : he’s got what he wants, and how. A conjoint fabrication of genus and genre comes next. The narrative of the boy’s life begins with an “Alexandrian footnote” to an epic (uel sim.) antecedent that does not exist: Dicitur Idalios Erycis de uertice lucos . . . (3.4.21). “The story goes that . . .” The present poem briefly poses as an erudite rewrite of some lost master-­text. But it is instead a whole cloth fiction that weaves an ornate tapestry of mastery for the master himself. Venus, et al. are set onto the cloth after the prevailing fashion. And here the fashion is determined by “the dominant taste” which is very much supposed to line up with the “taste of the dominant.” The literary tradition

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328  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity qua tradition is evoked as mere ornament, golden lines that are threaded through the piece to give it its value. The dicitur misdirects in that the real allusion is to “court poetry” more generally and the way that a certain kind of poet says, “it is said” to a certain kind of audience. And the non-­ Domitianic reader is asked to extend some sort of complicit charity to the man awash in such self-­made treasures: “He says what one says . . .” This is how one sings to a prince. “Traditionally” one sings to him by inserting his (disruptive) story into tradition as if it were a moment of continuity. How many “variant myths” within the tradition are themselves a function of ad hoc socio-­political expedience? And is there a meta-­complicity in the fact that poets do not call one another out on this? Venus, who was on her way to Ida—she does not want to be late to another Judgement of Paris . . .?—visits Pergamum to see Earinus. She sees Earinus praying in a temple of Aesclepius (3.4.26). I wonder what he is praying for. The poem will never say. For my part, if my testicles had been destroyed, I can think of a prayer that I might make to a god of healing. But perhaps that is just me. And, so far as this poem is concerned, that really is “just me.” The poem as a whole does a very good job of never saying the very thing you might be thinking if you know too much about the concrete historical figure named Earinus. His castration has gone missing.292 Or, put more bluntly, the cut has been cut.293 In-­place-­of-­the-­cut comes the break-­with-­tradition that is presented as if it were a moment of continuity.

292  Henricksén, 1997:282 reconstructs as follows: “Because of his beauty (Stat. Silv. 3,4,26 ff.), Earinus seems from the very beginning to have been destined for Domitian the emperor (Palatino famulus deberis amori, ibid. 38), and consequently he must have arrived in Rome after Domitian’s ascension to the throne, i.e. in late 81 at the earliest. On his arrival, he was castrated, no doubt to make his youthful beauty last as long as possible by eliminating the onset of puberty.” Henricksén, 1997:283 suspects that Earinus was only two or three years old at this point. But I’m not sure how the “because of his beauty” thesis above really fits with someone that young. “Normative” ancient sexual predation starts a few years later, no? Someone is making a “speculative investment” and Statius is retroactively hiding as much by building a verse fantasy of a sort of “necessity” that a perma-­beautiful thing would “of course” be owed to and destined for the palace. A very ugly sociological substrate has been hidden away. The disagreeable matter of just which method of castration was employed can affect our timeline. See Henricksén,  1997:287: Earinus might be 13–15 in 94CE or, his preference, 16–18. Verstraete, 1983:200: “The poet attempts to mitigate the harsh reality of [Earinus’ castration] by introducing a fantasy of how the god Aesculapius was summoned from Pergamum to perform the surgery on his former protegé.” 293  Defenders of the notion that Earinus was a thlibas, i.e., that his testicles had been crushed in his infancy will need to forgive me for using the “wrong pun.” They can imagine some riff off of digitis comprimuntur instead: “the pressing has been suppressed”? See Henricksén, 1997:282n4 for eunuch-­making recipes.

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The motif of marveling reappears. Venus marvels at the boy, at his beauty (miratur puerile decus; 3.4.31). Again, there is no wound, quite the contrary. Then again, the next thing she looks at is his face and his hair (uultumque comasque | aspiciens, 3.4.31–32). That is, she looks at the very place where “one day” a different sort of cut will take place. And when that cut occurs, the hair will come back to this very spot. And that lovely, complete, perfect circle will be celebrated by the very poem in our hands. The cut will make it all whole, then. It’s the wrong cut, though, and the wrong whole. Venus is worried about the boy’s fate. She does not worry about his bodily integrity. She worries about his social integrity. “Neglected of Venus”—yes, the Latin phrase neglectus Veneri at 3.4.33 is forced and ­turgid . . .—might mean that something bad would happen to him. This bad thing is not castration or sexual abuse, venereal troubles most literal and fates that are not in the least hypothetical. Instead, the youth and beauty of this youthful beauty would be traumatized were he to be mastered by a lowly master. Move aside castration anxiety and fears of sexual assault. This is our great fear: humiliation that is insufficiently sublime. The goddess asks indignantly, “You?! Will you endure a squalid abode and a vulgar yoke of servitude? Heaven forfend! (tu sordida tecta iugumque | seruitii uulgare feres? procul absit; 3.4.33–34).” She offers an equally emphatic answer to the dreadful future she imagines: “I myself that | beauty will supply with a master it merits (ego isti | quem meruit formae dominum dabo; 3.4.34–35).” The focus has again shifted to the master and away from the slave. The discourse takes as its topic and speakers other characters, but the point of reference and the source of meaning is the owner of the slave. In this case, that owner is the emperor. Venus tells the boy to follow her. She will take him for a lovely ride on her magic chariot and give him as a “mighty gift to the lord (donum immane duci; 3.4.37).” The epithet has been ideologically transferred.294 The gift is immane only because the dux is himself immanis. Venus and the poem are insisting upon a short-­circuit. Objects and their values are connected to one another via a font and origin of meaning towards which all things must be oriented so that they can become what they must be if they are not to be abject things consigned to unlivable, unlovable lives. In order that the one-­dimensional Möbius strip that relates

294  Compare Zeiner, 2005:127 on the way that the narrator’s affection for rich people in a landscape morphs into talk about a “rich” landscape. “Richness” is infectious.

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330  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity boy to master to boy to master may be forged, all that is required is a cut and a twist of the wrist: gone is the other side of things.295 The universal, hard-­won, and much-­cherished rights of the average Roman appear in this poem as if they were something vile, but this loathing is distinctly local to the forced context of the Siluae: “Nor will plebeian rights await you. You will be given as a slave to Palatine Love (nec te plebeia manebunt | iura: Palatino famulus deberis amori; 3.4.37–38).” Earinus is asked to feel horrified at the prospect of being a “mere” citizen. It is so much better to be a “slave to love.” Again, this is not the seruitium amoris about which the free narrator of Roman elegy sings.296 Instead this is literal slavery that (says the goddess (says the poet)) “feels so good” when the alienated erstwhile autonomous subject kicks aside his desire for any standing as a person who is sui iuris and instead finds his happiness in being a famulus, a thing with no rights, but, nevertheless, qua imperial thing, superior to those who have—yuck!—mere plebeian law to guarantee their status as persons and not property. The voice of Venus strongly resembles the voice of our standard narrator within the Siluae. She seems to be familiar with his hyperbole and his favored diction. “Confessing” and “marveling” come naturally to her. “Marveling” is all she can do when she, a goddess, draws near to the world of Ausonian Jove (miratur puerile decus; 3.4.31). She, a lady who’s been around and seen a thing or two, has never seen anything quite like Earinus. Such is her “confession”: “Nothing, I say, nothing so sweet ’neath the whole vault of heaven | have I either seen or brought forth. Of his own accord will Endymion yield to you | and Attis, and he whom the empty image of the spring | and fruitless love consumed (nil ego, nil, fateor, toto tam dulce sub orbe | aut uidi aut genui. cedet tibi Latmius ultro | Sangariusque puer, quemque irrita fontis imago | et sterilis consumpsit amor; 3.4.39–42).” She next mentions the abduction of Hylas by the nymphs: they would grab Earinus first if they were given the chance. Again and again, we see the inadequacy of the world of myth. Its sublimity offers only a coarse approximation of the true elevation of the here 295  Lacan,  2014:136: “If the insect that wanders along the surface of the Möbius strip forms a representation of the fact that it is a surface, he can believe from one moment to the next that there is another face that he hasn’t explored, the face that is always on the back of the face along which he is walking. He can believe in this other side, even though there isn’t one, as you know. Without knowing it, he is exploring the only face there is, and yet, from one moment to the next, it does indeed have a back.” 296 Russel,  2014:105: “In addition to the supposedly feminizing affects of castration, Earinus’ future as a slave in Domitian’s court makes grossly literal the figurative language of elegy; he has become a real-­life slave to love.”

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and now of the objects around which power circulates. Spontaneous yielding ensues (cedet ultro; 3.4.40). Or, rather, there “spontaneously” bursts forth a rhetoric whereby such yielding is an obvious consequence. Fateor . . . : one “confesses” that something will yield. The confession itself is a sort of in-­advance yielding that “guarantees” the yielding to come even as it shows the false sentiments that will mark both acts. Not only is the enthusiasm forced and effectively fake, but the stories of the boys Venus speaks for all involve a sort of accursed beauty that suffers. A sweet word like dulce accordingly introduces us to stories that are, at best, bittersweet. Endymion is doomed to eternal sleep. Attis is self-­castrated. Narcissus’ self-­love is his undoing. Hylas drowns. These unhappy youths might well long to “yield” their unhappy myths to someone else: “Take my glory, please!” Here one could suggest that the narrator is “subtly subversive” and that we have some sort of critique of Domitian in the poem. But there is nothing at all subtle about this list. One would have to genuinely care about the youths and their psychic life if this were somehow going to be a critique of power. Instead this passage—just like so many others in the Siluae—only commits itself to a sort of “tragedy of youthful beauty.” This tragedy makes into fate what is really only convention: it is (allegedly) better to be a pretty boy who suffers than to be a “plebeian” boy of no account; it is better to serve as the helpless object of High Passion than to be something “not so sweet.” Meanwhile, for the gods themselves, that is, for the leading citizens of Rome, it is “sad” that boys come and then go, but this melancholy state of affairs is itself something that gives piquancy to one’s love for them. So many fair flowers, so quick to bloom, so soon to fade . . . The focus, as usual, shifts from the boy to the owner. Logical logic may well object, but the logic of these praise poems has an internal consistency of its own. Namely, even though the boy is the prettiest thing ever, there is something still prettier out there: Domitian. “You, boy/slave (puer), surpass them all. The only one more beautiful than you is the man to whom you will be given (tu puer ante omnis; solus formosior ille | cui daberis; 3.4.44–45).” This is where the goddess’ speech ends: with the emperor, his beauty, and his ownership of Earinus. We already saw this trope in the discussion of Siluae 2.6 earlier. The master is the real hottie in these relationships: “Second only to your owner! (et tantum domino minor! 2.6.35).”297 “To whom you will be given” are her very last words. The subject is 297  But see also Siluae 4.2.25 which uses the very same phrase. Domitian is the dominus there too.

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332  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity s­ upposed to find a satisfaction in (the specious claim of) imperial beauty. And this same beauty is asked to double for the “beauty” of being owned by power: “you” will appreciate this. And so, we can loop back to Narcissus for a moment. He is the one boy who is not quite like the others. His unhappy ending is not a function of assault, abduction, or mutilation. Those other boys do remind us more of Earinus. This boy tends to remind us of our narrator. The “empty image of the fountain-­head” (irrita fontis imago; 3.4.41) captures something important about the Siluae themselves. The narcissistic self-­impressed narrator is very much content to heap up empty images. The fons et origo of the narrator’s discourse is a pointed nothingness that reflects back the comely visage of the poetaster wearing his garland of laurel. The “depth of the world” as seen in the reflected image is one where Domitian’s reign and the leading lights of the same offer plenitude, meaning, and “the marvelous sheen” that suffuses the whole imago. The actual depth of the waters is a very different affair. The glare of the reflective surface hides it away. And so, one is invited to “speculate” on what might be down there. Perhaps “the empire” really does offer some sort of depth. Or perhaps it is the “re­sist­ance” of the ego of the poet to the ego-­speech of the narrator that furnishes this depth. But a more useful way to talk about the other, hidden side of the discourse of the Siluae might be provided by castration. What we both can and cannot see at one and the same time is a species of disappearance, rupture, and pain. And it is the very “emergence of disappearance” that serves as the dark counterpart to what we are asked to see instead (en! ecce! . . . ), namely the narcissistic spectacle of the narrator’s radiant discourse. The sterile love that ensues consumes the manifest discourse of the poem. And this sterility arises out of an Attis-­like moment of self-­violation. Even the depth of the pool itself becomes a “hollow depth” given that “loss” generates it. The lack of a “there there” sustains the glorious image-­play here and now. The very fact that one wonders whether or not the present interpretation is “making too much of Narcissus” tends to support the thesis itself. “Of course” this is an “over-­interpretation” of the myth. We all know that all that is really being said here is that poetry is about poetry, that another allusion to another intertext is all that is really at stake. Count the number of reflections, calibrate the angles of all the mirrors. The only thing to see here is the spectacle of sight itself, a spectacle that is staged as a collection of bookish reminiscences that hurl us into a bibliophilic abîme that recedes forever in the opposite direction from the waters of the fons. Narrator,

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reader, emperor: which among them is really threatened with death and dismemberment? Fear and trembling are replaced by “readerly competence” and “well-­wrought artistry.” And this is the point: namely, that you will never yourself feel anything especially pointed when reading the story of a young man who was sold, raped, and mutilated. In fact, you will think of everything but those things while nevertheless being haunted by their spectral images that flash as odd shadows that emerge at the edges of the imagines that flit throughout the verses. A sublime conspiracy is afoot. The literary sublime, the heavenly sublime, and the politically lofty are all arranging themselves so that “the heights” get all of the happiness that is coming to them. Venus offers the boy to Domitian. The narrator offers the poem to Domitian and the reader. Earth and heaven are pointedly blurred, and this is because that is what the fact of Domitian “means” within this narrative universe: “Domitian is raising up Rome to reach the highest stars (et summis aequat Germanicus astris; 3.4.49).”298 Hesiod’s monsters attempting to assault Olympus have turned into Statius’ better-­than-­Olympians making their way (at last) to their celestial destiny. Meanwhile the goddess is anxious to make up this pretty boy to be prettier still that he might please Rome’s Jove (tunc propior iam cura deae . . . 3.4.50) Domitian, “the celestial ruler,” is fastidious. This she “knows” (norat caelestis oculos ducis; 3.4.53). And so, Venus adorns the boy. And so the narrator adorns his narrative with a scene of Venus adorning the boy. Both bestow upon him a measure of “their own radiance, their own fire” (dat radios ignemque suum; 3.4.56). In the wake of these efforts “there is a yielding.” The Domitianic aesthetic is all about “yielding,” say the poems of Domitian’s reign. And here we have a perfect beauty made still more sublime. The inevitable consequence is the defeat of all other lovely objects: “Former favorites and the flocks of slaves gave way (cessere priores | deliciae famulumque greges; 3.4.56–57).” Earinus is the best object out of all the other objects. Well, he will be the best until the next wonderful object is found and (over-)hyped by the luminous flames of poetic passion with its zeal to offer primped and precious make-­ overs that jazz up the already juiced. Delights 298 Compare Flauiumque caelum in Siluae 4.3.19. Coleman, 1988:110: “It implies in flattering hyperbole that heaven is guaranteed to be the eternal domain of the Flavian dynasty.” But why not make this more hyperbolic still? Heaven itself is Flavian. Heaven, that is, is finally its most heavenly. See Newlands, 2002:290: “[H]e appropriates heaven itself, making it Flavian.” But “he” is Domitian for Newlands. I think that “the narrator” is a more useful noun to posit as the antecedent of the pronoun.

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334  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity surrender . . . to further delights. Infinite jouissance is on offer. One casts aside without a second thought the last castrated boy about whom so much was said. Instead, our focus is squarely on the Palace-­as-­Olympus moment. The poem turns to address the boy. The vocative is, “Boy, dear to the gods (Care puer superis; 3.4.60).” But we know that “the superior” here are the earthly overlords (who seem to be quaffing something that looks a lot like heavenly ambrosia . . . ).299 This was, after all, what we were just discussing. And it turns out that the addressee may be the boy but the topic is Domitianic might. We congratulate the youth on his good fortune. He has been chosen to touch the hand that subjected nations seek to touch (3.4.61–62). The submission of the world and the boy’s servitude are connected. One is praised as “good luck,” the other is less clearly defined, but “might that makes right” will likely do to describe what is going on with Persian desires to touch Domitian’s hand. Care puer superis, qui praelibare uerendum nectar et ingentem totiens contingere dextram electus quam nosse Getae, quam tangere Persae Armeniique Indique petunt! o sidere dextro edite, multa tibi diuum indulgentia fauit. olim etiam, ne prima genas lanugo nitentes carperet et pulchrae fuscaret gratia formae ipse deus patriae celsam trans aequora liquit Pergamon. haud ulli puerum mollire potestas credita, sed tacita iuuenis Phoebeius arte leniter haud ullo concussum uulnere corpus de sexu transire iubet. tamen anxia curis mordetur puerique timet Cytherea dolores.  Boy, dear to the gods, you who tastes first the venerable nectar and meets so often with the mighty right hand, chosen to do so, even as the Getae long to know it, the Persians, the Armenians, and Indians to touch it! O you under a lucky star

299  See Statius, Siluae 3.4.60–61: praelibare uerendum|nectar.

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Mastering the submission game: six case studies  335 born, the great indulgence of the gods shows you its favor. Once upon a time as well, lest the first down your shining cheeks plunder and the grace of your fair form grow dim, the very god of your fatherland abandoned across the seas lofty Pergamum. Not to anyone was the boy’s softening a power entrusted, but the Apolline youth with silent art gently the body shaken by no wound bids it transition from its sex. Nevertheless, anxious with cares Venus feels their bite and fears for the boy’s pain. Statius, Siluae 3.4.60–72

The boy’s divine good fortune is stressed several times over in just a few lines. After care superis we are shortly re-­addressing him: “Born under a lucky star (o sidere dextro | edite).” The “lucky star” is a dexter one, and should likely be associated with the “right hand” of Domitian, the sign of his power. But the point we are building to after talking about pretty boys, empire, and the love of the gods is a most ungentle use of the hands. Of course, when it comes, this same gesture will be spoken of as if it were very tender. The poem is about to discuss the castration of Earinus. “Boy, dear to the gods . . .” was our way of broaching the topic. But we never speak of it as directly as we might. The cut gets cut. The focus is pulled away from the disfigurement and pain. Instead, we look away from the boy and his body and into the heart of a god: “Lest . . .” The god hopes to prevent the damage that will be done to the boy’s beauty if he grows a beard. That soft down will “tear at” (carperet) the gleaming cheeks of the boy. The down will mean the darkening of the grace of his lovely appearance. A very peculiar version of carpe diem is at work here. One is “harvesting the genitals” so that the youthful hour and its beauty will never get lacerated. The threat-­to-­the-­cheeks is staved off by an assault on the groin. The body of the boy is the passive site at which a set of desires is registered and where others’ wishes and ends are worked over. Let not that gentle down on his cheeks ravage the good fortune of the youth by ruining the lust that he provokes in Domitian. The “darkness” of that beard will make the boy’s gratia grow dim. This is the second time we have seen gratia in the span of seven lines. Gratia

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336  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Baccho ended the last verse paragraph. There we had gods, pleasures, and the party. Ganymede served. The wine tasted good. Now we have an “obfuscation” on the part of the narrative of where gratia comes from and where it is going. A dative has gone missing? Is it fuscaret tibi or duci? Perhaps both parties are affected at once by the thing that happens to the surface of the boy’s body: the pleasure he gives falls dark and with it his standing with the prince. But such a discussion is superfluous, misleading, and pointedly contrafactual. “Lest” we have to worry about what is really going on with the death of gratia as a function of the advent of virile autonomy in the natural course of biological development, a god intervenes. A god saves Domitian’s desire for Domitian and the gratia and caritas of little mister lucky-­star. Aesculapius—the god in whose temple Earinus was first seen praying by Venus—leaves Pergamum and personally comes to do the surgery. The castration is violently erased from history and, in precisely the same gesture, turned into part of the sublime fiction of the world of the Siluae. “The softening of the boy was entrusted to none . . . (haud ulli puerum mollire potestas | credita; 3.4.68–69).” Nobody did it. Nobody even says exactly what was done.300 Instead, something else is said to have been done. The bodily trauma that softens is softened by the poem and its own “power of softening.” And this power too is anonymized by being sublimated. So, nobody did it: “Instead the Apolline youth with silent artistry | mildly and without any wound struck his body | and bade it depart from its sex (sed tacita iuuenis Phoebeius arte | leniter haud ullo concussum uulnere corpus | de sexu transire iubet; 3.4.69–71).” A secret and silent art, an ars tacita, is shared by surgeon god and wordsmith. The silent art knows how to silence the screams. Or perhaps what it knows is how to “keep it all quiet” in a more practical sense. The secret of the secret is that everybody knows, but nobody says and everybody knows better than to say. The wound was no wound (haud ullo uulnere).301 “This is not a pipe,” says the picture of the 300  One might insist that haud ulli means something like, “to none other was it entrusted” here. That is fine, I suppose. But note that haud ullo uulnere is coming up two lines from now. That phrase definitely means “no wound” and so one should be able to hear in this place as well “no agent.” 301  Vollmer takes haud ullo uulnere and uses it as evidence that we are talking about the mode of eunuchification here. It is an interesting hair-­splitting world in which we say that people who have their testicles crushed receive no wound. And this is not really a criticism that is primarily directed at Vollmer. If Statius somehow insists that we take this phrase in a hyper-­literal sense, then he is asking us to forget the spirit of the act in the name of the letter even though throughout the Siluae a reader’s amenibility to extended and double senses is

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pipe. The viewer is asked to be complicit with the lie: “Shhh: art is all about whispers, not cries.” The body of the boy who is not the master of his own body is given an order by the god, an order that it obeys: “Transition away from your sex.” But one wound does remain, one word does stick out red and raw: concussum. This is the word that cannot work. Leniter concussum is an oxymoron that only a very specific kind of moron will declare to be an instance of verbal gratia. Concutere is too strong, it is not amenable to being made “gentle” by the imposition of an adverb. That adverbial imposition is itself effectively an instance of symbolic violence, an exercise of poetic fiat in the service of political power. Concutere is used of violent psychic states: threats, terror, anxiety. If one were to attempt to translate the phrase “shaken to his core by castration anxiety” into Latin, concutere makes for an excellent candidate for the verb one might use. Concutere can be used of abstractions: the state was shattered.302 Of concrete objects it indicates profound disruption and often outright destruction.303 The boy’s body was “gently devastated.” It was utterly disrupted, but only “mildly utterly” disrupted. Such are the powers of a god, or, rather, such are the powers of a poet spinning lies about the gods. The offending word appears exactly where one says “no wound.” In fact, it throbs most intensely between the words “not any . . .” and “ . . . wound”: haud ullo concussum uulnere. The litotes of haud ullo even adds emphasis while opening the door to a new question: is “not any” really the same as “none at all”? Maybe what is really being designated is “no wound that will be allowed to count as such.”

required. Vollmer, 1898:426: “Die Einkleidung mit der tacita ars des Asklepios hat wohl den thatsäclichen Hintergrund, daß dem Knaben die Hoden nicht ausgeschnitten, sondern haud ullo uulnere zerquetscht worden waren, es war also zum θλαϲίαϲ, θλιβίαϲ gemacht.” Vollmer also notes that Roman juridical hair-­splitting itself takes cognizance that some might argue that thlibiae are not qualitatively the same as castrati and so addresses the issue by explicitly putting thlibiae-makers into the same category as people who perform castrations. See Digesta Iustiniani 48.8.5: Hi quoque, qui thlibias faciunt, ex constitutione diui Hadriani ad Ninnium Hastam in eadem causa sunt, qua hi qui castrant. In point of fact a ulunus does usually seem to be a wound received from cutting or piercing (but see Cicero, Pro Sestio 79 where the word seems to cover a variety of injuries, blunt and edged). But in its fig­ur­a­tive uses, which are many, uulnus does expand out to “blow, misfortune, calamity” as well as “great loss, grief, sorrow.” 302 Both abstract and literal: cuius impulsum manu | cecidit decenni Marte concussum Ilium (Seneca, Agamemnon 920–921). 303 Seneca, Thyestes 358–359: quem non concutiet cadens | obliqui uia fulminis . . . Similarly: cum subito caeco terra mugitu fremens | concussa totos traxit ex imo sinus (Seneca, Troades 171–172).

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338  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity Missing are the testicles. Missing is the moment they went missing and what the boy himself felt about said moment. His body was shaken. It was told to leave its sex. It obeyed. I wonder what was going through Earinus’ mind at that moment . . . Instead the affective component of the episode is presently transferred over to Venus, that is to the “Desiring Subject” and away from the “Desired Object.” “Nevertheless, anxious with cares . . .” (tamen anxia curis . . .  3.4.71). Someone is worried that it might hurt (puerique timet Cytherea dolores; 3.4.72), but the boy does not cry out, thanks to the art of silencing/silent art and the fact that the wound is no wound. We do not have much time to entertain thoughts of pain, though, because there is a “jump cut” within the perspective of the narrative itself. Suddenly we are talking about the cut that was applied to cutting itself. Castration has been forbidden, and forbidden by imperial decree: “Not yet had the fair clemency of the leader begun to keep males intact from birth (nondum pulchra ducis clementia coeperat ortu | intactos seruare mares; 3.4.73–74).” Castration is a traumatic punishment from which people are saved by the emperor.304 Castration is a beautiful moment that preserves beautiful things in their beauty for the emperor. Formae pulchrae and their gratia are growing dim throughout the land, the pulchra clementia of the emperor is to thank for this: bodily beauty (gotten in so ugly a manner) beautifully yields to fair clemency.305 Gratias ago. Thanks! “Now breaking one’s sex and transforming a human being is an abomination (nunc frangere sexum | atque hominem mutare nefas; 3.4.74–75).” The situation “now” contrasts strikingly with that from the situation three lines ago: de sexu transire has become frangere sexum. A mere movement has turned into something violent. The euphemism has been exposed for what it was. Bodies are in fact “concussed” by castration.306 Nature rejoices to see people as they were born and only as they were born (gauisaque solos | quos genuit natura uidet; 3.4.75–76). What 304 Think again of the whole debate over “Are thlibiae distinct from castrati?” as per [NOTE 620]. To the extent that we may have just been asked to think, “well, they are very different,” then why are we suddenly talking about castrati when there seems to be no reason in the world to talk about them . . . ? Nun weiss ich aber, dass du wirklich fährst nach Rom . . . 305  Ahl, 1984:205–206: readers are supposed to be repulsed by this perverse evocation of clementia; the emperor finds it flattering. Critics who see repulsive flattery and loath Statius have gotten the ancient rhetorical theory wrong. This is an interesting position to take, and it is a key moment in Ahl’s whole piece, but Ahl’s claims are curiously under-­proven. They are only true to the extent that one accepts the framework of the whole piece. The reading of Statius is actually so thin that it lacks any citations of the Latin itself. 306  Russel,  2014:102: “The act of being bodily pierced and penetrated by a knife breaks Earinus’ gender purity in the same way that a girl sexually penetrated loses her virginal purity.”

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must she feel, then, when she sees Earinus? Does Nature shudder to look upon him even though Venus rejoiced? But are not the two goddesses easily viewed as one and the same divinity? One need look no farther than the first lines of Lucretius’ De rerum natura.307 Now slave mothers do not fear to bear children. The “sinister law” has been lifted (nec lege sinistra | ferre timent famulae natorum pondera matres; 3.4.76–77). A lex sinister meant that Earinus’ mother was filled with dread as she bore the child in her womb? But this was a child we said just a few lines ago was born under a dexter star (o sidere dextro | edite . . . 3.4.63–64). We are having trouble telling right from left, up from down. The dread of impending castration makes the weight of a child a sort of “Dead weight of dread” for a mother. She knows that her child is a human being, a homo, but that nevertheless a left-­handed law might mutilate this person’s body as the pondera sexus—that is, his testicles, for those of us gauche enough to use such an unpoetic word and to gesture to the very thing being hidden by the verses—are declared to be obstacles to the gratia formae, the charm of physical beauty. And this is a beauty that their children might be forced to deliver over to their masters. Darling deliciae are not nearly so delicious when so burdened. Perhaps we are supposed to say that “everyone else” suffered but that, “of course” Earinus did not suffer. He did not suffer because there was a miracle. But there was no miracle, there was only the positing of a miracle by a narrator who is leveraging the traditional panoply of names, places, allusions and intertexts to generate a singularly implausible portrait of Natura complying with the venereal self-­interests of power. The poem’s “guilty conscience” keeps on saying as much. This guilt arises because compliance with the lex sinistra that, though unwritten, encourages complicity with power yields an incoherent, impossible relationship to the formal “law of the land” according to which we all live in a wonderful, just Rome that is looked after by a superlative father-­figure who has our best interests at heart. That is, there is not an “actual” bad conscience of some concrete historical individual named Statius at work. Instead, there is a structural “bad conscience” that inheres within the poetic project itself. If the emperor hacks at your genitals, this is great. If the emperor does not hack at your genitals, this is great. Here you have the Silvan aesthetic: the conclusion is presupposed, and all that is needed is a tendentious collection of pretty 307  Aeneadum genetrix, hominum diuomque uoluptas, | alma Venus, . . . Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.1–2.

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340  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity words that more or less seems to support it. The capriciousness of power itself and its power to make and remake and unmake, to shake us to our core while also leaving us perfectly unharmed and supremely happy, this is what we are singing of. The absurdity of such a situation yields the ab­surd­ ity of the song. But the totalitarian aesthetic thrives on this very ridiculousness. And that is because it is itself only pretending to be legitimate. There is a manifold “weight of obscenity” that corresponds to the “genital dread” felt by mothers and sons about the dead weight of the sex organs under threat. The poems of the Siluae keep on hustling off stage ideas that briefly flash before our consciousness. As such the verses stage a species of linguistic repression that converges with political oppression. Unlike psychic repression where the unthought is unavailable to consciousness, the repression of the obscene in these poems talks a great deal about refusal and repudiation. It talks all around the problem and then dismisses it as “no problem at all.” Linguistic self-­castration means that the smiling cheeks of our narrator are forever fair, forever pulchrae. The law did not command this, but with “sinister dexterity,” the narrator anticipates Domitianic desire and caters to it. And even if there is horror, pain, and resentment “deep down,” this poem states unequivocally that the beautiful things of this world are, miraculously, immaculate and free from such stains even as we know full well that this is a lie. The narrator strikes the very sort of cynical bargain of beautiful resignation that one of the deliciae themselves would need to strike with themselves in order to survive let alone thrive: “Well, I was going to be a famulus one way or the other. But this version of compliance in fact leaves me with the most freedom and happiness . . . And, come to think of it, I really am quite lovely.” Everything is for the best in all possible Domitianic worlds. This is a political thesis that has been turned into a poetical reality. The poem is cataloging a variety of contradictory Domitianic experiences and declaring them all to be wondrous, marvelous, awe-­inspiring, divine . . . Earinus himself, had he been born a little later, would be leading a perfectly contrary and yet wholly identical life (Tu quoque nunc, iuuenis, genitus si tardius esses . . . 3.4.78). He would have a beard (umbratusque genas; 3.4.79) and he would have a mature, virile body (adultos fortior artus; 3.4.79). The very thing avoided before would have come to pass. And yet the net result of this contrafactual life would be that Earinus would make offerings just such as the present one, and these offerings would be made at the very same shrine of the god. An “artful” vividness attaches itself to the beauty rather than to the horror of the situation. We can see this in the use of the future indicative in

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this passage. “To this hair will even yield the wounded tresses of beautiful Nisus (huic et purpurei cedet coma saucia Nisi; 3.4.84).” The violence done to the hair of the pretty boy from books hides away the violence done to the body of the pretty boy here and now. That fair hair of the defeated boy will be defeated and will yield all over again to a victorious boy. The poem brings back and then displaces the same collection of ideas time and again. Earinus is not a boy with a wounded body. There was no wound, haud ullum uulnus. The wounded one is Nisus, or, rather, Nisus’ hair. The idea of the trauma done to Earinus “will yield” because the poem as a whole is dedicated to the project of cutting something off and then dedicating it at the altar of imperial submission. This is a poetry that will forever yield yielding. It guarantees this future by iterating a whole collection of artful displacements in the here and now of the poem’s fabric. Nothing will ever be called by its name. A golden chain of metonyms will drag us away from the horror of reality. An irresistible force of bold metaphors will constantly dislodge us from the hard fact of pain. A second offering “spontaneously” emerges (forte).308 Statius’ reader by now knows that there is nothing in the Siluae so much to be expected as the unexpected. A mirror and not just the lock of hair will be sent to the god. A “Cupid from the crowd” who is also “just one of the slaves” speaks up (tunc puer e turba . . .  3.4.93). While the mirror itself is a familiar metapoetic object, one should explore the motivational structure that surrounds this particular mirror as itself revelatory of a key aspect of the poetic project.309 On the one hand we have a crowd of lovely creatures, but, on the other, these same also serve desire in the broadest possible sense. They cater to and foster desires. They are subjects-­and-­objects of desire. They are both independent actors, but they are always also acting within a specific regime. A golden mirror in which we cannot see what is really in front of us is held up so as to block our vision of the scene before us. A narcissism of literary craft hides away the spectacle behind the mirror—namely the sight of a boy’s body violently assaulted for the pleasure of some faceless third

308  Commenting on a different Statian passage but useful here is White,  1975:282: “As often, forte indicates, not that the action expressed by the verb of its clause takes place accidentally or by chance, but that the connection between its clause and an adjacent clause is fortuitous and unexpected.” 309 Taisne,  1994:35 enumerates the relevant internal and external cross-­ references. “Amplificatio de la beauté — des être, de la nature ou des œuvres d’art — telle est certes la fonction essentielle des reflets dans les Silves, et leur fascination n’a rien de maléfique, elle se confond avec l’admiration et la sérénité.” (Taisne, 1994:36)

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342  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity party’s potential joys—in order to luxuriate in the spectacle seen in the reflective surface—namely the beauty of the over-­adorned golden lineaments of the standard collection of prestige cultural objects: Narcissi, Hyacinths, Hylases, . . . Earinus’ face is made to appear in the same mirror, and it outshines them all.310 The Cupid who “happened” to intervene proposes that the mirror be sent to the shrine in Pergamum. But what makes the mirror truly valuable is not the gold from which it is made. Instead, something will be added to the object itself: “You, just fix your gaze upon it and leave here forever your visage (tu modo fige aciem et uultus hic usque relinque).”311 And so, even as the mirror is a supplementary gift, this supplement is itself supplemented. One adds to it “the face of Earinus.” But this very (poetic) image of an (optical) image is an absurdity that one is enjoined to take for a profundity. Even if one is free to find fault with the ancient appreciation of optics, nobody was so literally naive as to believe that something can be “left behind” in a mirror.312 Instead it is poetry’s will to power—which is also a will to serve power in the present case—that imposes upon the physical rules of the world its own revised vision of how light and shadow work. This sort of transgression of the physical laws of nature often has a great deal of charm: a sun smiling upon a happy lover is not, after all, such a displeasing transgression of the grim order of things wherein the sun rises and sets without ever bothering to smile for himself, let alone another. But there is a more “sinister law” of poetic production at work here. Consider the implications of this moment and the line that follows it: “So he spoke, and he closed the mirror: the likeness had been stolen (sic ait et speculum reclusit imagine rapta; 3.4.98).” The boy is dispossessed all over again. But this stealing of the boy from himself is presented as a celebration of the true and truly wondrous beauty of the boy, a beauty that outstrips the ability of mere bejeweled mirrors to fully compass it. But this image of the 310  Talbert on court life and prestige objects like the details of dress: “All these stupefying fine distinctions — ‘prestige fetishes’ to use Elias’ term — were no joke, moreover. Rulers themselves were prone to be obsessed by them” (Talbert, 2011:8). The learned poetic catalog finds a “natural” audience in the highly artificial world of high society with its obsession with wonderful objects and the fine distinctions among the already refined. 311  Russel, 2014:112: “The image in the mirror will forever be a puer, never a iuvenis; it will be sent to remain forever in Earinus’ childhood home of Pergamum, where the separate version of himself on the other side of the threshold—the boy who could have become a man— will remain, forever separate from the real Earinus. In a sense, he has achieved the impossible desire voiced by Ovid’s Narcissus (Met. 3.467–470).” 312  Newlands, 2002:110: “But the mirror is also a symbol of entrapment. It metonymically represents the palace itself.”

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image of Earinus is patently false. We all know that mirrors do not work as they are said to work in this poem. We also all know that castration does not work as it is said to work in this poem. But the work of this poem itself connives with power to produce the image of word-­power and world-­ power as fabulously omnipotent. Submit and enjoy: hand over the trapped imagines and get your hand-­outs now that the promised verses have been delivered. The poem closes with Earinus speaking “for himself.” The prayer Earinus offers is directed to Domitian. Domitian is the (legitimate) substitute-­object for our desires, the thing we all say that we “really want.” Domitian’s greatness is the object that we have all agreed to claim to want if we are going to get what we really want. But we can only get to that “real” object of desire behind the “fake” (but panegyrically omnipresent) object by accepting a monstrous hybrid return for our desiderium. We get poems.313 And these poems sing a very specific song time and again. In this verse world we get castration-­but-­power, humiliation-­but-­influence, genius-­but-­complicity.314 We do not get ourselves or own “proper” desire, we get a scarred desire and something else too, an uncanny anxiety that hovers over the question of literal as well as symbolic castration. And so on to the prayer itself: Earinus asks the healing god as a “gentle guardian of men” to preserve the princeps: “In exchange for these gifts, most gentle guardian of mankind, if I have merited as much, may you wish to refresh for me my master by giving him a long span of youth and preserve him for the world! (his mihi pro donis, hominum mitissime custos, | si merui, longa dominum renouare iuuenta | atque orbi seruare uelis! (3.4.100–102).” But Earinus has not really been guarded so gently by the god, at least his genitals have not been guarded gently. This boy who was consigned by no choice of his own to eternal youth prays that the god might “renew” the long youth of the prince. “Earinus”—the thing offered by the poet to Earinus himself as the object that will purportedly satisfy his desire—follows a script we have already seen the narrator construct 313  See Statius, Siluae 3.pr on Earinus’ desire for Statius’ verses: “And [there is a poem about] Earinus as well, the freedman of our Germanicus. You know how long I delayed his desire for a poem even though he had sought that I make a verse dedication of those locks of his that he was sending to Asclepius in Pergamum in a gem-­encrusted box and accompanied by a mirror (Earinus praeterea, Germanici nostri libertus scis quamdiu desiderium eius moratus sim, cum petisset ut capillos suos quos cum gemmata pyxide et speculo ad Pergamenum Asclepium mittebat, uersibus dedicarem).” 314  Newlands, 2002:113: “As a castrated slave and Domitian’s prized possession, Earinus provides an extreme example of the condition of the courtier.”

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344  Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity above and elsewhere. It goes like this: rewrite history; fictionalize the actual age of Domitian; make an imperial prayer.315 The boy who has been dislodged from space and time prays that all space and all time might feel Domitian’s presence. And the poem asserts by its own bullshit pseudo-­divine fiat, that the prayer was answered. Or, rather, in the last line of the poem, the boy “marveled” at the sequel to his prayer: the (far off) altars of Pergamum moved (sic ait et motas miratur Pergamos aras; 3.4.106). And so you, dear reader, are told that the boy saw what he could not see; that the gods assented to that which they did not assent; and that, if you think about it, the boy wished for that which he would never be expected to wish. Provided you fix your own gaze upon the well-­wrought jeweled frame of the mirror, you will not see yourself seeing yourself falling in love with the image of your own complicity. 315  Domitian is perhaps thirty-­nine when this is written. That is a bit old to be “young.” Russel, 2014:97: “In essence, Earinus has traded away his own iuventa so Domitian can have it; yet, paradoxically, as a boy who will (supposedly) never age, it is he who will have an eternal youth that Domitian never can—a youth that means the death of the possibility of his attaining adulthood.”

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4 Conclusion If our only evidence for the regime of Domitian were the poems written during it, we should see the imperial court as a benign centre of patronage, literary as well as official, and the scene of a civilized existence carried on against a background of elegant houses and suburban estates. One of the murderers of Domitian was Entellus, apparently his a libellis; three years before, Martial had addressed to him an epigram celebrating the elegant and fruitful gardens of his house in Rome [8.68]. Another was Parthenius, a cubicularius. Martial addresses a number of epigrams to him, for instance on his son’s birthday in 88, thanking him for the gift of a fine toga in 93, asking him to present some poems to Domitian in 89 [4.45, 5.6, 8.28]. When the Praetorian guard rose against the murderers in 97, they cut off Parthenius’ testicles, stuffed them in his mouth and strangled him.1

We have been exploring the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The discussion has its unsettling qualities. Specifically, it has resisted a sense that there is a neutral position from which to articulate aesthetic claims. This is a variation on a familiar claim: “If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.” The critical sword winds up being two-­edged indeed, for a criticism of criticism emerges in the course of the argument. We will end by meditating further on that. But for the moment let us stick with Statius and Martial and their various strategies of complicity. Some of the obvious points should be recapitulated. First, they chose to write what they wrote. They were free to not write at all, to write to other addressees, to write other texts. Saying that if they had made such a choice we would not be reading them today either begs the question or makes it a much more depressing one. A young ­person today can choose to work for Oxfam or to study to be an investment banker. This version of Heracles’ choice can be readily turned into 1  © Fergus Millar, 1977, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 B.C.-A.D. 337), Bristol Classical Press, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The  Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Erik Gunderson, Oxford University Press. © Erik Gunderson 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.003.0004

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346 Conclusion something more complicated. A certain number of people from good families take time out to work for Oxfam before ultimately going to law school and then joining up with the family firm, a firm whose clients include, ­perhaps, a few big banks. But, one is quick to note, the firm also does a fair amount of pro bono work. It’s complicated, so very, very complicated. All situations are, if you wish them to be. We can play the same game with institutions. Harvard law school produces many, many people who do many, many amazing things for their fellow man. But, when one aggregates everything done by all of the graduates, on balance, it is difficult not to suspect that the school is more successful at fostering inequality than it is in producing substantive improvements for the average citizen.2 Yet who is going to advocate the throwing out of the baby along with all that bathwater? The question already contains within it the rebuttal to the objection about the value of the institution. In Statius and Martial we see complex, Daedalean authors who have, for some reason or other, decided that they wish to fly close to the Domitianic sun. This is where we start: these works have elected to talk to power. There may be political subtexts in Statius’ Thebaid, in Valerius’ Argonautica, or in Silius’ Punica, but, by focussing on works that speak directly to power, we are forced to take on the conjoint matter of the explicit and the implicit rather than just lingering with the latter. When confronted with a text that is always and only implicitly political, one can explore various inferences and alleged insinuations ad libitum and so ad infinitum. Too much of this can be little more than projections onto the text by its readers. While the last are unavoidable, the present has been a discussion of the politics of literature that does not subsist on a diet made up entirely of implications and inferences. The Epigrams and the Siluae speak directly to and about power and the powerful. The politics of Martial’s Epigrams and the politics of Statius’ Siluae should by no means be reduced to a matter of their manifest, explicit political statements. But these nevertheless do offer a place to get started. Nor should either collection be read exclusively through those statements as if (manifestly) (excessive) praise was somehow going to offer the key that unlocks all hermeneutic doors. However, if it is unfair to make the political poems into the not-­at-­all secret set of messages that purportedly 2  In 2014, 31 percent of seniors graduating from Harvard college went into finance and consulting, an industry that is more or less dedicated to producing inequality in the name of maximizing shareholder value. See https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-­2014/ why-­are-­harvard-­grads-­still-­flocking-­to-­wall-­street/ [last accessed February 16, 2021].

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opens up the rest of the poetry, the converse proposition ought to be just as problematic. That is, we cannot summarily lop off the political poems as if they were somehow not really elements of the poetic program. Some sort of comment about such a dismissal would be in order because these poems are shouting at us as loud as they can and from prominent rooftops that they are indeed elements of the text, perhaps even the most important elements. And the dismissals of the political poems would also need to be more sophisticated than “he had to talk like this” or “everyone was talking like this, but nobody meant it.” The complexity of the political poems therewith vanishes. Their deep connections to the larger project disappear at the same time. This sort of statement, if made about those other programmatic poems that signal Catullan affinities or Vergilian connections, would never be countenanced: “Absolutely everyone name-­ checks Callimachus. Nothing to see here. Move along.” The rubric of sincerity is similarly unhelpful and for convergent reasons. There is a great deal of ritual distortion during the speeches given at weddings and funerals today. People do not necessarily believe what they hear, but everyone has agreed to submit to the forms of the occasion. Martial and Statius are promulgating idealized images of the subject and power. Everyone understands that the real situation is more complicated, but, as in the case of a contemporary western world that presents capitalism as both “deeply flawed” but also “the only real choice,” so too does their discourse systematically elide a whole host of possibilities in the course of framing both the text and the subtext of their poetry. The degree of complication on offer “behind the scenes” is effectively limited. Perhaps Domitian is not so great as all that, but we are not nostalgic for the Republic. Goldilocks wants her imperial porridge to be just right. She is not heading off somewhere else to eat something else. If politics is the art of the possible, it might as well be remembered that the conditions of impossibility of change arise out of a consensus as to this very impossibility. Too few who matter in fact want change. Emperors come and go, some are better, others are worse. Some people rise under one regime, others rise under another. It would be nice if Domitian were an Augustus, I suppose. But Augustus had his problems too. In any case, I am here to get mine while the getting is good. If I don’t do it, then somebody else will. And, indeed, plenty of people are already doing it. It’s all in a day’s poetic work. There is safety in (amoral) numbers. This is the soft complicity of going along and getting along and (bad) faith in “the system.”

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348 Conclusion Depth is a topic that abuts the issue of sincerity. Both Statius and Martial have a strategic flatness to their discourse. Surface effects flash and dazzle. Faux-­depths are offered by a collection of rhetorical mirrors. These mirrors are deployed so as to play the serious game of deferring the issue of profundity. Cleverness radiates from every surface. The genius of the critic is solicited: behold the genius of the poet. Ecce! But it is also made clear that we are playing a certain game of a certain shape. Some questions are not to be asked. Some roads will not be traveled. The depths have been selectively conjured. One is told to drop the plumb line here and not there. The good reader will play along. And in so playing this reader plays the game of watching the poet play the game. We will discuss hermeneutic metacomplicity at some length below. Unmasking a persona is a task only an unusually oxy moron would set himself or herself. And we are very much in the presence of personae. Instead, one needs to attend to the question of form.3 What is the work done by the form itself? Does any surplus meaning arise in the course of the execution of this work? But let us regress for a moment before advancing on surer footing. The path of “unmasking” is a dead end. But how and why, exactly, is it a dead end? The simple error would entail mistaking author for narrator. That is, one would say that there is no mask to begin with: “The concrete historical individual named Statius loved Domitian and so he wrote this poem.” The clever error entails playing the game of the mask with the mask: “The concrete historical individual named Martial created a mask of a character named Martial from whose mouth praise of Domitian emerged.” Here we get two unsatisfying possibilities for reading. First, we are offered the chance to make the “simple error” all over again but now “more cleverly.” That is, there is still a certain concrete subjectivity held in reserve as the truth-­behind-­the-­mask. One did not fall for the feint—“You say, ‘I am going to Cracow . . .’”—and in being undeceived in the first instance one fools oneself into thinking that there is a second instance where the issue of true and false can be adjudicated—“And so you want me to think you are going to Lemberg when in fact you are going to Cracow . . .”4 We know that there is a destination, and we also believe that we can guess the station at which our author means to get off no matter what his narrator might say. Next, we have the exceptionally clever error that denies outright that there is a there there. This reading invests in “infinite jestfulness.” The poetic play is about poetic play, and the mask is nothing but a mask and 3  Compare Žižek, 1989:15 on the insufficiency of unmasking the commodity-­form. 4  See again Freud, 2001a:115.

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asking something of it would be absurd. The clever claim is, then, something like “genre is destiny.” This reinscribes, please note, a concrete historical individual named, for example, Statius. But this time one posits that what this person “really wants” is to remain forever hidden: “You say, ‘I am going to Cracow,’ and so I know that you are going to frolic on Mt Helicon.” The “genius” reading depoliticizes political poetry by celebrating the ways in which the sign is always elusive. Ultimate meaning is a delightful je ne sais quoi upon whose unknowability we insist. A formal critique of personae considers the political economy of masks in general and of these masks in particular. What happens when we take the mask at face value? We can return again to Martial’s question to Domitian: “Under what princeps was there so much libertas? (pulchrior et maior quo sub duce Martia Roma? | sub quo libertas principe tanta fuit? 5.19.5).” As was argued previously, Caesars change, but the words about Caesarism remain the same.5 Caesar always leaves us at liberty, even when he does not. Here we have a bad faith version of Pascal’s wager.6 Whatever dissembling there may be in the poem, whatever “ironic reserve” one might postulate on the part of the concrete author of the verses, the poem “materially supports” the psychic life of imperial power.7 That is, the poem enacts a structural belief in imperialism. One has elected to kneel and pray to this god and to no other. And no matter what the putative internal contents of the gesture might mean “in the final analysis,” the fact of the gesture itself remains. It was this gesture and no other that one observed. As we saw in the discussion of Siluae 5.2,8 we are manifestly rendering unto Caesar the things that are, it would seem, Caesar’s. Whether or not Caesar is also the name of the Lord unto whom the hidden remainder is rendered is an interesting question. But one needs at a minimum to note that at least half of the pious contract has been fulfilled. Look upon the face of the coin, and then ye shall know to whom it is owed. This is not so difficult. This study has offered a collection of close readings of the poetry of Martial and Statius. The significance of the “remainder” that one might

5  See page 164. 6  See Žižek, 1989:38–40 on Pascal. Note in particular the following on Pascal’s “paradoxical” “belief before belief ”: “[B]y following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already believed. In other words, what the behaviourist reading of Pascalian ‘custom’ misses is the crucial fact that the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious.” 7  Silverman, 1992:23: “[I]deology can so fully invade unconscious desire that it may come to define the psychic reality even of a subject who at a conscious level remains morally or ironically detached from it.” 8  See pages 247–59 above.

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350 Conclusion detect in the Epigrams and the Siluae should be referred to the sign system itself, not to “the author.” Any claims about the latter tend only to be expressions of our own faith in the fantasy of Authorial Authority. As a wager on our part, this strikes me as a bad bet. Instead, we can see in the poetry a fidelity to a truth of the poetic world as such. This includes a faith in the power of poetry to make worlds. And this too is a faith in the poet’s right to make “the mere gesture,” to conjure, to dismiss, to make, and to as-­if-­do in the course of making. This sort of activity has been described as evincing the poetic will to power, as manifesting the power/poetry dyad. Here we need to note another dimension of “complicity.” First, we have the (perhaps) (not so) empty gesture of kneeling before and then also rendering unto Caesar. Next, we have the (perhaps) (not so) empty free play of the imagination, the libertas of poetic fancy. The structural homology between these two dimensions articulates the chapter-­and-­verse Gospel of the Domitianic. It is not the case the one gesture takes place and, disparately and heterogeneously, the other gesture also takes place. Were that so each party would be getting his separate due. And separateness would be the emphatic term. Instead, payments made on one side of the ledger are always also being registered on the other side as well. One can note this as both a concrete and abstract feature of the poetry. In these corpora, there are always Caesar poems as well as other poems. Barring an act of critical will to power and hermeneutic fiat, there is no way to partition the work so that there is some distinct, transcendental Master to whom some heteronomous subset of the poems make address. For the work qua work is always immanently addressing both Caesar and the world of Caesar rather than now addressing Caesar and then addressing some wholly other world. The more abstract version of this phenomenon of non-­partition yields the striking collocation of pornography, high art, and imperial presences that suffuses the poetry of Statius and Martial. These poetic projects are full of ecstasies of power, flashes of genius, and buckets of literal as well as figurative filth. And this impossible mixture which is also a disavowed mixture cannot be sorted and segregated. Everything is always both ridiculous and sublime. In the case of the Epigrams, the heterogeneous nature of the material and the juxtapositions of the poems offer a patent illustration of this phenomenon. But Statius’ programmatically striking Latinity that offers absurd gentry, dead and castrated boys, and maudlin toy-­stories participates in a similar strategic mixing. The project is no longer itself if

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one deprives it of its shocks of juxtaposition and forced perspectives, its aesthetic of distance-­and-­intimacy.9 All of the talk of marvels and yielding conjures an ecstatic present. And here one can take the adjective etymologically: one claims to be “beside oneself ” in the wake of the encounter with the Domitianic now. And the spectacle of this dazzled self is itself something on offer to a super-­self, something that is supposed to give this super-­subject pleasure. That is, self-­alienation is figured as something that might delight power. Power, one says, both dislocates and is impossible to pin down: it produces an incapacity to be oneself, an inability to capture the moment in language. One doubts that the poets are truly over-­awed. Their claims are decidedly studied. But the rhetoric of joyful alienation nevertheless does constitute a fact in its own right. Here we see a political compact being struck. A surplus bit of self is being held in reserve—“What I really think about the situation”, vel sim.—but this surplus has been purchased. The price one pays is the following: power will be allowed to super-­saturate the zone of lived public reality; power will also be allowed to have its own reservoirs of excess and surplus. Meanwhile the political subject is dazzled but quiescent. The private subject held in reserve will remain private. One might contrast an art that hides itself with this panegyrical poetry. In the former case the poetic effects conjure a more-­ness that taps into the depths of the sign-­system and connects it to the profundity of the subjective experience. One feels as if one has just glimpsed the tip of some sort of iceberg. Dare one sail forward? In contradistinction to that sort of art, the panegyrical mode insistently shows itself. It may well say, “This thing that you see here is the tip of an iceberg” and it may well insist that, “There is so much more to say but I cannot say it all,” but, nevertheless, one’s reaction to the claims is, “Well, so you say.” That is, one readily notes that turgidity has usurped the place of the ineffably lofty.10 Questions of quantity and quality have effectively been referred to the “genius of the poet” and the relationship of this same genius to the topic at hand. In short, one is told to evaluate the verse in terms of the cleverness of its formal rhetorical capacities. We are not thinking about universal truths of the human spirit but instead marveling at particular solutions to rebarbative challenges set 9  See again Fitzgerald,  2007:5 on Martial: “The most useful term we can enlist for the formal principle of a sequence of short but highly closed poems is juxtaposition, a term that suggests both closeness and separation.” 10  Consider [Longinus], De sublimitate 3.4: “But the turgid wants to surpass the sublime, while the puerile is downright antithetical to greatness (ἀλλὰ τὸ μὲν οἰδοῦν ὑπεραίρειν βούλεται τὰ ὕψη, τὸ δὲ μειρακιῶδεϲ ἄντικρυϲ ὑπεναντίον τοῖϲ μεγέθεϲι).”

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352 Conclusion before someone with a well-­trained faculty for invention and elocution. Display poetry is also, then, the mere display of poetry. One shows showing: ἐπίδειξιν ἐπιδεικνύει. This offers us a further formula for the phenomenon of desublimation found in both Martial and Statius. Τὰ ὕψη, “the lofty,” in an aesthetic sense, has been pulled down from on high and the deep pools of meaning have been drained. Language can and will yield to any and every expediency. The signifier Jove can now signify “cut-­rate Domitian,” if it comes to it. Meanwhile two masters emerge: the MasterPoet and the Prince. The ­former offers to the latter portraits of subjected subjects as well as the subjection of an over-­mastered language. It would be one thing if it were merely the poems addressed to Domitian that evinced this logic and were marked by these features. But the Epigrams and the Siluae reveal traces of a generally unified artistic vision in their relationship to their material. The poems literally addressed to power are extreme cases of a generalized phenomenon. In spite of the formal alienation of the (conjured) authorial voice from the narrative voice and so too then from the princeps as (mere) addressee, the implied author’s stance relative to the material more generally indulges in this anti-­sublime poetry of cleverness. And cleverness is, in effect, the mortal enemy of the sublime. Riddle-­epigrams perhaps give the zero-­degree of this phenomenon. The poet constructs the surfeit. Then the poet reveals his genius as a surfeit-­ constructor. The “unfathomable depths” of the sublime are replaced by the revelation of the “expected unexpected,” of the clever thing one knew one was going to encounter in the end. He said he was going to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Voilà: a rabbit emerges from the hat. One calls this a magic trick, but everyone knows that magic has nothing to do with it. This was all a matter of misdirection, and it was misdirection that began with the word “magic” itself. The false god Domitian on high corresponds to the false depths of these poems. This I take to be a relatively straightforward description of the Domitianic pseudo-­sublime in the poems we have been discussing. But how to dive deeper into a puddle that merely conjures depth? How to ascend to the stars when all we can see is some gilt figures worked onto the trompe l’œil roof of a palace? Without some means of talking about the subject of this particular configuration of power we are more or less condemned to describe and to summarize: this is flat; this is fake; this is flat; this is fake . . . One needs to find a way to talk about interiority and politics. And the need is all the more pressing because the poems

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are ostentatiously conjuring psychic lives and political truths. We are being taunted with interiority and politics as pointed objects of inquiry. But then, after the rabbit has been pulled from the lion’s mouth, the narrator says, “Look, happy bunnies all around!” That is, one cannot possibly accept the discourse of psychology or politics within the poetry at anything like face value. Nor can one trust the “deeper,” “implicit” version of the same in that the “more” of these poems comes pre-­populated by an ersatz surplus that is itself one of the chief tropes of the panegyrical aesthetic. What we see is not quite what one is told we are getting. And the fakery happens at more than one level. So, this phenomenon offers a start, a place where criticism might find something to seize upon. Presumably, the phenomenon in question is something that finds its satisfaction in the truth-­ and-­fiction game itself, in the dance of cleverness, in the jubilation of withholding plenitude, in the non-­convergence of being and meaning. There would be nothing especially distinctively Domitianic about this sort of neurotic deferral if we left the adumbration as it stands. We need to add in the observation that this joy-­in-­cleverness is so very invested in playing the full-­and-­empty game relative to power itself. In Statius we find goddesses whom the narrator can’t help but figure as scullery maids. The low feels low. The high feels either low or hollow. In both Statius and Martial the implied authorial figure promulgates the idea that there is something jubilant-­and-­obscene about pleasure. The implied authorial figure also then adopts a distanced, objective relationship to both itself and to pleasure. Mastery-­and-­poetry arises out of distance-­as-­ power, but the same conflation also means that all of the gold winds up seeming too much like fool’s gold if not downright shit. The surplus that has been mastered seems worthless as it stands. Whatever is really contained in this remainder does little to speak to the glorious free play of the omnipotent imagination. Instead, it is redolent of the foul complicity of abasement: there is no horror like castration; there is nothing so lovely as Earinus; suck-­ups are disgusting; everyone likes being sucked off. And so forth. The “metapoetical” moments of these authors leave us somewhere that is more “after poetry” than it is “along with poetry.” In Martial, poetry and prostitution sound too much alike. The joke is that this is not really a joke. In Statius absolutely everything in the poetry is an allegory for the poetry itself. Even the most insipid objects are “metapoetic.” And the joke of the parrot that is no joke in Statius is that, no, the poet really is a lot like a

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354 Conclusion brain-­dead and soon to be real-­dead parrot who has been taught how to say, “Hail, Caesar (whichever Caesar you happen to be . . .).” There is a specifically political cast to the perversity of these poetic successes-­in-­failure and failures-­in-­success. People are selling out at two levels. They sell out at the “fake” formal level. They also sell out at the very site of the “thing in reserve.” And this site itself can only be purchased by investing in a certain configuration of power. The subjective configuration that corresponds to this politics has been sketched above. There is something “anxious” about it. But saying that poetry like this “reflects” a courtier’s “anxieties” in some loose sense is not enough. The poetry performs anxiety itself. It shows us that our relationship to the world is a matter of conjoint agony-­and-­ ecstasy. In choosing between “your meaning or your life,” we got life, but we lost a mastery over the domain of meaning. And so this life is filled with a guilt and shame that accompanies our every ecstatic expostulation: Ecce!11 The ability to proudly(-­but-­also-­guiltily) self-­assert has been purchased at the price of taking on the burden of complicity with the order of things: “My being is an alienated being that only makes sense within this domain of meaning and no other. I am not the absolute dominus relative to this domain. I can only fantasize about being a master after the fashion of The Master. Behold, then, my subjectivity-­as-­subjection. Behold my private fantasy of mastery as something propped up by a fantasy that has invested in some Other’s mastery.” Sullivan, a major and innovative critic of this poetry, opens and pointedly closes the door to this sort of reading. “A Lacanian interpretation of Martial would postulate that the poet has only one goal and one anxiety that he wishes his readership to share: to take the place of the father, to become himself the master.”12 One must offer two crucial notes to this. First, Sullivan is not in fact offering a Lacanian interpretation; he is only reporting what one “would” look like.13 “I know this guy who read some Lacan (and over-­assimilated him to a vulgar version of Freud), you see . . .”. Next: the father is “Vergil” in Sullivan’s argument. Nevertheless Sullivan at least offers a sense of how and why we might need to think of politics and aesthetics simultaneously. This is because mastery and poetic mastery do

11  See Lacan, 1998a:210–212. See also Fink, 1995:51–53 and Silverman, 1992:53. 12 Sullivan, 1991:103. 13  The thumb-­nail sketch also looks far more Freudian than it does Lacanian.

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indeed intersect. After all, every species can be expected to appertain to its genus.14 Sullivan’s choice of Vergil as “the father” is a telling one. It speaks to our own critical habits. For many critics of Latin literature, poetry is about the poets. But the poems of Statius and Martial insist that Big Daddy is Domitian. And he is a peculiar sort of father. One wants to kill him (because he is disgusting). One wants to replace him (even though one is oneself also disgusting). Here we need to remember as well that we have so very little access to concrete historical information about Domitian himself. Instead, we have been seeing Domitianic fantasies. The poetry has been fantasizing about Domitian’s desires and pandering to the conjured desire of this other. Domitian did not ask for this poetry. Domitian may well not even read it. And so the “Domitian” of “Domitianic poetry” really is the before-­and-­after-­the-­poetry metapoetical master of the verse-­world. Genius seeks out this hypostatized fons et origo for its paeans, and in so seeking it sees reflected a misrecognized version of its own beautiful-­and-­ ugly desiring-­and-­desired face. This magic speculative moment enflames the disavowed-­ but-­ primary narcissism of Domitianic poetry, a pretty poetry obsessed, inter alia, with pretty boys who see their own faces in pools and mirrors. Within this self-­authorizing fantasy of the verse projects qua fantasy, the excess of the excessive poetry is enjoined. The sick pleasures of the narrative are enjoyment enjoined. The devil is making them do it.15 But he is assuredly not making them do it. Nevertheless, the author implied by the text insistently adopts a perspective that has simultaneously constituted a centering center as well as the spectacle of an author contemplating that center. Within this spectacle Domitian turns into an obscene father. All of the pleasure, all of the power, everything-­and-­then-­some has to be offered to him. We adore him even though we loath him. Sullivan’s Oedipal reading of Martial poorly captures the “psychic sociology” of these moments. Freud’s Totem and Taboo is closer to the mark.16 14  Lacan, 2006:689: “Nevertheless, it is this whimsy [on the part of the Other] that introduces the phantom of Omnipotence—not of the subject, but of the Other in which the subject’s demand is instated . . .—and with this phantom, the necessity that the Other be bridled by the Law.” 15  Žižek, 1991:9–10: “[E]njoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression,’ is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered—when we enjoy, we never do it ‘spontaneously,’ we always follow a certain injunction. The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction, for this obscene call, ‘Enjoy!’, is superego.” [emphasis altered] 16  Freud, 2001c:18: “‘Taboo’ is a Polynesian word. It is difficult for us to find a translation for it, since the concept connoted by it is one which we no longer possess. It was still current

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356 Conclusion The empty sublime, the ecstatic present, and the “too muchness” of the objects of representation are coordinated and coordinating features of the Epigrams and the Siluae. These poetic projects innovate by lodging themselves in the here and now. They transgress and progress because they do not feel compelled to orient themselves around nostalgic cultural shibboleths. One is freed up to violently reappropriate traditional cultural capital for novel ends. There is a radical aesthetic self-­assertion amidst the sycophantic political submission.17 The former is perhaps possible only in the wake of the latter. Nevertheless, as poetic projects there is also something unpleasant and regressive about this same moment of emancipation-­in-­subjection. The implicit nihilism of a poetic voice that is willing to say anything about anyone is disconcerting. It is the correlate of the power to which it sings, a power that is capriciously willing to do anything to anyone. Remoteness and abstraction on the part of power, convention and restraint on the part of language might offer a sort of salve to one’s anxieties about the dangerous intimacy of the Domitianic father.18 The Antonine age effectively states as much with their portraits of the good new emperor. Pliny’s linguistic restraint in the Panegyricus is the correlate of a thesis about political restraint on the part of Trajan. For the Antonines, the figure of “Good Trajan” requires “Obscene Domitian.” And this obscenity is not some mere figure of speech or thought. Consider again the sexualized rage visited among the ancient Romans, whose ‘sacer’ was the same as Polynesian ‘taboo’ . . . The meaning of ‘taboo’, as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand, ‘sacred,’ ‘consecrated,’ and on the other ‘uncanny,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘forbidden,’ ‘unclean.’ ” Then consider the guilty band of brothers in the primal horde who kill the obscene father Freud, 2001c:142: “The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength.” The everyday analog can be found in children and neurotics: “They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too.” (Freud, 2001c:143) 17  Horkheimer and Adorno, 1997:9: “The awakening of the self is paid for by the acknowledgement of power as the principle of all relations.” 18  Žižek, 1999:314: “Another aspect of this duality [of the father] is the crucial distinction between the ‘big Other’ qua the symbolic order, the anonymous circuity which mediates any intersubjective communication and induces an irreducible ‘alienation’ as the price of entering its circuit, and the subject’s ‘impossible’ relationship to an Otherness which is not yet the symbolic big Other but the Other qua the Real Thing . . . [T]his Thing is, rather, Father ­himself, namely, the obscene Father-jouissance prior to his murder and subsequent elevation into the agency of symbolic authority (Name-­of-­the-­Father).” [original emphasis] Compare Lacan, 2006:689: “Nevertheless, it is this whimsy [on the part of the Other] that introduces the phantom of Omnipotence—not of the subject, but of the Other in which the subject’s demand is instated . . .—and with this phantom, the necessity that the Other be bridled by the Law.”

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upon Parthenius in the quote that opens this conclusion. The Antonines’ self-­identify as angry survivors of Domitianic perversity. Tacitus’ cynicism helps a certain sort of critical eye to get things sorted: when looking back at past verbal performances one sees that in them a dead emperor is always too bad, and a living one always too good.19 And this is “true” no matter who the emperor is, because this “false rhetoric” is in fact a home truth of imperial subjectivity. Tacitus’ Antonine position is, then, that one only belatedly acknowledges the problems with empire. In the actual moment one does not actually do anything about these problems. This same conclusion enables one to go along and to get along (all over again) in an Antonine here and now. Both the emperor and his subjects “know better” than to acknowledge that there is a problem with the imperial system. The current euphemism is the one we will all cynically agree to live by. This age will pride itself on offering a conservative counterrevolution that stabilizes and sorts as per the old hierarchies.20 The system may stink, but it is our system. There are no viable alternatives. And so, we are “reluctantly complicit” all over again, but this time after an Antonine fashion rather than a Domitianic one. Fashions come and go, you see, but a toga is always basically a toga. Claims like these deserve closer scrutiny. But, for present purposes, we can describe the Antonines as content with their contemporary fictions precisely because these fictions are traditional in form: “You may be a bad emperor, but I believe in the empire.” The Domitianic position had been, effectively, “You may be a monster, but I will call you a god.” In the Domitianic case the thing one “believes in” is saying what one says and 19  So say the openings of both Tacitus’ Histories and his Annales: “At the same time historical veracity suffered manifold crippling blows: first, people had no understanding of a state that was like a stranger to them; next there was a passion for assent, or, conversely a loathing towards one’s masters. Accordingly, between the hostile and the beholden on neither side was a solicitousness for subsequent generations shown (simul ueritas pluribus modis infracta, primum inscitia rei publicae ut alienae, mox libidine adsentandi aut rursus odio aduersus dominantis: ita neutris cura posteritatis inter infensos uel obnoxios. Tacitus, Historiae 1.1).” “Fear caused the affairs of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero to be falsified during their lives. After they died the same were fictionalized by people whose enmity was still fresh (Tiberii Gaique et Claudii ac Neronis res florentibus ipsis ob metum falsae, postquam occiderant recentibus odiis compositae sunt. Tacitus, Annales 1.1).” 20  Gender trouble and status ambiguity are also tidily sorted as well, my-­what-­a-­relief: “For equilibrium the system of the Principate depended both on proper relations of confidence between the ruler and the military oligarchy and on a proper control of his domestic entourage. Hitherto the Palace had seldom failed to engender strife and disturbance, from the ambitions and intrigues of the empresses, the dominating influence of imperial freedmen, the perpetual traffic in honours. The accession of Trajan promised order, decorum, and sobriety, with family politics now discountenanced, and no undue prominence for the women of the household.” (Syme, 1997:232)

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358 Conclusion doing the done thing. There is no “higher principle” in evidence because “the high” itself has been dislodged and comes crashing down upon us. The contrast between the Domitianic and the Antonine rhetorics can be reframed under the rubric of The Politics of Latin Literature.21 While I have already been arguing for the imbrication of aesthetics and politics, I would like to step back for a moment to talk more generally about aesthetic objects that are embedded in their political moment. Then we can return to the politics of style in Statius and Martial. But all of this is a prologue to a reappraisal of the ethics of reading. That is, what sorts of complicities await critics themselves? Roman poetry had been socially and politically engaged from its ­inception. In fact, song of itself was already socio-­politically charged as a category before literature as such emerges.22 Ennius may well be an avant-­ garde artist on the one hand, but he is also connected to and celebrating the aristocratic imperial project on the other.23 A literary triumph arises out of a celebration of triumphal generals. The praetexta was as old as Naevius and celebrated the great deeds of Romans.24 Comedy can have a political edge: later generations claimed that Naevius was imprisoned for a joke he made at the expense of the Metelli.25 Terence is happy to say in the prologues to his plays that he has friends in high places. Lucilius is famous for abusing contemporaries. In short, Latin literature had been so manifestly political from its very inception that “art for art’s sake” and “I  herewith retreat from the world and into the grove of the muses” 21  That is, see Habinek, 1998. 22  Habinek,  2005:8: “Song enters Rome in the context of ritual.” Note as well Habinek’s assertion that the ritual origins of song are still an element of song’s long history of Rome even as the ritual context as such has disappeared: “Although song is eventually dislodged from ritual, much as poetry is dislodged from song, still the authority of song derives from its origin both historically and pragmatically in ritual . . . Each and every instance of song within Roman culture relies upon practices of ritualization analogous to those found in the Salian rite. And the Salian rite, in turn, can be interpreted as a self-­referential reflection on song’s role in the foundation and maintenance of social order and on song’s power to transform the everyday into the eternal.” (Habinek, 2005:9) 23  Goldberg, 2005:22: “The success of Ennius’ Annales had so codified and canonized the early history of Rome and established history as the subject of Latin epic that later poets could imagine little more than a continuation of its story.” 24  The exact nature of the genre is obscure owing to the state of our evidence: one late play and after that not so many and then too quite meager fragments. See Kragelund,  2002:8: “What the evidence suggests is, in short, that [Roman tragedy and the praetexta] had a common stock of dramatic props and motifs, but that the praetexta also drew on other, notably historiographical, sources.” Kragelund, 2002:22: “Owing to their more ‘historical’ character, these near contemporary praetextae have often been considered different from the legendary variety, but on closer inspection the difference may well prove superficial.” 25  See Germany, 2019:70 on the episode. But Germany’s whole piece is an overview of the politics of Roman comedy.

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emerge as relatively late and uncommon stances, and ones that are always compromised. Art has to be “cleaned up” before one can loudly trumpet that it is Pure. Meanwhile everyone is wise to the fact that it just got a good scrub. Given the empirical reality that literature is so political at Rome, the very attempt at a depoliticization of any given project is itself a politically consequential posture: “Here, unusually, is poetry that insists that perhaps poetry need not be so tied up with politics.” And, of course, in the wake of such a declaration, cynics, of which there were very many, will at once assume that the denial is an oblique confession and set themselves the task of hunting down some political subtext or other. Martial’s sense that people like to exercise their genius in the case of another’s book shows that readers have been known to find things that were not there to begin with.26 They were looking, and so they found.27 The contemporary western experience of aesthetic products retains a Romantic quality. That is, one generally does not expect works of art to be directly engaged with political questions. There might even be an assumption that any such engagement effectively debases the project relative to some other “pure” and “timeless” meditation on the human condition. A potentially defensible middle ground might possibly exist in those works that are only indirectly engaged with the contemporary scene: the abstract claims to the aesthetic as such remain despite some specific ties to the concrete. This sort of bias about the political disconnectedness of the aesthetic realm can make it difficult for audiences today to grapple with the artistic integrity of highly political works from the twentieth century. One often dismisses them as “mere” propaganda without considering the poetic genius of the propagandists themselves. And, to the extent that one does countenance the possibility of genius, there is a tendency within the North American reception of these works to imagine either that excellence emerges “in spite of ” the basic outline of the project or that there is somehow something “resistant” about the artist and that this “reluctance” is in fact the source of the praiseworthy within the project. That is, genius resides in the thing left over from and/or to one side of the political 26  See again the preface to the first book of Epigrams and the discussion above. The evil genius of the malevolent reader turns him into a rewriter of the text (nec epigrammata mea scribat). 27 The notorious version of the phenomenon appears during the revivals of plays. Audiences would at times “read” the piece as if it were a political commentary on the present. See Nicolet, 1980:166–173 which preserves and supplements the extensive testimony on the phenomenon available in Cicero’s Pro Sestio 115–126.

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360 Conclusion content of the work. Take as sample works illustrating the politics-­and-­art confluence “The Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” by Leni Riefenstahl, “Three songs for Lenin” by Dziga Vertov, “October (Ten Days that Shook the World)” by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigoriy Aleksandrov, and “The East is Red” by Ping Wang.28 In each case we can find “great art”—several of these pieces are seminal for subsequent filmmakers around the world . . . —but any separation of that art from the political content can be achieved only by means of effecting a hermeneutic violence to the original. Nevertheless, it is tempting to heed the siren song of “the aesthetic disposition.” Artists implied, artists concrete, narrators, and characters abound who all lay hold of the hymnal of Art. Sings their pious song, “Art is about art.”29 What sort of churlish individual capriciously opts to sail off in another direction?30 And, further, a critique of criticism is itself destined to be met with at best mixed enthusiasm.31 Nevertheless, a useful rejoinder is, “Why should I go along with the rules of reading folded into the text?” In the case of panegyrical works a resistant reading comes quite easily. But it would be salutary to ask the same question even (especially?) in the case of art that does not present such obvious and immediate politico-­aesthetic challenges. Martial and Statius are leveraging “song’s power to transform the everyday into the eternal” to turn Domitian’s Rome into something timeless.32 28  One can for the moment leave to one side the extent to which a variety of Hollywood films are themselves pieces of propaganda that celebrate rapacious capitalism and brutal imperialism in the course of their narration of historical events. 29  Bourdieu, 1996:185: “The rupture that must be effected in order to ground a rigorous science of cultural works is hence more than and different from a simple methodological overturning: it implies a veritable conversion of the most common manner of thinking and living the intellectual life, a sort of épochè of the belief commonly granted to cultural things and to the legitimate ways of approaching them.” [original emphasis] Adorno, 1981a:23: “But the greatest fetish of cultural criticism is the notion of culture as such. For no authentic work of art and no true philosophy, according to their very meaning, has ever exhausted itself in itself alone, in its being-­in-­itself. They have always stood in relation to the actual life-­process of society from which they distinguished themselves.” 30  Bourdieu, 1984:28: “Any legitimate work tends in fact to impose the norms of its own perception and tacitly defines as the only legitimate mode of perception the one which brings into play a certain disposition and a certain competence.” Bourdieu’s position is in its own way just the special cultural case of the more general thesis of Marx: “Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer” (Marx,  1993:92). Marx himself in fact already offers the special case: “The object of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.” (Marx, 1993:92) 31  See Bourdieu, 1996:209 on the way that the process of “objectifying the subject of objectification” in the course of reflexive research can and will be mistaken for an “attack” launched at several levels at once. 32  See again Habinek, 2005:9.

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And they do this by means of deploying “improvisational,” “occasional,” and “small” texts. The works are, of course, neither improvisational nor small. And the occasions are carefully chosen. The Epigrams and the Siluae have transitioned away from the realm of the gods and towards political power. If the old ideology of literature used the power of song to yoke the contemporary and the eternal, this new song with its short-­circuit logic sutures the contemporary to the contemporary when it links the poetic to the political. This timelessness yields an “eternal present” of power itself as well as a new art suited to speaking to this power. I do not mean to indicate that Domitianic modernism represents a radical and unparalleled intervention into the history of Latin literature. There had been plenty of “modernisms” before in earlier generations. Ennius had to have shocked many sensibilities with his numerous formal innovations. But the collection of additions and subtractions in Statius and Martial should be noted. And we should also attend to the net effect of this recalibration of the artistic enterprise. A genuine provocation is offered to the long-­established sense that Roman culture is connected to an authorizing past.33 In Statius we find the clever self-­assertion of linguistic innovation. There is nothing new about this. One need only look back to the authors of the preceding generation to find any number of familiar items that recall the Siluae in either form or contents. But these individual similarities are each extraneous to the general tenor of Statius’ enterprise. Persius is full of lexical and syntactic surprises.34 He is an angry Neronian author, and angry precisely because he is a Neronian author. Lucan’s striking poetry is strikingly “anti-­Caesarean.”35 Seneca derides costly villas and praises Scipio’s old pile of rocks.36 It is hard to think about high-­class meals and swanky digs in the same way after meeting Petronius’ Trimalchio. Each of the above illustrates a road half-­taken by the Siluae. Statius travels in parallel for a while but also forks off toward an imperial aesthetic in

33  Habinek,  1998:3: “The social milieu from which Latin literature emerged and in the interests of which it intervened was that of the elite sector of a traditional aristocratic empire. Many of the characteristics of Latin literature can be attributed to its production by and for an elite that sought to maintain and to expand its dominance over other sectors of the population through reference to an authorizing past.” 34  See Freudenburg, 2001:131–132 on Persius’ Neronianism and on his “difficult Latin.” 35  Johnson, 1987:110–111: “[Lucan’s poem] evokes, suggests, points toward — it cannot represent without falling into the very illusion it is trying to lay bare — the ‘reality’ of naked, aimless, self-­destructive power, the will-­to-­power that exists for its own sake, which the splendid myths of rational power are designed to hide.” 36  See Seneca, Epistulae morales 86 and Henderson, 2004 on the same.

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362 Conclusion the end. Persius’ Latin stuns and dislocates us. Statius takes striking Latin and with it advertises not just his own brilliance but also the brilliance of the Domitianic project more generally. In contradistinction to the worlds of the Neronian satirist or epicist, in the Siluae everyone seems to be both bigger and better than they should be. And, accordingly, the lay of the political land seems supremely agreeable. And yet Statius poses as an ardent-unto-­impiety admirer of Lucan (Lucanum canimus, fauete linguis . . . 2.7.19). But Lucan is a critic of autocracy. Yet, according to the Siluae in general, we are lucky to have been given an opportunity to submit to Caesarism. Meanwhile, all of the creature comforts of this world are to be embraced and celebrated rather than jeered at for their hollowness. Cynicism, skepticism, even hypocritical refusal are all “off the table” now that we have reset the places at the literary feast: “Dig in, it’s time for Domitian’s banquet.” While we are examining contrasting artistic means and ends, we can turn to the literary generation that will follow. Apuleius has a highly artificial style that is ostentatiously clever. But it plays a low-­and-­highbrow game and so is always accessible even as it can be simultaneously recherché. His works are set on the edges of the empire. Caesar is missing. One cannot even bray his name. This is a portrait of empire on the one hand, but also of a generic empire with a remote emperor who, in his remoteness, has enabled a variety of literary and social possibilities.37 Caesar is but an idea, and we love the idea that he is just an idea. All of which is to flesh out the same observation one more time: Statius’ poetry did not have to look like it looks. It did not have to be so insistently Domitianic and to anchor the project itself so squarely in a meditation on power/poetry. Latin literary genius had been and would continue to be full of bold invention. It had been and would continue to be meditating on problems of the subject and power. But other artists worked otherwise. Martial’s mix-­and-­match is not uniformly imperial. Nevertheless, the emperor is given pride of place. One also suspects that if Martial could really bring himself to mock himself, then perhaps his Caesar would look different as well. The Epigrams are so very “on board” and “up for it” and “along for the ride” when it comes to the Imperial city Writ Large (and, please remember, Small too). The narrator’s some-­time hatred for and critique of Rome is redolent of the sort of affected disaffection that certain life-­time New Yorkers manifest. Despite all of the complaining, the only 37  See further Gunderson, 2019.

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thing worse than life in New York would be life anywhere else. See Epigrams 10.58 on getting out of this madhouse.38 See Epigrams Book 12 on what it means to lose Rome. And much as Manhattan can only be what it is because of a variety of core injustices and inequalities that are key components of its socio-­political infrastructure, so too is Epigrammatic Rome a thing that, if loved, has to be loved “warts and all.” Nevertheless, the complaints are quite hollow in the end. The warts not all that warty for those that are truly reveling in the delights of the city: “This restaurant was so much better before it was discovered . . . ” “The Met is weak this season.” “I had to wait forever to get a cab.” “I hate trudging uphill at dawn to visit a patron.” (5.22) “I’ll die if I have to hear you recite your poetry again.” (2.88) “Sixty guests and but a single boar: what a boor . . . ” (1.43). Fitzgerald is right to point out the flâneur in the epigrammatic ­narrator.39 In fact, a striking amount of Benjamin’s thought suits Martial’s world. That is, Benjamin’s account of the Parisian cityscape works very well with Martial’s Rome. We can linger with the claim that “the spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”40 Here Benjamin catches out the connection between the anonymous consumption of city-­ as-­spectacle and power. Seeing this and not that, wandering here and now there, consuming and commenting, this is evocative of a lordly privilege. Martial’s narrator takes the reader along with him for just such a stroll. The world is offered up to our eyes as a spectacle that is fit for a king. It is as if the motley lot of it was happening for us, as if daily life had somehow to be referred to our interests and tastes if it is to find its true value, aesthetic or otherwise. The homology between giver-­of-­poems and giver-­of-­shows is felt all over again.41 And the audience is implicated as well: society is my spectacle; I look in upon it and judge it; it does not look back at me. Benjamin’s point should not be mistaken. He is not talking about a situation where Nero dresses up like a commoner and roams the streets.42 This is not a case of supreme power “slumming it.” Instead, Benjamin notes that “feuilletonist miscellanies as moral dioramas” are part and parcel of this desire to stage, consume, and enjoy “life” precisely in the form of

38  But recall that everything in Book 10 makes for odd evidence as to general attitudes of the narrator. Something unspeakable has happened at Rome . . . 39 Fitzgerald, 2007:7–8. 40 Benjamin, 1999:443. 41 Gunderson, 2003a:653–654. 42  See Suetonius, Nero 26: “As soon as it started to get dark he would grab a freedman’s cap or a wig and make the rounds of the pubs, and he wandered the neighborhoods seeking out good times (post crepusculum statim adrepto pilleo uel galero popinas inibat circumque uicos uagabatur ludibundus).”

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364 Conclusion a representation-­of-­life: “The wax museum ‘Panoptikum’: a manifestation of the total work of art. The universalism of the nineteenth century has its monument in the waxworks. Panopticon: not only does one see everything, but one sees it in all ways.”43 Epigram sees everything. It sees it in all ways. It offers moral dioramas. But it is not “high art.” Instead, it is “mass art,” but it is a mass art that makes-­a-­mass-­of Rome rather than being addressed to the masses. To the extent that the readers of these epigrams identify with the process and product, they are assenting to the “panoptical” premise that the city in its heterogeneity is something that is to be captured and offered up as a living whole. And it is to be offered up to an elite, well-­trained eye whose eye-­for-­detail can be counted upon to note connections between Martial’s epigrammatic Rome and Greek epigrams that celebrate Alexandria. At this juncture we should recall that only the emperor and his court and his shows are the really real items on display in the Epigrams and that everything else is anonymous, generic, and typical. The “whole” is real, but only as generic: “This is Roman life.” But within this whole there is one specific part that is very much real in a qualitatively different manner, the emperor himself. “Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.”44 The trace is the generic specificity of Rome in the Epigrams. One feels the nearness of Rome much as the narrator of the Epigrams feels his own neighbor to be so close that he can touch him though the open window (1.86). The reality-­effect of the charming verses forever leaves traces behind. It puts us in possession of Rome. Rome is right here. It is ours. But the very same text also conjures an aura for the emperor. There is an “intimate inaccessibility” to this figure. His is a closeness that takes possession of us. His presence is felt “deep within.” He only seems to be remote. Perhaps the palace is literally distant, but the “aura of power” has been thoroughly induced into the text by its author. A numinous unreality of author-­and-­emperor or power-­and-­poetry gives the Epigrams their magic, a magic that seizes us in the very moment when we thought that we were the ones consuming the spectacle of the world. “By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-­ praise.”45 The dialogic 43  See Benjamin, 1999:531.

44 Benjamin, 1999:447.

45 Debord, 1994:19.

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imagination, heteroglossia and (Kristevan) intertextuality are all forestalled by the Domitianic aesthetic of the Epigrams and the Siluae.46 The openness of Apuleius and Petronius is closed down by a centripetal drive to hitch all meaning to the imperial star.47 The absurdity and insincerity of the panegyrical rhetorical gestures in Statius and Martial do nothing to dispel the net effect of the movement in this direction. In fact, the disbelief in the message proper only accentuates the power-­play invested in the formal claim. The uninterrupted monologue of self-­praise is ostentatiously ironic when it comes to its other-­praise. Like the emperor, the artist is the capricious point of synthesis. Anything and everything can and will pass through the hands of one and be offered to the eye of the other. The net effect is a pseudo-­dialogistic relationship to the world in that the ultimate point of origin-­and-­return is the Poet-­and-­Prince dyad. And the actual duality of this pair’s doubleness is often suspect. Poet is always also another name for prince. Prince is always also another name for poet. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”48 Martial and Statius are mounting a scene where this mediation via images is “legitimate.” Watching-­and-­reading imperial cultural displays is a socio-­literary relationship. The images given off by other imperial agents of the spectacle— the stage managers who set this trained beast against that one; the chefs who arrange the brilliant dishes at an imperial feast; the men who make the statues of the emperor . . . —are taken up, recast, amplified, and re-­ disseminated by Statius and Martial. The genius of all parties is evaluated by their ability to effect a variety of transformations of these coins of this realm into other preciously spectacular wares.49 Obverse: Domitian. 46  See Kristeva, 1980:66 on intertextuality: “The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double. The word as minimal textual unit thus turns out to occupy the status of mediator, linking structural modes to cultural (historical) environment, as well as that of regulator, controlling mutations from diachrony to synchrony, i.e., to literary structure” [original emphasis]. Later on the same page: “Each word (text) is an intersection of word (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read . . . [A]ny text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.” 47  Bakhtin, 1981:38: “The present, in all its openendedness, taken as a starting point and center for artistic and ideological orientation, is an enormous revolution in the creative consciousness of man.” 48 Debord, 1994:12. 49  Burgersdijk and Ross, 2018:1–2: “The impression, however, that the emperor stood at the top of an imperial pyramid may still be endorsed by modern scholarship, but the structural integrity of that pyramid was ensured by every layer, not just dictated by the top. The

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366 Conclusion Converse: The Artist. On the one hand we have drifted away from “the gold standard” of traditional Roman culture and even traditional imperial hegemony. But, on the other hand, this allows for the pure abstraction of symbolic capital and capital as symbol to emerge. Fiat cultural currency circulates specifically because the poetic fiat of cultural producers are minting this sort of coin and no other: “In Domitian we trust (even though, of course, we don’t).” An interesting non-­debate resides in the bibliography on Statius and Martial. One once freely denounced Statius and Martial as Domitianic toadies. But now one praises their artistic genius. Neither point really speaks to the other. That is, we can note an occluded possibility: a genius can be a toady, and a toady can be a genius. But what if virtually every genius who wields symbolic power was always also a toady? What if they were two sides of the same coin? “The properly ideological function of the field of ideological production is performed almost automatically on the basis of the structural homology between the field of ideological production and the field of class struggle. The homology between the two fields means that the struggles over the specific objects of the autonomous field automatically produce euphemized forms of the economic and political struggles between classes.”50 The non-­communication between the positions—genius or lickspittle . . . —is of itself interesting. The failed critical encounter is predicated on a shared assumption: good art is not produced by bad people. A variety of derivative quasi-­syllogistic minor premises and conclusions accompany this first and false major premise. Political complicity is wicked. Panegyric is false. A prostituted muse cannot yield great works of art. The Epigrams and the Siluae are the products of exceptionally talented individuals. They are filled with the tokens of genius. They are fully engaged with “the greats.” They are not constantly praising. The praise is extraneous to the true genius of the project. Their praise is complex. The ambiguities inherent in any complex sign system should be leveraged to demonstrate that the praise is half-­hearted, hollow, and/or somehow subtly subversive.51

images by which emperorship was surrounded and propagated were essential for ensuring the structural integrity of the system.” 50  Bourdieu, 1991:169 [original emphasis]. 51  Roman,  2001:115: “If previously scholars tended to take silver writers literally when they represented their literary activity as degraded, inferior, and subordinated to sordid social aims, now scholars interpret such expressions of inferiority as conceits or playful self-­ deprecation which the reader knows not to take seriously.”

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And so we return to the allegedly self-­disqualifying gaucherie of a socio-­political appraisal of literature. The very move to de-­politicize criticism and to reserve a separate space is itself an intensely political gesture.52 A certain self-­interest if not outright self-­preservation can be detected in this. Given that ancient societies are violent, sexist, and exploitative and are in fact generally proud to admit as much explicitly, connecting their literature to their culture too strongly can put the critic himself or herself on the hook: “You like that?!?” How can one defend being a carnivore who routinely eats factory-­farmed meat to one’s vegan friends beyond offering a guilty shrug? Complicit artists, that is, endanger their critics: we too might be part of the problem. And one dimension of the very problem might be our problem-­solving relationship to the various allusive riddles of the text. We spend our time in that one cozy corner that we might avoid moving throughout the room and bumping into some of the sharper edges and confronting less pleasing elements of the decor. Everyone wants to hear Orpheus sing. But not everyone who sings is an Orpheus. And, in Domitian’s Rome, Orpheus might just be a criminal dressed up like Orpheus who is about to be eaten.53 Let us return to Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl is an obviously inflammatory comparandum, but she does make for a stellar example of a great artist whose brilliant, ground-­breaking work was executed in the service of a politically despicable cause. And her post-­Hitler efforts are just as fascistic in their portrait of bodies and beauty as her work during the Reich had been. Just as there is no real gap between Early Leni and Late Leni, there is no way to segregate out some Good Leni from a Bad Leni. The integrity of the body of work, its genius, and its evil are all of a piece. In 1975 Susan Sontag was savage about the de-­politicization of Riefenstahl in then-­recent publications: “It takes a certain originality to describe the Nazi era as ‘Germany’s blighted and momentous 1930s,’ to summarize the events of 1933 as Hitler’s ‘having attained power,’ and to assert that Riefenstahl, most of whose work was in its own decade correctly identified as Nazi propaganda, enjoyed ‘international fame as a film director,’ ostensibly like her

52  Laclau and Mouffe, 1985:107 will have none of it: “Our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-­discursive practices. It affirms: a) that every object is constituted as an object of discourse, insofar as no object is given outside every discursive condition of emergence; and b) that any distinction between what are usually called linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice, is either an incorrect distinction or ought to find its place as a differentiation within the social production of meaning, which is structured under the form of discursive totalities.” 53 Martial, De Spectaculis 17 yet again.

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368 Conclusion contemporaries Renoir, Lubitsch, and Flaherty.”54 The rehabilitation of Riefenstahl was attempted by means of an appeal to The Aesthetic: “But a stronger reason for the change in attitude toward Riefenstahl lies in a shift in taste which simply makes it impossible to reject art if it is ‘beautiful.’ The line taken by Riefenstahl’s defenders, who now include the most influential voices in the avant-­garde film establishment, is that she was always concerned with beauty.”55 Our own detachment and our own beauty-­in-­detachment can be on the line here. The seductions exerted by talk of works of timeless monumentality can appeal to a very timely and situated political desire. This trick was tried in a different imperial age: “The Augustan fiction of the literary work as timeless monument, removed from the urgency of immediate, social needs, paradoxically responds to the contemporary demand for a literature capable of integrating Augustus into the fabric of Roman thought, history, and experience, and at the same time, capable of conveying the impression that he was always somehow inherent to that fabric.”56 The “liberty” of Augustan poetry comes entangled in the web of complicity that extends up to and even includes their own rhetoric of frank speech.57 Poet and critic are always situated. And we academic critics are enmeshed in our own webs of complicity despite our fantasies of au­ton­omy.58 54 Sontag, 1975. 55  Sontag, 1975. Sontag has branched out to Riefenstahl’s corpus more generally, but she is very much interested in The Last of the Nuba, a then fairly new publication. It is the English version of Die Nuba: Menschen wie von einem Anderen Stern which first comes out in 1973. Die Nuba von Kau will appear in 1976. Salient for our purposes is the way that the extremely high level of technical skill deployed in the service of presenting beautiful black bodies all but invites us to think that Riefenstahl is not now and never has been a fascist, instead she is “an Artist” and “just loves beauty.” Sontag, obviously, will have none of that. Africans as spectacle, Africans as bodies, Africans as noble savages, Africans as vanishing . . . There is a long list of problems here. Nevertheless, the photos are gorgeous. And one needs to think hard about the pointedly double seduction, a simultaneously political and aesthetic seduction, that is on offer. Martial’s tenth book of Epigrams and much of the fifth book of the Siluae come to mind: these are the depoliticized, “pure art” projects that arrive late in the game and invite us to use here-­and-­now aesthetics to paper over old political questions about the art itself. 56 Roman, 2001:143. 57  Roman, 2001:99: “The project of establishing a new set of cultural and civic values for imperial society, and of redefining Romanitas, both on the level of personal ethics, and in terms of a broader conception of history, so as to accommodate Augustus and the Principate, required the complicity and even active cooperation of writers, who in turn strove to fashion a rhetoric of independence.” 58  Gramsci, 1971:7: “Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an ‘esprit de corps’ their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group. This self-­assessment is not without consequences in the ideological and political field, consequences of wide-­ranging import.” As members of the culture industry, the

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Universities facilitate and reproduce dominant social structures while also housing a criticism of the same. The disruptiveness of the criticism is in doubt, the reproduction of the domination is not. Meanwhile the critics win their right to safe criticism by taking fully on board the normative paradigms of the system itself.59 Some examples of “soft complicity,” a complicity which is no less complicit for being soft: Taking time out for political activism would be unadvisable for someone who is pre-­tenure, and, accordingly, the active activists tend not to swell the ranks of the professoriate. The carbon footprint of the average full professor is shocking: the impact of multiple transatlantic flights per year puts to shame the brownest lifestyle of a less economically advantaged person. And, ironically, many of those conferences will have as their subject topics like “Addressing global climate change” or “Classics in the Anthropocene.” The idea that “deep down” Statius and Martial are not part of the problem has as its likely correlate a self-­interested conviction that “deep down I am not a part of the problem.” A retreat into the purity of pure literature and pure reflection on literature effaces the conditions of possibility of the very retreat itself: “It is one of the generic properties of fields that the struggle for specific stakes masks the objective collusion concerning the principles underlying the game . . . What would become of the literary world if one began to argue, not about the value of this or that author’s style, but about the value of arguments about style?”60 To the extent that Domitian is a monster ready to use concrete violence, the poetry of Martial and Statius fashions a velvet glove for the iron fist. The Siluae and the Epigrams embrace their role as agents of symbolic violence. They are even willing to do violence to the old ways of speaking that they might fully inhabit this role. Both projects are insistent that they articulate the grammar and syntax of domination. In arrogating for themselves the  right to so speak they ipso facto perpetrate symbolic violence. The urban/urbane Martial and Statius also fit well enough with the following although one should probably note their greater autonomy: “Intellectuals of the urban type have grown up along with industry and are linked to its fortunes . . . Their job is to articulate the relationship between the entrepreneur and the instrumental mass and to carry out the immediate execution of the production plan decided by the industrial general staff.” (Gramsci, 1971:14) 59  That is, they adopt the academic habitus as such. Bourdieu, 1990:55–56: “[B]eing the product of a particular class of objective regularities, the habitus tends to generate all the ‘reasonable,’ ‘common-­sense,’ behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits of these regularities. and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field, whose objective future they anticipate.” 60 Bourdieu, 1991:57.

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370 Conclusion aesthetic projects in their aesthetic radicalness are deeply complicit with power more generally because “euphemism” as such is a chief mechanism of symbolic domination.61 The well-­said meets up with the mis-­said in euphemism and the product of this symbolic confluence is the violent consignment of certain ideas to the realm of the unsaid and unspeakable. This line of thinking complicates the familiar ways of talking about poets and patrons while also opening up the question of just what is being swapped for what in the exchange.62 The ability to articulate the ideal relationship between subject and world is a fundamental site of symbolic conflict. A poetry of empire reproduces the ideal relations of symbolic domination.63 And in the case of Statius and Martial, their poems broadcast as loudly as possible that this is what they are doing: “Domitian is the best. And, on a not unrelated note, . . .” The very beauty, decorum, and genteel tenor of the non-­Domitianic verses is itself part of the violence of the enterprise. “[S]ymbolic violence, gentle, invisible violence, unrecognized as such, chosen as much as undergone, that of trust, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, debts, piety, in a word, all the virtues honoured by the ethic of honour, presents itself as the most economical mode of domination because it best corresponds to the economy of the system.”64 Domitian is being put at the center of the system. And we are asked to embrace the pleasure of participating in the social structure more generally. For example, a celebration of leisured retreats from city life offers symbolic support to the order of things that safeguards private comforts precisely at the cost of a deeper complicity with the system more generally. 61  See Bourdieu, 1990:126 on symbolic domination within the economy of a pre-­capitalist society: “[T]he only way relations of domination can be set up within it, maintained or restored, is through strategies which, if they are not to destroy themselves by revealing their true nature, must be disguised, transfigured, in a word, euphemized. The censorship that this economy imposes on the overt manifestation of violence, especially in its crudely economic form, means that interests can only be satisfied on condition that they be disguised in and by the very strategies aimed at satisfying them.” 62  Coffee, 2015:116: “The apparently real-­life situations of the Siluae idealize gift relation to the point of fantasy.” Coffee, 2015:119 on the “sublimation of the process of gift exchange” in the Siluae: “By evoking the instrumental sense of gift transactions . . . only to subsume it under a notion of charm, Statius makes a performance of pleasure (in the form of charm) superseding instrumentality.” 63  Rosati, 2006:57 on Martial on the fantastic qualities of everyday life in today’s Rome: “In this ideology, then, luxury not only finds a full cultural legitimisation, but also reveals its precious functionality as a political instrument: it proves to be an instrument, not of disintegrations (which was the traditional accusation of the moralists) but rather of social cohesion. The encomiastic poetry of the Flavian Age collaborates decisively in the aestheticisation of the power that it celebrates, and the elaboration of its ideology.” 64 Bourdieu, 1990:127.

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Depoliticized readings of poetry can reproduce ancient structures of symbolic domination. The outline of a requisite readerly competence written into the poems themselves challenges us, flatters us, entices us, and, in so doing, leads us away from other modes of approaching works like the Epigrams and the Siluae. It is fun to play along with a playful poet and to frolic with him in just the sort of game he would have you play. But this is also a problematic sort of sportiveness. We are invited to follow the trail of breadcrumbs left by the MasterPoet who is also the Poet of the Master. We are invited to always give him the benefit of the doubt, to use our cleverness to prove just how clever he was. And in so doing we can come to sound like panegyrists of the panegyrists, like people bent on praising men who were bent on praising. A tricky poem or passage is, for the clever critic, the same sort of catnip that a dreary topic like a new imperial road might be for a poet: one maximizes one’s profits of distinction when weaving an astonishing silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Ecce! Within the dominant scholarly paradigms one is all but enjoined to read the poetry-­game as a game and as per its self-­inscribed rules.65 Conte pits intertextual reading against “the malady of theory.”66 This is his way of saying that one should look neither for a lever nor for a place to stand lest one move the world. Instead, one is required to take the world in its own limited terms. Poetry is about poetry. Poets imitate other poets.67 “Originality” is praised by Conte, but obviously he has a very specific species of “novelty” in mind here. One earns the right to innovate, and good innovation takes place only inside tradition.68 The system is hermetically sealed and allegedly demands a hermeneutic complicity that assents to precisely these rules of just this game. Authors, intentions, and allusions should take center stage. What emerges is a hermeneutic De Spectaculis.69

65  Dominik et al.,  2015:11: “The largest body of modern scholarship on Statius’ poetry concerns its place in the literary tradition, that is, its intertextual relationships with previous and contemporary literature.” 66  Conte, 2017:1. For more on Conte in particular and intertextuality in general, see also Gunderson, 2020a. 67  Note as well the rebirth of the author (who only died in the eyes of benighted critics): “The disappearance of the author and of his predominance in literature, was the toll that structuralism paid to the aversion for idealism that was in command at the time, and I paid the same generational tribute.” (Conte, 2017:45) 68 Conte,  2017:25: “The imitator retrieves another man’s design but must inevitably bestow on it meaning and values that are in harmony with his own sensibility.” 69  Conte,  2017:46: “Let us return to the intentionality of the art of allusion; there is no doubt that it is an inalienable prerogative of the Author (and even of the programmed reader obliged to decipher it).”

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372 Conclusion The critic-­as-­spectator of the display of textual mastery “collaborates” with the author.70 This moment of complicity yields jubilation: in it we celebrate the MasterPoet and his artistic triumph. The spoils of the literary world have been delightfully arrayed before us. The artist solicits our applause. And we do applaud. Conte’s frank and full embrace of a complicit hermeneutics is refreshing in its explicitness. He spells out—but in an oddly bitter and angry tone . . . —the simple pleasures that await cozy people in nice houses reading cozy poems about nice houses.71 And as we have been forbidden—socially, politically, and aesthetically, it would seem—from asking about those bitter notes, we can do what our author intends and just drop the issue here. We yield— cedamus!—to Conte’s fiat. We do so out of a respect for his symbolic authority qua authoritative master of symbols and not because we have been persuaded. Post-­structuralism, etc. is merely abused by Conte, it is not refuted.72 Refutation is “beneath contempt” for a lordly critic such as himself. In Conte’s case the politics of Latin literary criticism has been reduced to authoritarian bullying.73 What had been a flattering invitation on Conte’s part—“Come join the smart set over here!”—turns into something else in the end: “Shut up and be happy!” It would take a Statius or a Martial to abuse a straw-­man critic with a spluttering eloquence that equals this. Few are quite so explicitly “all in” as Conte when it comes to readerly complicity as the alpha and omega of civic participation in the Empire of Letters. But those who eye authors, intentions, and intertexts with too fervent a passion will tend to end up uncomfortably close to Conte’s position. One potential way out of the bad conscience that might ensue is a hunt for “deviant allusions.” That is, we seek-­and-­find—for the rabbit is always in the hat if you put it in there first . . . —the intention of our ex hypothesi 70  Conte,  2017:47: “The poet of the Aeneid keeps his distinguished model in mind and intentionally alludes to it. The reader is invited to collaborate in the recalling of the verse, and to recognize the resemblances between the two texts in order to appreciate the variations more fully” [original emphasis]. Conte, 2017:56: “The real point is that here the poet of the Aeneid simply has the intention of alluding to Ennius, and the reader is summoned to act by recognizing the allusion.” 71  Note, then, the adjective “aristocratic” in the following: “In its extensive history classical studies has experimented with everything, but its position has almost always been one of aristocratic restraint.” (Conte, 2017:54) 72  Conte, 2017:52: “This is just what was seen and can still be seen in some recent works . . . Their authors still keep each other busy with post-­structural inventions, urged on by the shared illusion that they are the critical avant-­garde.” 73  Adorno, 1981b:48: “[T]he very intelligentsia that pretends to float freely is fundamentally rooted in the very being that must be changed and which it merely pretends to criticize . . . The power of reason today is the blind reason of those who currently hold power.”

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Conclusion  373

good author. Specifically, we seek-­and-­find his intention to say something bad about the bad emperor. Given that Romans loved to find clever ways  to say nasty things about one another, snide messages—real and imagined . . . —can be found just about anywhere. But the central question is, once again, whether or not this “resistance” is “resistant.” Many people say terrible things about their bosses among their co-­ workers but nevertheless log a solid fifty-­hour week and toe the corporate line. How else to get a promotion? The firm and its interests are very much advanced by these efforts despite the reluctance of the agent who is advancing them. Imagine if a right-­wing authoritarian buffooon were to run for president or prime minister. Many people might either openly or less openly denounce the buffoonery and the authoritarianism and yet gladly lend a hand to campaign and administration when the time comes: “The progressive alternative is worse in the end. Here the tax policy is sound. What matters is the institutional substructure, not the public face. I and others will prove to be moderating influences. I will be able to do a lot of good working on the inside and periodically even at cross purposes.” These people are complicit but not, you know, “really complicit” and they are definitely not parties to something wicked. This is because their hearts are not fully in it. And they say as much, at least they say as much to their friends and to those as know how to decode their half-­hearted praises “for what they really are.” As Fowler put it, “To praise the Aeneid for its resistance to power can be seen as a way of underestimating that power, and thus reinforcing it.”74 What one means by power and what one means by resistance can be left too fuzzy. Where is the critique really directed? Does it land a blow? If so, how hard does it hit? Does power care? Is power perhaps amused by this puckishness? Perhaps harmless grumblers who are nevertheless afraid of detection and denunciation play right into power’s hands. Maybe nothing is so congenial to an authoritarian as the prospect of a resistance that is so leisured that it can be counted upon to never act, especially if such an act were to pose the least risk to the leisure itself. As mentioned in the introduction, there is a native version of tyrannical political philosophy that is sublimely unperturbed by the prospects of a resistance of this stamp: “They can hate me so long as they fear me (Oderint dum metuant).” We need to avoid the self-­serving vain posturing of a Statius lest we too so abuse the old understanding of things that we mistake a clever 74 Fowler, 1990:58.

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374 Conclusion faux-­grumbler for The Next Cato Uticensis: “Let Cato’s actual death in the name of libertas yield to my radically risky allusion to freedom. Remember when I wrote that one line about how I ‘TASted the LIBER’? Get it? It looked like I was drinking some wine. And in the course of my sipping, I pretended to half-­way care about political freedom by folding libertas into my libri. I ran a desperate risk there: perhaps you would not see that TAS was to be connected to LIBER. But now you DO see it so the crisis has passed: I am recognized for the genius that I am, that is, the genius that only a genius like you could have recognized.” People who propose that a wink is indeed better than a nod have swapped out the clever literary representation of politics for politics itself. And that substitution is itself a complicit act. The facile oscillation between praise-­and-­blame only rewrites the problematic question of the imperial system in general and the Domitianic age in particular. Critics are enticed by the Antonine self-­serving fiction: “I did it, but I did not mean it . . . ” In this fiction panegyric is decried as an aberrancy. Authorial intention is generated as a political defense against the surface meaning of texts. The erstwhile complicit wash their hands of yesterday while becoming entangled all over again in the politics of today. Finally, we are free to . . . . do it all over again, but more quietly.75 At last a space for villas and hendecasyllables is opened up.76 This space comprises the serene retreat into literature and culture now that politics is taking care of itself. This stance is no less complicit, it is just differently so, and the most salient difference is in the positing of the a-­political quality of otium (“ease”) and the studium litterarum (“dedication to literature”) that accompanies this ease. And yet, claims the public and political voice of Pliny, our otium betrays us and reveals our political/ethical value. Otium can and should be read by third parties. It gives you a place where you can read the true story of ­power.77 The fun and games and jokes, the lusus and ioci and all that, of

75  Waters, 1969:385: “The purpose of the present article is to show that despite the ancient view, until recently subscribed to by many moderns, of a completely different approach to government on the part of Trajan from that of Domitian, the two emperors were committed to an almost identical policy. That policy was one of increasing autocracy.” 76  See Pliny, Epistulae 4.14.1–2 and its elaborate scene-­setting. 77 Pliny, Panegyricus 82: “Our idle hours betray us. Is it not the case that most emperors would lavish this time on gambling, illicit sex, and dissipation? That the vigorous pursuit of vice gave content to the hours which were their respite from earnest business? (Otio prodimur. An non plerique principes hoc idem tempus in aleam stupra luxum conferebant, cum seriarum laxamenta curarum uitiorum contentione supplerent?).” And Pliny will follow this claim with a discussion of the infinite visibility that comes with high social station. The

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Conclusion  375

leisured otium can and will be read as an index of a certain kind of imperial subjectivity. And so we see in Pliny someone who is washing his hands of the past while simultaneously laying down the rules for “pure literature,” a literature that is ostentatiously “harmless” precisely because it is all genteel fun and games. This sort of thing almost makes one nostalgic for Martial’s rabbit who ran around in the lion’s mouth. Now we pretend that there is no lion. But that really only means that the mouth has gotten that much bigger and we are trying that much harder to pretend that it is not there. If Martial and Statius reveal their own will to power by means of their complicity, the new generation will be complicit by showing off their (alleged and expedient) will to powerlessness. The critic of the literature of either age needs to confront the politics of the legitimate reading written into the items he or she is examining. “There is no way out of the game of culture; and one’s only chance of objectifying the true nature of the game is to objectify as fully as possible the very operations which one is obliged to use in order to achieve that objectification.”78 Bourdieu’s next words are de te fabula narratur. Some will hear in them a mere allusion. But his point is that the intertextual game makes us all complicit in advance. A habitus adapted to a field slips into the rules of the game embodied by that field all too readily. Those who find Latin difficult—in any sense of the word difficult . . . —confess their disqualification. They need to make one more effort that they might themselves fit in with the program and so feel at ease within the field. Here one strategically confuses and mingles two meanings of the word field: a field is academic discipline with an object; a field embodies a social structure and its logic. One pretends that the observer is only properly qualified when he or she is also a fully invested participant. This is a recipe for hermeneutic complicity that also brands the non-­complicit as hopelessly unqualified outsiders. Once they at last achieve the status of true insiders and become “leading lights of their field,” Conte’s good Latinists have various options in front of them. Some can demonstrate their own legitimacy and authority by hunting out the beast-­and-­sovereign hidden at the heart of the textual maze. Others will praise Daedalus and wander endlessly within the vast spaces of his work: around this bend is another allusion; around that one another clever joke; around this one another pretty boy; around that one another dead parrot. But, despite Conte’s private/public distinction is meaningless for the elite (habet hoc primum magna fortuna, quod nihil tectum, nihil occultum esse patitur; Panegyricus 83). 78 Bourdieu, 1984:12.

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376 Conclusion bluster and rage, there are still other critics. They are observers who are less sanguine about their participation. They seek a thread that might lead them out and up towards a vision of the maze itself in its totality. Only then can they pass from panegyrical amazement at crafty craftsmen to a discussion of the politics of maze making and the problematic figures of thought-­and-­act that lie at its heart. They are interested in talking about art without also reproducing complicity itself as the touchstone of cultural legitimacy.

Appendix: From Nero to Trajan: Lives and Times From Nero to Trajan 35

37

39

41

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45

47

49

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53

55

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59

61

63

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67

69

71

73

75

77

Pliny the Elder (23/24-79CE)

12

14

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20

22

24

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30

32

34

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40

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54

Silius Italicus (c. 26-c.102 CE)

9

11

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15

17

19

21

23

25

27

29

31

33

35

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41

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49

51

Quintilian (c.35-c.100CE)

0

2

4

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8

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14

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0

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Josephus (37-c.100) Martial (c38-c104CE) Dio Chrysostom (c.40/50-110/120 ad) Plutarch (c.46-post 120CE) Juvenal (?55-?138CE) Tacitus (c56-c120CE) Pliny (61-c.112CE) Suetonius (69-post 122CE)

81

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99 101 103 105 107 109 111 113 115 117 119 121

53

55

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63

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71

73

75

77

Color Key

Reigning as emperor 1-10 11-20 65

67

69

71

73

21-30

75

31-40

61-70 71+

Dictionary:

8

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12

14

16

18

20

22

24

26

28

30

32

34

36

38

40

42

44

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0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

22

24

26

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30

32

34

36

38

40

42

44

71

73

75

77

79

81

83

85

87

89

91

93

95

97

99 101 103 105 107 109 111 113 115 117 119 121

52

[please note how uncertain many of these dates are]

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50

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0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

Galba (3BC - 69CE)

37

39

41

43

45

47

49

51

53

55

Otho (32 - 69CE)

3

5

7

9

11

13

15

17

19

21

Vitellius (15 - 69CE)

20

22

24

26

28

30

32

34

36

Vespasian (9 - 79CE)

26

28

30

32

34

36

38

40

42

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Claudius (10BCE - 54CE) Nero (37 - 68CE)

Titus (39 - 81CE)

57

59

61

63

65

67

69

18

20

22

24

26

28

30

32

57

59

61

63

65

67

69

71

23

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70

14

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40

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44

Domitian (54 - 96CE) 5

Nerva (30 - 98CE)

7

9

11

13

15

17

19

Trajan (53 -117CE)

21

54 42

46

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64

A chronology of the poetry of Martial and Statius 80

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98

Domitian

26

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Nerva

50

51

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68

Trajan

27

28

29

30

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33

34

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36

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40

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Martial

42

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50

51

52

53

54

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58

59

Statius

35

36

37

38

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43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

Epigr 4

Epigr 5

Epigr 6

Martial’s Poetry (as per Fowler 1995) Statius’ Poetry (as per Vollmer 1898)

Spectacles

Xenia & Apophoreta Epigr 1 & 2

Epigr 3

Epigr 7

Epigr 8

Siluae 1-3; full edition of Thebaid

Epigr 9 & 10a Siluae 4

Epigr 11 Siluae 5

[posthumous?]; Achilleid [incomplete]

Epigr 10b

99

100

101

102

103

104

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

Epigr 12a

Epigr 12b

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Statius (45/50-96CE)

79

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Dictionary:

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Bibliography  381 Coleman, Kathleen (1998), “The liber spectaculorum: Perpetuating the Ephemeral,” in Grewing, Farouk (ed.), Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der MartialInterpretation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner), 15–36. Coleman, Kathleen (2008), “Stones in the Forest: Epigraphic Allusion in the Silvae,” in Smolenaars, Johannes Jacobus Louis, Harm-Jan van Dam, and Ruurd R. Nauta (eds.), The Poetry of Statius (Leiden: Brill), 19–43. Conte, Gian Biagio (2017), Stealing the Club from Hercules: On Imitation in Latin Poetry, (Berlin: De Gruyter). Courtney, Edward (1990), P. Papini Stati Silvae, (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Cowan, Robert (2014), “Fingering Cestos: Martial’s Catullus’ Callimachus,” in Augoustakis, Antony (ed.), Flavian Poetry and Its Greek Past (Leiden: Brill), 345–371. Culler, Jonathan  D. (2002), The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Curtius, Ernst Robert (1973), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Damon, Cynthia (2002), “The Emperor’s New Clothes, or, On Flattery and Encomium in the Silvae,” in Damon, Cynthia, et al. (eds.), Vertis in usum: Studies in Honor of Edward Courtney (Munich: K.G. Saur), 174–188. Damschen, Gregor and Andreas Heil (2004), Epigrammaton liber decimus. Das zehnte Epigrammbuch: Text, Übersetzung, Interpretationen, (Studien zur klassischen Philologie, Bd. 148; Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang). Debord, Guy (1994), The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books). Delarue, Fernand (1974a), “Stace et ses contemporains,” Latomus 33 536–548. Delarue, Fernand (1974b), “Stace et les ‘Modernes,’” Revue de Philologie, de Littérature et d’Histoire Anciennes, 48 274–301. Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Foucault, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Dewar, Michael (1994), “Laying it on with a Trowel: The Proem to Lucan and Related Texts,” The Classical Quarterly, 44 199–211. Dewar, Michael (1996), Claudian: Panegyricus de Sexto Consulatu Honorii Augusti, (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Dewar, Michael (2008), “The Equine Cuckoo: Statius’ Ecus Maximus Domitiani Imperatoris and the Flavian Forum,” in Smolenaars, Johannes Jacobus Louis, Harm-Jan van Dam, and Ruurd R. Nauta (eds.), The Poetry of Statius (Leiden: Brill), 63–83. Dietrich, Jessica (2002), “Dead Parrots Society,” American Journal of Philology, 123 95–110. Dominik, William  J., Carole Elizabeth Newlands, and Kyle Gervais (2015), “Reading Statius,” in Dominik, William J., Carole Elizabeth Newlands, and Kyle Gervais (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Statius (Leiden: Brill), 3–27. Dyson, Stephen L. and Richard E. Prior (1995), “Horace, Martial, and Rome: Two Poetic Outsiders Read the Ancient City,” Arethusa, 28 245–263. Eck, Werner (1985), “Statius Silvae 1.4 und C.  Rutilius Gallicus als Proconsul Asiae II,” The American Journal of Philology, 106 475–484.

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388 Bibliography Rosati, Gianpiero (2008), “Statius, Domitian and Acknowledging Paternity: Rituals of Succession in the Thebaid,” in Smolenaars, Johannes Jacobus Louis, Harm-Jan van Dam, and Ruurd  R.  Nauta (eds.), The Poetry of Statius (Leiden: Brill), 175–193. Rosati, Gianpiero (2015), “The Silvae: Poetics of Impromptu and Cultural Consumption,” in Dominik, William  J., Carole Elizabeth Newlands, and Kyle Gervais (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Statius (Leiden: Brill), 55–72. Rosolato, Guy (1974), “La voix: entre corps et langage,” Revue française de psychanalyse, 38 75–94. Rühl, Meike (2015), “Creating the Distinguished Addressee: Literary Patronage in the Works of Statius,” in Dominik, William J., Carole Elizabeth Newlands, and Kyle Gervais (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Statius (Leiden: Brill), 91–105. Russel, Craig (2014), “The Most Unkindest Cut: Gender, Genre, and Castration in Statius’ Achilleid and Silvae 3.4,” American Journal of Philology, 135 87–121. Saller, Richard (1982), “Personal Patronage under the Early Empire,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 41–78. Saller, Richard (1983), “Martial on Patronage and Literature,” Classical Quarterly, 33 246–257. Scherf, Johannes (1998), “Zur Komposition von Martials Gedichtbüchern 1-12,” in Grewing, Farouk (ed.), Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), 119–138. Schröder, Bianca-Jeanette (1999), Titel und Text: zur Entwicklung lateinischer Gedichtüberschriften, mit Untersuchungen zu lateinischen Buchtiteln, Inhaltsverzeichnissen und anderen Gliederungsmitteln, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Scott, Kenneth (1933), “Statius’ Adulation of Domitian,” American Journal of Philology, 54 247–259. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham: Duke University Press). Selden, Daniel L. (1992), “Caveat lector: Catullus and the Rhetoric of Performance,” in Selden, Daniel  L. and Ralph Hexter (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York: Routledge), 461–512. Shackleton Bailey, David  R. (1987), “The Silvae of Statius,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 91 273–282. Shackleton Bailey, David R. (1993), Martial: Epigrams, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Silverman, Kaja (1988), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Theories of Representation and Difference; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Silverman, Kaja (1992), Male Subjectivity at the Margins, (New York: Routledge). Sloterdijk, Peter (1987), Critique of Cynical Reason, (Theory and History of Literature; v. 40; Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press). Sontag, Susan (1975), “Fascinating Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, 22 (1). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/ Spaeth, John  W. (1929), “Martial Looks at His World,” Classical Journal, 24 373–361.

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Bibliography  389 Spaeth, John W. (1932), “Martial and the Roman Crowd,” The Classical Journal, 27 244–254. Spisak, Art L. (1998), “Gift-Giving in Martial,” in Grewing, Farouk (ed.), Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), 243–255. Steele, R.  B. (1930), “Interrelation of the Latin Poets under Domitian,” Classical Philology, 25 342–328. Sullivan, John P. (1991), Martial, the Unexpected Classic: A Literary and Historical Study, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Swann, Bruce W. (1998), “Sic Scribit Catullus: The Importance of Catullus for Martial’s Epigrams,” in Grewing, Farouk (ed.), Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), 48–58. Syme, Ronald (1997), Tacitus, (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Taisne, Anne-Marie (1994), L’esthétique de Stace: la peinture des correspondances, (Paris: Belles Lettres). Talbert, Richard (2011), “Introduction: Quis se Caesaribus Notus non Fingit Amicum,” The American Journal of Philology, 132 1–13. Thomas, Michael L. (2004), “(Re)locating Domitian’s Horse of Glory: The ‘Equus Domitiani’ and Flavian Urban Design,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 49 21–46. van den Berg, Christopher Sean (2014), The World of Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Verstraete, Beert C. (1983), “Originality and Mannerism in Statius’ Use of Myth in the Silvae,” L’Antiquité Classique, 52 195–205. Vessey, David (1974), “Erich Burck, Vom römischen Manierismus von der Dichtung der römischen Kaiserzeit (Libelli Band CCCXXVII),” Journal of Roman Studies, 64 271–272. Vollmer, Friedrich (1898), P. Papinii Statii Silvarum Libri, (Leipzig: Teubner). Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew (1996), “The Imperial Court,” in Bowman, Alan  K., Andrew Lintott, and Edward Champlin (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History: 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 283–308. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew (2011), “The Roman Imperial Court: Seen and Unseen in the Performance of Power,” in Tülay, Artan, Jeroen Duindam, and Metin Kunt (eds.), Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill), 91–102. Walter, Uwe (1998), “Soziale Normen in den Epigrammen Martials,” in Grewing, Farouk (ed.), Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), 220–242. Waters, Kenneth  H. (1969), “Traianus Domitiani Continuator,” The American Journal of Philology, 90 385–405. Watson, Patricia (2006), “Contextualizing Martial’s Meters,” in Nauta, Ruurd  R., Harm-Jan van Dam, and Johannes Jacobus Louis Smolenaars (eds.), Flavian Poetry (Leiden: Brill), 285–298. Weaver, Paul R. C. (1965), “The Father of Claudius Etruscus: Statius, Silvae 3. 3,” Classical Quarterly, 15 145–154.

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390 Bibliography White, Peter (1975), “The Friends of Martial, Statius, and Pliny, and the Dispersal of Patronage,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 79 265–300. White, Peter (1978), “Amicitia and the Profession of Poetry in Early Imperial Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies, 68 74–92. Woodcock, Eric C. (1985), New Latin Syntax, (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press). Wray, David (2007), “Wood: Statius’s ‘Silvae’ and the Poetics Of Genius,” Arethusa, 40 127–143. Zeiner, Noelle K. (2005), Nothing Ordinary Here: Statius as Creator of Distinction in the Silvae, (New York: Routledge). Žižek, Slavoj (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso). Žižek, Slavoj (1991), For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, (Phronesis; London: Verso). Žižek, Slavoj (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology, (Wo es war; New York: Verso). Žižek, Slavoj (2007), “Series forward,” Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), ix–x. Zupančič, Alenka (2003), The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, (Short Circuits; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

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Index of Passages Anthologia Graeca 11.44  144n189 11.191 125n163 Aristotle Poetics 1448a16–18  216n78 Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 2.23  251n168 Noctes Atticae 3.3.15  250n166 Callimachus In Iovem 8–9  143n186 Cassius Dio Historiae Romanae 68.3  169n222 Catullus Carmen 2  76n92 Carmen 3  123 Carmen 16.1–6  45 Carmen 42  198n27 Carmen 50  76n92, 197n23 Carmen 66.7–9  324 Carmen 93  56n64 Cicero De Legibus 2.40  210n59 De Officiis 1.97  16n54 De Re Publica 1.50  131n171 Orator 132  229n117 Paradoxa Stoicorum 5.40  93n110 Philippicae 1.34  16n54 Philippicae 2.117  131n171 Pro Quinctio 56  33n7 Pro Sestio 79  337n301 Pro Sestio 102  16n54 Claudian In Rufinum 1.283  211n63 Digesta Iustiniani 48.8.5  337n301 Dio Orationes 3.19  2n4 Orationes 6.58  2n4 Homer Ilias 5.31  125 Ilias 5.455  125 Homer Odyssey 20.13–14  315n268 Horace Ars Poetica 102–03  229 Carmina 1.1  108 Epistles 2.2.141–144  98n119 Joannes Antiochenus Fragmenta 110  169n221 [Longinus] De Sublimitate 3.4  351n10 De Sublimitate 8.2  88n102

De Sublimitate 8.3  214n72 De Sublimitate 15  229n117 De Sublimitate 18.1  214n72 De Sublimitate 23.4  239n141 Lucan Bellum Ciuile 1.131–32  250n165 Bellum Ciuile 2.288  248 Luclilius Saturae 9.355  125n162 Lucretius De rerum natura 1.1–2  339n307 Martial De Spectaculis 4  35n13 De Spectaculis 10  42 De Spectaculis 11  41n31 De Spectaculis 12–14  41n32 De Spectaculis 17  42n33, 367n53 De Spectaculis 21  42n34 Epigrams 1.pr  33–37, 146n193, 159 Epigrams 1.1  38–39, 52–53, 151 Epigrams 1.3  44n40 Epigrams 1.4  45, 77, 79, 81 Epigrams 1.5  44 Epigrams 1.6  46, 187 Epigrams 1.8  50–52 Epigrams 1.9  52–53 Epigrams 1.14  54, 56, 77 Epigrams 1.22  56–57 Epigrams 1.29  39n24 Epigrams 1.38  39n24 Epigrams 1.43  363 Epigrams 1.44  57 Epigrams 1.47  44 Epigrams 1.48  57–58 Epigrams 1.51  59 Epigrams 1.53  39n24, 56 Epigrams 1.60  62 Epigrams 1.61  49n50 Epigrams 1.72  39n24 Epigrams 1.86  111n137 Epigrams 1.104  62–63, 66 Epigrams 1.113  99n122 Epigrams 2.23  30n2 Epigrams 2.25  145n190 Epigrams 2.32  67 Epigrams 2.33  55n60 Epigrams 2.35  145n190

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392  Index of Passages Martial De Spectaculis (cont.) Epigrams 2.49  78n94 Epigrams 2.59  67 Epigrams 2.64  81n99 Epigrams 2.85  171n222 Epigrams 2.88  363 Epigrams 2.91  67 Epigrams 2.92  67 Epigrams 3.11  30n2 Epigrams 3.51  145n190 Epigrams 3.54  145n190 Epigrams 3.68  41n30 Epigrams 3.90  145n190 Epigrams 3.95  67 Epigrams 4.3  67, 139n185 Epigrams 4.8  67 Epigrams 4.38  145n190 Epigrams 4.58  145n190 Epigrams 4.88  67 Epigrams 5.1  69 Epigrams 5.2  71 Epigrams 5.6  169n220 Epigrams 5.19  72–75, 257, 349 Epigrams 5.20  95 Epigrams 5.22  363 Epigrams 5.28  169 Epigrams 5.41  79 Epigrams 5.58  81n99 Epigrams 5.78  103 Epigrams 6.1  76, 81 Epigrams 6.2  76–77, 79, 80, 83, 130, 175 Epigrams 6.3  79, 80, 157 Epigrams 6.4  82 Epigrams 6.7  83, 130 Epigrams 6.28  190, 316n271 Epigrams 6.29  190, 318n276 Epigrams 6.42  190 Epigrams 6.70  81n100 Epigrams 7.1  85–86, 88 Epigrams 7.2  85–86, 88–89 Epigrams 7.3  86 Epigrams 7.4  86 Epigrams 7.5  86–88, 95 Epigrams 7.6  88 Epigrams 7.7  88 Epigrams 7.8  88, 89n104 Epigrams 7.39  153 Epigrams 7.40  285n229 Epigrams 7.52  146n192 Epigrams 7.96  81n99 Epigrams 7.99  91

Epigrams 8.pr  92–95, 96n117, 131n172 Epigrams 8.1  95n115, 96, 105 Epigrams 8.3  98, 99 Epigrams 8.4  100 Epigrams 8.6  81n100 Epigrams 8.39  210n57 Epigrams 8.70  95n115 Epigrams 8.78  49n51 Epigrams 9.pr  99n122, 102, 108, 110 Epigrams 9.1  107–108, 110 Epigrams 9.2  110–112, 114, 122, 126–27 Epigrams 9.3  110, 113 Epigrams 9.4  110, 114, 147 Epigrams 9.5  110, 115, 118, 129, 131–32 Epigrams 9.6  110, 129 Epigrams 9.7  110, 129–32 Epigrams 9.8  110, 118 Epigrams 9.9  110, 118, 119n147 Epigrams 9.10  110, 119 Epigrams 9.11  121, 125–26, 128 Epigrams 9.12  121, 126–28 Epigrams 9.13  128, 129n166 Epigrams 9.14  110 Epigrams 9.15  110 Epigrams 9.16  110, 134, 135 Epigrams 9.17  110, 136–37, 138n184, 140 Epigrams 9.18  110, 188 Epigrams 9.27  177 Epigrams 9.28  145 Epigrams 9.33  111 Epigrams 9.33  142 Epigrams 9.34  111 Epigrams 9.34  144 Epigrams 9.35  111 Epigrams 9.35  144 Epigrams 9.35  169 Epigrams 9.36  111 Epigrams 9.36  140 Epigrams 9.36  141 Epigrams 9.37  111, 145–47 Epigrams 9.38  111 Epigrams 9.39  111 Epigrams 9.40  111 Epigrams 9.43  191 Epigrams 9.44  191 Epigrams 9.79  146n192, 148, 154 Epigrams 9.91  210n57 Epigrams 9.95b  30n2 Epigrams 10.1  151 Epigrams 10.2  153, 156, 162

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Index of Passages  393 Epigrams 10.3  158–60, 162 Epigrams 10.4  161–62 Epigrams 10.5  162 Epigrams 10.6  151, 163–64 Epigrams 10.20  173, 174n228 Epigrams 10.48  162n212 Epigrams 10.58  363 Epigrams 10.72  164–65 Epigrams 10.75  159 Epigrams 10.100  158n206 Epigrams 10.104  167 Epigrams 11.1  169–71 Epigrams 11.2  173–75, 177, 180 Epigrams 11.3  175 Epigrams 11.4  176–77 Epigrams 11.5  146n192, 147n194, 169, 177 Epigrams 11.6  177 Epigrams 11.20  34n11, 35, 176n232 Epigrams 12.pr  179–80 Epigrams 12.1  180 Epigrams 12.2  167n216, 180–81, 183n244 Epigrams 12.3  180–83 Epigrams 12.5  183n244 Epigrams 12.6  180–81, 183–85, 187 Epigrams 12.7  180 Epigrams 12.8  180–81, 187 Epigrams 12.20  181 Epigrams 12.57  66n70 Epigrams 13.60  55n61 Epigrams 13.92  56n63 Epigrams 13.108  122n155 Epigrams 14.73  276n216 Ovid Amores 1.15.41–42  156n203 Amores 3.15.19–20  156n203 Ars Amatoria 3.209–210  146n191 Epistulae ex Ponto 3.5.33  257 Fasti 2.760–61  263n193 Fasti 4.459  131n169 Fasti 4.553–53  316n270 Fasti 6.43  326n291 Metamorphoses 3.385  300n246 Metamorphoses 10.161  326n291 Metamorphoses 15.851  226n108 Tristia 1.1  167n216 Tristia 3.7.50  156n203 Petronius Satyrica 75  138n183 Satyrica 135.15  172n223 Plautus Asinaria 495  112n138

Epidicus 683  93n110 Mercator 171  93n110 Miles Gloriosus 211  250n166 Pseudolus 1258  210n59 Pliny the Elder Naturalis Historia 34.41 213n68 Pliny Epistulae 3.18.3  98n121 Epistulae 3.21  173n226 Epistulae 4.14.1–2  374n76 Epistulae 10.96.5  216n79 Panegyricus 1.6  215n74 Panegyricus 2.3  209n55 Panegyricus 34.4  73n84 Panegyricus 46.5  204n44 Panegyricus 54.5  215n74 Panegyricus 82  374n77 Panegyricus 83  375n77 Panegyricus 85.1  2n6 Panegyricus 89.3  204n44 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.5.20–24 273 Institutio Oratoria 8.6.73–74  254n174 Institutio Oratoria 12.9.4  249n163 Seneca Agamemnon 920–21  337n302 Consolatio ad Marciam 25.3  321n284 Consolatio ad Marciam 26.6  321n286 De Clementia 1.12.4  16n54 De Clementia 2.2.2  16n54 De Ira 20.4  16n54 Dialogi 2.8.2  210n59 Epistulae Morales 47.1  306 Epistulae Morales 51.9  304 Epistulae Morales 86  361n36 Epistulae Morales 86.6  240n145 Epistulae Morales 94.28  161n212 Epistulae Morales 117.13  245n157 Oedipus 983–84  321n287 Thyestes 358–59  337n303 Troades 171–72  337n303 Servius In Aeneidos Libros 1.663  34n9 Silius Italicus Punica 4.475  204n41 Punica 10.277  204n41 Punica 12.257–58  204n41 Punica 15.274–75  204n41 Statius Achilleis 1.12–13  227n112 Siluae 1.pr  194n13 Siluae 1.pr.7–10  195, 231n123 Siluae 1.1  191, 301 Siluae 1.1.1–13  221

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394  Index of Passages Statius Achilleis (cont.) Siluae 1.1.17  222 Siluae 1.1.28  226n105 Siluae 1.1.54  267 Siluae 1.1.54–55  265 Siluae 1.1.84  225 Siluae 1.1.93–94  267 Siluae 1.1.100  240 Siluae 1.1.103–04  213, 240 Siluae 1.2  225n101 Siluae 1.2.27  224 Siluae 1.2.31  224 Siluae 1.2.33–34  224 Siluae 1.2.87–90  223 Siluae 1.2.93  239 Siluae 1.2.201  204n42 Siluae 1.2.258  206n46 Siluae 1.3  301 Siluae 1.3.4  259n183 Siluae 1.3.11–14  254 Siluae 1.3.18–19  254 Siluae 1.3.20–24  255 Siluae 1.3.83  227n111 Siluae 1.3.88  227n111 Siluae 1.3.93–94  241 Siluae 1.3.106  204n42 Siluae 1.3.110  81n99 Siluae 1.4.61–64  230n120 Siluae 1.4.68–70  225 Siluae 1.4.70  230 Siluae 1.4.127  81n99 Siluae 1.5  190, 239, 301 Siluae 1.5.8–9  318n277 Siluae 1.5.9  196n21 Siluae 1.5.14  197n23 Siluae 1.5.22  225n102 Siluae 1.5.35  240 Siluae 1.5.54–56  241 Siluae 1.5.63–64  204n42 Siluae 1.6  191, 248, 265, 274, 301 Siluae 1.6.23–27  209 Siluae 1.6.39  246n159 Siluae 1.6.39–41  209 Siluae 1.6.43–45  246 Siluae 1.6.46–50  247 Siluae 1.6.83  260n188 Siluae 1.6.96–98  205 Siluae 1.6.98–99  267 Siluae 1.6.100–102  268 Siluae 2.1  190, 248, 251n170, 301, 313 Siluae 2.1.1–13  315

Siluae 2.1.14–15  247, 316 Siluae 2.1.41  225n100 Siluae 2.1.49–50  262 Siluae 2.1.50  243,316 Siluae 2.1.50–51  263n195 Siluae 2.1.51  302 Siluae 2.1.55  316 Siluae 2.1.67–68  244 Siluae 2.1.69  317n273 Siluae 2.1.70  317 Siluae 2.1.74  318 Siluae 2.1.76–81  318 Siluae 2.1.78  322 Siluae 2.1.81  322 Siluae 2.1.85  320 Siluae 2.1.112–13  313n265 Siluae 2.1.166–68  320 Siluae 2.1.174  319 Siluae 2.1.175  317n273 Siluae 2.1.189–90  320 Siluae 2.1.199  321 Siluae 2.1.212–13  321 Siluae 2.1.218–29  321 Siluae 2.1.223–24  321 Siluae 2.1.230–34  322 Siluae 2.2  301 Siluae 2.2.28–29  260n185 Siluae 2.2.44–46  260 Siluae 2.2.52–53  255n176 Siluae 2.2.60–62  227n112 Siluae 2.2.95  204n42 Siluae 2.3  301 Siluae 2.4  263n197, 271, 301, 308 Siluae 2.4.1–10  272 Siluae 2.4.7  318 Siluae 2.4.7–10  273 Siluae 2.4.11  274 Siluae 2.4.13  275 Siluae 2.4.14–15  274 Siluae 2.4.15  275 Siluae 2.4.18–19  275 Siluae 2.4.23  275 Siluae 2.4.26–27  276 Siluae 2.4.29–33  276 Siluae 2.4.37  276 Siluae 2.5  191, 271, 301, 308 Siluae 2.5.1–7  277 Siluae 2.5.4–5  279 Siluae 2.5.7  280 Siluae 2.5.11  280 Siluae 2.5.13  281

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Index of Passages  395 Siluae 2.5.16–17  281 Siluae 2.5.17  282 Siluae 2.5.29–30  282 Siluae 2.6  301, 313, 317 Siluae 2.6.1–3  303 Siluae 2.6.8–12  304 Siluae 2.6.10  251n169 Siluae 2.6.12–17  306 Siluae 2.6.15–17  307 Siluae 2.6.20–21  308 Siluae 2.6.21–23  309 Siluae 2.6.29  244 Siluae 2.6.29–30  310 Siluae 2.6.34–37  310 Siluae 2.6.35  331 Siluae 2.6.51  309n259 Siluae 2.6.52–53  311 Siluae 2.6.82  260n188 Siluae 2.6.85–86  312 Siluae 2.6.89–90  312 Siluae 2.6.92–93  312 Siluae 2.6.103–04  312 Siluae 2.7.50  239 Siluae 2.7.68  248, 250 Siluae 2.7.70  249, 250 Siluae 3.pr.  343n313 Siluae 3.pr.3–4  238 Siluae 3.1.8  256 Siluae 3.1.17–19  221n91 Siluae 3.1.166  204n42 Siluae 3.2  238–39 Siluae 3.2.61  238n140 Siluae 3.2.64  238 Siluae 3.2.78–79  240 Siluae 3.3  28, 301, 303, 317 Siluae 3.3.4–5  286 Siluae 3.3.6–7  285 Siluae 3.3.17–18  286 Siluae 3.3.20–21  286 Siluae 3.3.21  256 Siluae 3.3.22–24  287 Siluae 3.3.25  287 Siluae 3.3.25–26  298n240 Siluae 3.3.31  204n42, 287 Siluae 3.3.43–50  288 Siluae 3.3.44–45  299 Siluae 3.3.46  299 Siluae 3.3.47  299 Siluae 3.3.48  289, 299 Siluae 3.3.50–55  290n231 Siluae 3.3.55  290

Siluae 3.3.58  299 Siluae 3.3.59–60  299 Siluae 3.3.63–64  291 Siluae 3.3.69  296 Siluae 3.3.72–77  202n38 Siluae 3.3.73–75  291n233 Siluae 3.3.86–87  293 Siluae 3.3.86–89  294 Siluae 3.3.98–99  294 Siluae 3.3.106–108  295 Siluae 3.3.108–110  296 Siluae 3.3.111–12  297 Siluae 3.3.111–14  300 Siluae 3.3.115  297 Siluae 3.3.120  297 Siluae 3.3.124  287, 298n240 Siluae 3.3.138  299 Siluae 3.3.164  299 Siluae 3.3.179–80  299n244 Siluae 3.4  191, 266, 324 Siluae 3.4.6–19  326 Siluae 3.4.21  327 Siluae 3.4.26  328 Siluae 3.4.31  330 Siluae 3.4.37–38  330 Siluae 3.4.39–40  243 Siluae 3.4.39–42  330 Siluae 3.4.40  331 Siluae 3.4.41  332 Siluae 3.4.44–45  331 Siluae 3.4.49–50  333 Siluae 3.4.53  333 Siluae 3.4.56–57  333 Siluae 3.4.60–62  334 Siluae 3.4.60–72  335 Siluae 3.4.63–64  339 Siluae 3.4.68–69  336 Siluae 3.4.69–70  134n176 Siluae 3.4.69–71  336 Siluae 3.4.71–76  338 Siluae 3.4.76–77  339 Siluae 3.4.78–79  340 Siluae 3.4.84  341 Siluae 3.4.93  341 Siluae 3.4.98  342 Siluae 3.4.100–02  343 Siluae 3.5.44–45  208n53 Siluae 3.5.57–58  208 Siluae 3.5.57–59  217n84 Siluae 3.5.93  250 Siluae 4.pr.26  231n122

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396  Index of Passages Statius Achilleis (cont.) Siluae 4.pr.28–30  231 Siluae 4.pr.30  296 Siluae 4.pr.33–36  233 Siluae 4.1  230, 234, 301 Siluae 4.1.1–8  235 Siluae 4.1.3  214 Siluae 4.1.3–4  215 Siluae 4.1.9–11  236 Siluae 4.1.10  215 Siluae 4.1.13–18  215 Siluae 4.2.23–25  259 Siluae 4.1.26–27  236 Siluae 4.1.33–38  268 Siluae 4.1.39  236 Siluae 4.2.25  331n297 Siluae 4.2.34  206 Siluae 4.2.52  210 Siluae 4.2.81–82  202 Siluae 4.3  227, 255 Siluae 4.3.19  333n298 Siluae 4.3.79–82  228 Siluae 4.3.124–25  268 Siluae 4.3.128  268 Siluae 4.3.150  81n99 Siluae 4.4  301 Siluae 4.5.20  261 Siluae 4.6  191, 301 Siluae 4.6.29–30  243 Siluae 4.6.108–09  213, 242 Siluae 4.7.25–28  256 Siluae 4.8.14–15  204n42 Siluae 4.8.15–16  260 Siluae 4.8.25  204n42 Siluae 4.8.32–35  240 Siluae 4.9  202 Siluae 4.9.1–2  197 Siluae 5.1  206, 218 Siluae 5.1.33  256 Siluae 5.1.37–38  204n42 Siluae 5.1.38  208n54 Siluae 5.1.41–42  266 Siluae 5.1.230–35  206n49

Siluae 5.2  349 Siluae 5.2.58–60  252 Siluae 5.2.68–72  252 Siluae 5.2.97  204n42 Siluae 5.2.109  257 Siluae 5.2.113  257 Siluae 5.2.117  256 Siluae 5.2.117–121  258 Siluae 5.2.154  210 Siluae 5.2.170  210 Siluae 5.3.106–08  217n85 Siluae 5.3.155  239n143 Siluae 5.3.162  317n273 Siluae 5.3.214  196n22 Siluae 5.5.18–22  218n86 Siluae 5.5.66–70  251 Siluae 5.5.73–74  251 Siluae 5.5.77–78  251 Suetonius Augustus 31  6n14 Caligula 15  6n14 Caligula 30.1  16n54 Domitian 13.3  6n14 Juilius 76  6n14 Nero 26  363n42 Nero 55  6n14 Tiberius 59.2  16n54 Tacitus Agricola 3.1  73n84 Annales 1.1  357n19 Annales 1.7  12n34 Annales 15.53  131n172 Dialogus 61n68 Historiae 1.1  357n19 Historiae 1.15.304  2n6 Valerius Flaccus Argonautica 3.596–97 300n246 Vergil Aeneid 3.176  215 Aeneid 4  258 Aeneid 6.428  131n169 Aeneid 7.484  131n169 Georgics 4.49–50  300n246 Georgics 4.565  238

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index abjection 270 absurdities  171, 289, 295 absurdities, profundities and  342 absurdities, song and  340 abuse, sexual  329, 341 abuse, sexual, see also “rape” adulatio  2, 15, 215 adulatio, see also “flattery” adultery  78, 79, 81, 83, 116, 119 Aeneas  64, 69, 100, 215, 220, 221, 260, 268, 294 Aesculapius  133, 134, 137–38, 226, 230, 324, 336, 338 aestheticism 360 aestheticism, pure  150, 152 aestheticism, radical  19 aestheticism, politics vs  104 aesthetics  13, 158 aesthetics, and politics  7, 17, 345, 354 aesthetics, panegyrical  81, 353 aesthetics, Silvan  339 aesthetics, totalitarian  340 affectation  196, 200, 254 affectation, of disaffection  363 affects  9, 16, 105, 229, 245 affects, Caesarean  149 affects, contagiousness of  235 affects, dictated  63, 242 affects, displaced  118 affects, feigned  37, 271 affects, of a master  314 affects, saturation with  86 affects, superabundant  64 affects, transferred  338 age, Domitianic  1–3, 5–6, 16, 23, 41, 148, 233–34 age, Domitianic, logic of the  191 age, Domitianic, delights of the  201 Aleksandrov, Grigoriy  360 Alexandrianism  40, 48, 60, 151, 156, 162, 253, 275, 294, 327, 364 alienation  10, 16, 188, 356 alienation, specious  263

alienation, celebrated  270 alienation, self-  351 allegory  30, 47, 50, 54, 65, 100, 272, 353 allusions  7, 44, 45, 60, 324, 339 allusions, apolitical  272, 374 allusions, as seductive distraction  13, 199, 249, 263, 316, 332 allusions, polyvalent  125 allusions, regressive  248 ambition  25, 53, 59–61, 106 ambivalence  40, 72, 118, 124, 192 Amphion 227 anachronism  166, 292, 295 animals  41–43, 47, 53, 191, 279 anxiety  59, 65, 96, 115–19, 146, 210, 281, 325 anxiety, castration  118, 329, 337 anxiety, feigned  238 anxiety, performance of  354 anxiety, pseudo-  11 Apollo  213, 230, 239–40, 290, 313, 326 Apuleius  362, 365 Arcadia  123, 258 archaism 203 arena  41–43, 54–58, 62, 87–89, 201, 279–81, 292 arena, verbal  71 Arion  227, 265 Aristophanes 250 art  111, 256 art, about art  213, 360 art, apolitical  3 art, disavowed  64 art, high  40 art, of misery  154 art, silent  336 artifice  47, 244, 256 artifice, patent  194, 219, 307 artifice, self-conscious  264 assertion, self-  356, 361 Attis  122, 126, 129, 161, 330–32 Augustus  108, 175–77, 185, 347 Augustus, surpassed  268

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

398  General Index aura 364 author, intentions of  25, 45, 192, 372, 374 authority  17, 22, 27, 261 authority, authorial  350 authority, imperial  246, 264 authority, moral  37 authority, of the critic  375 authority, poetic  211 authority, symbolic  356, 372 autonomy  98, 105, 200, 145, 251, 330, 336 baths  190, 211, 239, 241, 301 bears  41–42, 62, 65, 143 beauty  3, 129, 367 beauty, and detachment  368 beauty, and mutilation  109, 128 beauty, of boys  136, 310, 313, 328–35, 338, 342 beauty, of Etrusca  296–97, 300 beauty, of masters 310m  332 beauty, politics of  23 Behold! (Ecce! and/or En!)  140, 172, 199, 215, 237, 240, 260, 286, 332, 348, 354, 371 belatedness  15, 357 belief, as embodied in actions  51 belief, beyond  254, 256 belief, in the gods  70 belief, location of  10 belief, structural  349 bigness  35, 81, 261 bigness, excessive  84 bigness, of Caesar  100 bigness, of Martial  106 body, as repository of desire  335–37 body, catastrophic  147 body, of Caesar  86 body, vile  111, 146–47 body, virile  340 body, see also “beauty of boys” and “castration” boldness  9, 91 boldness, as “boldness”  319 boldness, pseudo-  52, 135, 244 boldness, stylistic  238–39, 257, 304, 315, 341 books, and bookishness  36, 60, 332 books, and libelli  40, 53, 93, 98, 152, 157, 171, 182 books, as suppliants  93–94 books, materiality of  151 books, re-edited  151, 156, 196 both. . . and…  3, 33, 38

boys, dead  301–22, 324, 331 boys, eroticized  78, 262 boys, free  252 boys, poems as substitutes for  313–14 boys, slave  116 Bravo! (Macte!)  184, 203–04, 287 bullshit  10, 224, 293, 344 Caesar, as a theme  22 Caesar, as addressee  68 Caesar, as animating principle  85 Caesar, as auctor  48, 53 Caesar, as castrating  109 Caesar, as focal point  65, 96 Caesar, as frightening  76 Caesar, as guarantor of liberty  250–51 Caesar, as marginal  183 Caesar, as obscene father  76 Caesar, as patron  74 Caesar, as reader  43–44, 65, 75 Caesar, as too close  86 Caesar, prevents castration  110 Caesar, triumphal  47 Caesar, ubiquity of  69 Caesar, waxing  75 Caesar, see also “Domitian” cages  58, 274–82 calendar 107–08 Caligula  36, 202, 291, 293 Callimachus  26, 161–62, 217, 324, 347 capital, symbolic  249, 273, 356, 366 care (cura)  153–54, 204, 252, 295, 333 castration  79, 109, 114–15, 128, 139, 323–44, 353 castration, and illness  138 castration. as beautiful  338 castration, celebrated  134 castration, censored  136 castration, ended  129 castration, erased  335–36 castration, metaphorical  117 castration, occluded  122 castration, of slaves  116 castration, self-  110, 331, 340 Cato the Censor  37, 44, 50, 61, 66, 173–74, 186 Cato the Censor, smiling  184–85 Cato Uticensis  50–51, 60, 177, 248, 250, 287 Catullus  36, 40, 44–45, 48–49, 51–52, 56, 91, 123–24, 149, 177–79, 196–97, 272, 324–25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index  399 censor, blushing  95 censor, fantasy of the  118 censor, perpetual  37, 44, 82, 99, 101, 118 censorship  83, 89, 370 censorship, self-  95, 129, 132 charm  45, 52–53, 68, 98, 173, 198, 339, 364, 370 chastity  82, 97, 100, 115, 149 Christians 216 claritudo  105, 228, 311 classics, and theory  27–28 Claudian 25 Claudius  54, 56, 292, 357 clemency  63, 184–85, 338 cleverness  34, 45, 78, 83–84, 118, 216, 326, 348, 351, 374 cleverness, and narcissism  11 cleverness, as “cleverness”  36 cleverness, decried  35 cleverness, excessive  260 cleverness, mendacious  224 cleverness, of the critic  371 cleverness, ostentatious  313, 362 clichés  125, 295, 327 closeness  70, 86, 175, 206, 364 Colossus  213, 240 comedy  19, 31, 141, 205, 216 compliance  72, 110, 216, 228, 231, 253, 264, 285, 339–40 complaining (or not)  20, 33, 207, 231, 237, 239–42, 318, 322–23, 327 complicity, aesthetics of  15 complicity, and intertextuality  375 complicity, and resignation  283 complicity, and resistance  109 complicity, apologetics of  264 complicity, as playing along  62 complicity, generalized  25 complicity, hermeneutic  348, 371 complicity, meta-  3, 328, 348 complicity, of art itself  26 complicity, of artists  367 complicity, of the critic  285, 358 complicity, of the reader  41, 297, 344, 372 complicity, of the viewer  337 complicity, pretexts for  25 complicity, psychic  219 complicity, refused  300 complicity, “reluctant”  357 complicity, renewed  176 complicity, reproduction of  376

complicity, soft  347, 369 complicity, strategies of  345 complicity, structural  349 complicity, with domination  308 confession  91, 162, 214, 226, 242–44, 330–31 confidence  10, 68–75, 101, 202, 268 conscience 162 conscience, good  33 conscience, guilty  16, 339, 372 consolation  13, 247, 266, 271, 298, 300–322 consul  106, 176, 180, 214–16, 230, 234–36, 252, 268, 291 Conte, Gian Biagio  371–75 context, contrived  330 context, emerging from text  19 context, literary  86, 256 context, political  22–23, 89 contract, social  64, 233 contrafactuals  241, 276, 340 contrivance  11, 55, 87–88, 246, 307, 319 contrivance, ostentatious  214, 230, 313 copy, swapped for model  122, 141–42, 352 Cotta 52 courtiers  16, 90–91, 146, 148, 245, 273–74, 284, 291–93, 300 Cracow  38, 45, 348–49 Crispinus  90–91, 210, 224, 252, 257–58 critic, the  11–12, 35 critic, the, boldness of  9 critic, the, complicity of  4, 264, 284, 367–68 critic, the, criticism of  345, 355, 360 critic, the, genius of  348 Cybele  112–14, 120–22, 126, 128 cyncism  3, 51–52, 156, 159, 217, 357 cynicism, and compliance  216 cynicism, and complicity  15 cynicism, and knowing  8–9 cynicism, over reverence  205 danger  9, 34, 37, 225, 291, 356 danger, as “danger”  197–98, 201–02, 232 danger, harmless  53 danger, pseudo-  238 delights (esp. deliciae, delicatus)  55–56, 179, 305, 307, 317–18, 333–34, 351 delights, and pueri delicati  47, 140, 262, 271 delights, spontaneous  201, 214 denials  35, 242–45, 259, 299 deniability, plausible  21, 114

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

400  General Index depoliticization  212, 247–48, 359, 367–68 depth  14, 26, 163, 311 depth, avoided  53 depth, conjured  9 depth, dispelled  269 depth, false  198–201, 332, 347, 352 depth, “hidden”  53, 85 desire  11, 123–24, 131, 302, 307, 335, 338–43 desire, for a master  309 desire, for a poem  343 desire, for fame  105–06 desire, of a master  263 desire, of Domitian  336, 340, 355 desire, political  368 desire, to praise  94 desublimation  139, 204–05, 211, 217, 258, 352 directiveness  199–200, 242, 245 disappearance  37, 144, 327, 332, 358 disappropriation  302, 318–19, 323 disavowal  27, 105, 155, 159, 174, 229, 298–99, 324 disbelief  73, 365 disbelief, suspension of  64, 258, 289 display, of displays  48 display, of fidelity  64, 285 display, of poetry  352 display, of mastery  373 display, self-  7, 88, 233, 237 distinction  196, 283 distinction, profits of  39, 239, 371 distinction, verbal  242 domestication 277 domestication, of aristocrats  281 domestication, of poetry  279 domination  25, 202, 236, 248, 259, 308 domination, and beauty  270 domination, happy  260 domination, imperial  9, 70, 79, 289 domination, reproduction of  310 domination, symbolic  24, 369–71 Domitian, and normativity  82 Domitian, as “Domitian”  32 Domitian, as a function  118 Domitian, as cause  155 Domitian, as censor  37, 50, 82–83 Domitian, as conqueror  84 Domitian, as dominus  87, 92, 135, 139, 265 Domitian, as father  92, 131, 132, 355

Domitian, as Germanicus  71, 72, 75, 92, 107, 210, 220–21, 234, 333, 343 Domitian, as god-like  67, 70, 206, 209–10 Domitian, as greatest Caesar  73 Domitian, as ideal reader  83, 92 Domitian, as metaphor  25 Domitian, as muse  214 Domitian, as obscene father  76, 132, 136, 355–56 Domitian, as symbolic center  83, 89 Domitian, beauty of  331 Domitian, dead  150 Domitian, Equestrian statue of  191, 202, 212, 221, 225, 265, 301 Domitian, historical  24 Domitian, nothing beyond  141 doubleness  34, 44, 87, 224, 307 doubleness, and no more  83 dread  12, 42, 320, 339–40 dread, and desire  96 dread, numinous  85, 123 dread, sexual  116 Earinus  23, 67, 110, 119–29, 266, 314, 323–44 Earinus, as name and/or (mere) noun  124, 126, 129 Earinus, as unnamable  119 Earinus, castration of  330, 338 Earinus, identification with  133 echoes  260–61, 263, 272 economy, poetic  115, 159 economy, symbolic  207 ecstasy  107–15, 211–18, 230, 267, 302, 352 ecstasy, and power  350 ecstasy, as agony  147 editor (giver of shows)  48, 53, 65, 143 editor, and the author  201, 217, 363 editor, emperor as  91 Eisenstein, Sergei  248–49, 360 emperor, and his new clothes  17, 79, 132 emperor, as ideal spectator  292 emperor, as point of orientation  189 emperor, bad  357, 373 emperor, good  4, 149 emperor, see also “Domitian” empire  24, 87, 144–45, 175, 287 empire, fruits of  282, 301 empire, poetics of  211, 356, 370 emptiness, of poems  143, 300 emptiness, of speech  3, 10, 47, 274

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index  401 emptiness, producing  249, 353 Endymion 330–31 ephemerality  48, 267, 269, 314, 331 epic  50, 52, 125, 195–96, 211 epic, dismissed  106, 203 epic, genitals  142 epic, remoteness of  258 epic, surpassed  223 epigrams, as a gift  68 epigrams, as censorious  77–78 epigrams, as panegyric  94 epigrams, inscribed  32, 103–04 epigrams, over epic  99, 142 epigrams, see also “poetry” and “Martial” errors  35, 44, 348 Etruscus, Claudius  190, 202, 216, 296, 299, 318, 324 eunuchs  12, 77–79, 133, 175 eunuchs, see also “Earinus” euphemism  190, 295, 297, 299, 316, 338, 357, 366, 370 exculpation, self-  160, 164, 285, 369 exultation  247, 318 faith  216, 285, 350 faith, bad  8, 16, 64, 257, 349 faith, good  185, 255, 304–05 faith, see also “fidelity” fathers, and freedom  251 fathers, and politics  252 fathers, defective  285–89, 300 fathers, praised  288, 291 fathers, see also “Domitian” fear  97, 111, 116, 126, 229, 278, 333, 373 fear, aesthetic  12, 76 fear, dispelled  88, 162, 238–39 fear, of an animal  64–66 fear, of castration  116, 329 fear, see also “anxiety” and “dread” feelings, see “affects” felicity and felix  69, 134, 136, 138, 287, 292, 298, 326 fiction  5–9, 157–63, 244, 255, 258, 353, 357 fiction, and domination  289 fiction, and reality  31–32, 324 fiction, dominant  7, 32, 236 fiction, patent  343 fiction, pleasure of  323 fiction, shared  300 fiction, social  311, 317 fidelity  72–73, 285–86

fidelity, and fiction  255 fidelity, and the lyre  256 fidelity, displays of  285 fidelity, false  305 fidelity, meta-  10 fidelity, to poetry alone  350 flâneur  49, 363 flattery  2–3, 12, 16, 25, 93, 135, 166, 187, 191, 284, 338 flattery, commitment to  210–11 flattery, conventional  18, 70, 84 flattery, repudiated  165–66 focalization  62, 262 focalization, ideology of  282 focalization, onto the master  270, 306, 319, 329 focalization, see also “perspective” forgetting  126, 150–57, 164 forgetting, collective  156 forgetting, strategic  157, 167, 178, 185–86 framing  194, 197 framing, hyper-  287 frankness  22, 91, 123, 148, 185, 250, 368 frankness, see also “freedom” and “liberty” freedmen, and freedom  134, 287, 292, 296 freedmen, imperial  132, 148, 269, 284, 297 freedom  175, 185, 246, 316 freedom, and constraint  4–5 freedom, artistic  9, 350 freedom, of speech  61, 74, 95 freedom, of spirit  305, 312 freedom, psychic  119, 305 freedom, qualified  246–53 freedom, to be at leisure  250 freedom, to play with words  247, 309 freedom, see also “freedmen”, “liberty”, and “slaves” friendship  23, 28, 73–76, 103–08, 112, 224, 278, 358 futurity and the future  78–82, 130, 164, 169, 188, 215 futurity, already present  267–69 futurity, Domitianic  82 futurity, smothering  82 Galla  69, 114, 145–48, 159–60 Gallicus, Rutilius  211, 226, 230 Ganymede  46–47, 122, 124, 128, 139–43, 326, 336 genealogy  6, 323 genitals  78, 112

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

402  General Index genitals, disgusting  147 genitals, missing  120, 338 genitals, threats to  136, 339 genius  39, 224 genius, and complicity  343 genius, and the reader  41–45, 374 genius, as “genius”  36 genius, as superfluous  94 genius, daring  238 genius, limits set upon  42 genius, of the author  156, 355, 366 genius, of the singer  262 genius, poetic  12, 55, 157, 195, 207, 274, 276, 359 genre, and genus 327 genre, flagging  36, 50 genre, low or high  61, 99, 104, 195, 219 genre, mastery of  26 genre, trouble  94 gods, as playthings  209, 337 gods, as self-abasing  122 gods, desublimation of  114, 206 gods, care about Caesars  176, 215, 247 gods, humiliation of  290 gods, less important than Caesars  213 gods, killed off  123 guilt  16, 237, 248, 339, 354, 367 happiness  63, 91–92, 95, 105, 138–39, 214, 225, 229–37, 250 happiness, and subjection  230, 263, 323–24 happiness, see also “delights” and “joy” harmlessness  33, 36, 77, 176 harmlessness, of literature  45, 248, 275 hate  9, 16, 148–49, 229, 233, 373 Helicon  7, 184–87, 272, 349 hendecasyllabi  198, 227, 374 hermeneutics  7, 13, 27, 61, 243, 334 hermeneutics, complicit  371–72, 375 Homer  27, 125–26, 223 Horace  27, 49, 142, 219, 229, 238 horror  100, 320, 340, 353 horror, and beauty  142 horror, and joy  109 humiliation  15, 109, 111, 131–33, 278, 280–82, 309 humiliation, and glory  55 humiliation, and servitude  133 humiliation, and the narrator  147 humiliation, self-  118, 343 humiliation, sublime  329

humility  155, 166 humor, see “jokes” Hylas  161, 313, 330–31, 342 hyperbole  14, 81, 108, 115–17, 217–18, 222, 254, 286, 330 hyperbole, contrafactual  276 hyperbole, ironic  117 hyperbole, that overshoots  87 hypocrisy  2–3, 16, 32–33, 114–15, 174, 198, 217 ideology  7–9, 264, 270, 296, 366 ideology, and freedom  9 ideology, formula of  70 ideology, imperial  72–73, 208 ideology, of the inessential  38 ideology, of the text  14, 126, 193, 296, 329 image, concrete  103–06 image, of the author  118 image, reflected  300, 330–32 immediacy  38, 46, 50 immortality, and art  56, 84, 103, 106–07, 151, 155, 207, 321 in vain (frustra)  61–62, 165–65 inadequacy  84, 206, 213, 222, 241, 330 inauthenticity  8, 243–44 infinity, negative  197 innovation  14, 18, 37, 218–20, 223, 356, 361, 371 insincerity  4, 10, 17, 25, 105, 155, 216–18, 223, 278, 284, 307, 356 integrity  147, 293, 329, 359, 367 interiority  149, 219, 305, 309, 352 interiority, appropriation of  311 interiority, pseudo-  7 intertextuality, as distinct from allusions  13 intimacy, affective  105 intimacy, excessive  23 intimacy, literary  39 intimacy, political  171, 356 intimacy, social  76, 104, 351 irony  8, 22, 35, 62, 197, 219, 224, 250 irony, and affect  88 irony, and detachment  283 irony, and distance  39, 73 irony, as alibi  35 irony, as “irony”  50 irony, as posture  52 irony, death of  293 irony, lived  88 irony, reveling in  280

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index  403 Janus  215, 236–37 jokes  14, 35, 52, 75, 232, 278, 348 jokes, and punchlines  54, 87, 142 jokes, and seriousness  33 jokes, and urbanity  283 jokes, imperious  275 jokes, “mere”  34, 38, 275 jokes, that are not jokes  197, 353 jouissance  334, 356 joy  15–16, 87–89, 138–39 234, 287 joy, of submission  230, 261, 351 joy, in cleverness  353 joy, see also “happiness” Juno  140–42, 276, 325–27 Juvenal  2, 90, 269, 284 juxtaposition  21, 109, 248, 324, 350–51 Kalends 191 knowledge  11, 26, 243 knowledge, cynical  8 knowledge, will to  12 laughter  83, 278 laughter, festal  44 laughter, reactionary  31 law  79, 83, 215, 235, 253 law, against adultery  119 law, cosmic  290 law, left-handed  339 law, of nature  55, 342 law, of yielding  288–89 leisure  182, 370, 373–74 “Let it be!” (fiat)  235, 268, 272–73, 288, 337, 344, 350, 366, 372 liberty  73, 246–53 liberty, abstract  72 liberty, and Caesar  349 liberty, and the toga  252–53 liberty, contemporary  174, 248 liberty, excessive  61 liberty, immature  252 liberty, silvan  252 liberty, shameful  228 liberty, vs slavery  251 license  244, 247 license, comic  251 license, poetic  34, 125, 306 license, stylistic  95, 120 lions  11, 40–66, 185, 191, 277–83 lions, mouths of  9, 63–66, 88, 187, 202, 291 literature, about literature  193

literature, and history  29 literature, as derivative  48 literature, Domitianic  29, 50, 96, 189–92 literature, politics of  48, 155, 346, 361 literature, post-Domitianic  157, 173 literature, provincial  178 literature, pure  369, 374–75 Literature, Trajanic  164 litotes  12, 207, 299, 336–37 litotes, sublime  290 logic, illogical  231, 295, 327, 331 logic, strained  149 logic, see also “short-circuit” love, and hate  9, 16, 149 love, for a master  304–07 love, of Caesar  99, 130–32, 149 love, of one’s own symptom  8 love, of the muses  254 love, sadistic  63 Lucan  236, 249, 253, 361–62 Lucilius  34, 36, 125, 128, 358 luxury  127, 255, 258, 261, 274–78, 282–83, 301, 312 lying  14, 17, 38 lying, “I am not–”  243–44, 310, 316 lyre (chelys)  200–03, 314–15 Maecenas  50, 175, 185 majesty and maiestas  35, 64, 96–97, 210 mannerism  197, 199–201 Martial, as “Martial”  7, 31, 32, 36, 105–06 Martial, as poet of the monumental  101 Martial, as “That famous Martial”  31, 43, 65, 75, 101, 150–52, 166 Martial, biography of  29 Martial, Late  180 Martial, not-Pseudo-  181 Martial, Pseudo-  158, 166 Martial, shrinks  152 Martial, The friend of Martial  76 marveling and marvels  41, 46, 102, 105–06, 191, 219–25, 254–67, 329–30, 351 masks and personae  9, 32–33, 140, 172–77, 180, 229, 348–49 master, beauty of  331 masters  5–8, 71–72, 166, 259–70 masters, of intrigue  291–92 MasterCaesar  266, 296 MasterCensor 266 mastery  5–8, 265 mastery, and proprietorship  262

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

404  General Index mastery, commitment to  25 mastery, fantasies of  307, 354 mastery, glory of  311 mastery, of a social practice  72 mastery, of metaphors  5 mastery, of symbols  20 mastery, pleasure of  272 mastery, poetic  5, 7, 26, 72, 193, 253, 277, 352–54, 371–72 meaning, censored  140 meaning, filling with  126 meaning, mastery of  193 meaning, production of  367 meaning, suppressed  328 meaning, surplus  138, 193 megalomania 107 Melior, Aetidius  190, 313–23 Menander 250–51 metapoetics  19, 52, 274, 295, 319, 341, 355 metapoetics, and meta-politics  253 metapoetics, and power  20 metapoetics, as after poetics  353 metonymy  6, 97, 108, 121, 129, 205, 341 metonymy, and desublimation  206–07 metonymy, and horror  341 metonymy, and poetry  127 metonymy, Jove for Domitian  208 miracles  289, 294, 339 miracles, as “miracles”  47 mirror  134–39, 149, 161, 240, 255, 348, 355 mirror, and occlusion  341–44 mirror, for the prince  98 mise en abîme  103, 197, 276, 332 Möbius strip  329–30 modernity  33, 49 modernity, and innovation  226 modernity, Caesarean  42, 50 modernity, Domitianic  201, 207, 212, 361 modernity, radical  226 modernity, self-siring  297 modernity, superiority of  241 modesty  100, 149 modesty, Domitian’s  94, 215, 236 modesty, poetic  212, 223 money  159–60, 288, 294 money, and sex  110, 114–15 monumentality  102, 156, 260, 368 myth, and reality blur  309 myth, inadequacy of  120, 212, 330 myth, making  128, 143 myth, plundering  85, 141, 208, 224 myth, surpassed  100, 161, 222, 265, 330

narcissism  107, 237, 311 narcissism, of literary craft  341 narcissism, of the narrator  332 narcissism, of the reader  45 narcissism, poetic  355 narcissism, structural  193 Narcissus  241–42, 331–32 narrator  19, 244, 256 narrator, and Domitian’s desire  340 narrator, and his doubles  306, 318, 330, 332 narrator, and the author  39 narrator, as censor  145 narrator, as interruptive  307, 320 narrator, as puppet-master  322 narrator, as “transgressive”  315 narrator, ironic  305 narrator, untrustworthy  286, 309 narrator, vs author  348 naturalism 219 nature, as “nature”  41, 279 nature, denaturalized  228, 255 nature, raw  56 naughtiness, as “naughtiness”  58 nearness  111, 364 Nero  148, 168, 292, 361 Nerva 167–88 networks, social  104–05 nomen  123, 124, 128 nomen, as name  135–36 nomen, as name and/or (mere) noun  80, 121, 125, 222 nostalgia  109, 213, 347, 356 nothingness  105, 172, 332 nothingness, see also “trifles” Numa  168, 177, 184–85 obscenity  34–35, 340, 356 obviousness 264 omnipotence  121, 143, 343 omnipotence, of thought  4, 13, 271, 343, 353 Orpheus  4, 66, 95, 143, 154, 166, 227, 367 Orpheus, as “Orpheus”  42 Ovid  49, 131, 179, 208 oxymorons  315, 337, 348 panegyric  12, 49, 140, 210, 366 panegyric, and excess  18, 186 panegyric, and absurdity  134, 216–17 panegyric, vs criticism  25, 371, 376 panegyric, vs pedantry  81, 125, 275 panopticism 364

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index  405 paradox  41, 129, 219, 273, 289, 304 parentheticals  210, 230, 286, 303–04 Parrhasia  91, 117, 120–23, 128, 148 Parthenius  145, 169–71, 345, 357 Pascal, and his wager  10, 73, 349 past, and authority  211, 258, 361 past, as prelude to the present  267 past, as storehouse  222 past, embarrassing  166 past, outstripped  100, 147, 241 past, pastness of  109, 241, 247 past, rewriting the  82 patronage  177, 180–81, 191 patronage, imperial  266, 296 , 345 patronage, problems with  74, 99, 110, 113, 129, 131, 263 performativity  79, 211, 232, 235, 309 Persius 361–62 personae, see “masks” perspective  43, 75, 135 perspective, complicit  320, 355 perspective, cosmic  321 perspective, displaced  230 perspective, elided  316 perspective, forced  62, 135, 217, 319–20, 351 perspective, inverted  263 perspective, of the master  262, 305 perspective, split  87, 101 Petronius  361, 365 philosophy, quasi-  290, 306, 320–21 piety  10, 94, 210, 285–87, 293–94 pity, self-  309 play (lusus)  7, 33, 36, 44–47, 98, 160, 194–99, 201 play, and the social game  274, 283 play, artful  196 play, as mere play  126, 194 play, as not mere play  142–43, 196 play, bad  77–78 play, complicit  348, 371 play, in the lion’s mouth  187, 210 play, martial  89 play, public  232 play, with ideas  99, 309, 350 play, word- and power-  108 pleasure  79, 82, 115, 175, 262–63, 295, 336 pleasure, and power  25, 140, 351, 353, 355 pleasure, jubilant and obscene  353 pleasure, of deferral  128 pleasure, of fiction  323 pleasure, of mastery  272

pleasure, of submission  227–28, 256 pleasure, of the reader  13, 372 Pliny  98, 154, 166, 173, 185, 374 poet, and prince  4–5, 12, 106, 191, 235, 365 poet, as censor  79 poet, as center  365 poet, as maker  14, 236 poet, dead  162 poet, learnedness of the  253, 294 poet, like a prince  17, 72, 89, 193, 235 , 259 poet, omnipotence of the  337 poetics, and versification  303 poetics, disruptive  83 poetics, Domitianic  129, 231 poetics, political philosophy of  301 poetry, about poetry  21, 193, 199, 253, 303, 319, 332, 348, 353, 355, 371 poetry, and castration  114 poetry, and immortality  321 poetry, and life  98, 161, 179 poetry, and politics  20–40, 359 poetry, and power  4, 142, 146, 191, 350 poetry, as conquering  99 poetry, as detached from the world  86 poetry, as imperious  193, 228, 270 poetry, as power  26 poetry, courtly  328 poetry, fine-spun  323 poetry, occasional  25 poetry, panegyrical  25, 351 poetry, politics of  13 poetry, power-  263 poetry, vs frankness  149 politics  3, 13, 17–23, 29–30, 345–47 politics, and despair  60 politics, and the personal  82 politics, depoliticized  349 politics, obsolete  60 politics, of beauty  23 politics, of criticism  372 politics, of literature  354, 358–59 politics, of the small  170 politics, pseudo-  374 politics, refused  145, 374 politics, suppressed  154 posturing  3, 52, 101, 197–98, 218, 224, 237 power, addressing  346 power, and desire  131 power, and distance  353 power, and joy  235 power, and fiction  18 power, and poetry  7, 118

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

406  General Index power, and poetry as a dyad  20, 26, 350 power, and rewriting  107 power, and sex  339 power, and topography  169 power, and untruth  257 power, aestheticization of  25 power, capriciousness of  340 power, centralized  171 power, commitment to  25 power, contagiousness of  135 power, discourse of  5 power, ecstasies of  350 power, fertility of  1, 4, 191 power, ignoring  68 power, legitimation of  326 power, narrative of  56 power, of poetry  256, 350, 361 power, repressive  9 power, restrained  185 power, spectacular  55 power, will to  244 power, will to, disavowed  375 power, will to, of poetry  17, 42, 100–108, 192, 217, 342, 350 power, will to, of poets and princes  264, 271 power, will to, of the critic  350, 375 power, word-  343 preferring  121–22, 212–13, 240–42 present, the, and the “now” (nunc)  46, 88, 130–31, 142, 154, 184, 195, 338 present, the, as affectively supercharged  267 present, the, as revolutionary  147 present, the Domitianic  130 present, the ecstatic  210–218, 351 present, the eternal  267, 361 present, the, gloriousness of  211, 242 present, the, surpassing the past  226 present, the, validating the past  258 present, the, vividness of  135 Priscilla  206, 218, 266 Priscus  119, 157–58, 178–80 private, the  105, 172–74, 212, 230–35, 317, 351 programs and the programmatic  24, 36–38, 43, 48, 51–56, 67, 94, 172, 194, 228, 310–15, 350, 375 prostitution  110, 114–18, 130–31, 308, 353 psychic life  247 psychic life, contrived  88, 302 psychic life, ersatz  229

psychic life, fictional  7 psychic life, fictionalized  149 psychic life, implausible  296, 306 psychic life, imputed  141, 255, 353 psychic life, of things  270 psychic life, of youths  331 psychic life, paradoxical  63 quotation marks  36, 199 rabbits  5, 40–66, 77, 175, 185, 187, 210, 353–53, 373, 375 rage  15, 119, 277–78, 280, 356 rape  47, 326, 333 rape, occluded  121 rape see also “abuse, sexual” rashness  18, 238–39 reader, as Cato  172 reader, as conjured  41 reader, as spectator  47, 183 reader, benevolent  45, 153 reader, cleverness of  11, 34, 232 reader, competence of  333, 371 reader, complicity of  12, 360 reader, given cues for reading  67, 193 reader, good  348 reader, ideal  263 reader, left-handed  300 reader, malevolent  34, 42, 153 reader, narcissism of  45 reader, of Caesar  56 reader, scholarly  40 reading, depoliticized  371 reading, ethics of  358 reading, resistant  194, 360 reality, and the fake  32, 144, 244 reality, as “reality”  222 reality, as effect  18, 32, 47, 90, 364 reception  40, 90, 160, 193 refinement  60, 126, 150, 199–200, 327 religion 82 religion, and politics  107, 210 religion, evacuated  100, 143, 203–04 repetition  136, 273 repression  1, 9, 76, 136, 138, 340 resentment  302, 340 resistance, political  7, 13, 60, 359 resistance, reading for  49, 51, 70, 228, 373 resistance, that is not resistant  16, 52, 202, 212, 373 resublimation 212

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index  407 resublimation, see also “desublimation” reverence  148–50, 206, 247 reverence, for what is right  177 reverence, obscene  146–47 revolution, counterrevolutionary  248 revolution, denied  18, 168, 174 revolution, refused  52, 144–45 rewriting  93, 157, 186 rewriting, as symbolic violence  42, 55, 107–08, 326 rewriting, history  169, 177, 344 rewriting, social roles  303, 307, 317 rewriting, the world  268 riddles  128–29, 135, 352, 367 Riefenstahl, Leni  360, 367–68 Rome, and Roman life  38 Rome, as Caesar’s Rome  44, 64–65, 98, 105, 118, 203, 220, 360 Rome, contemporary  30–31, 72, 84, 148 Rome, displaced  121 Rome, imperial  67 Rome, new  167, 173, 186 Rome, refounded  108 Rome, Rome’s  156 sadness 121 sadness, ironic  271 sadness, of a master  270, 312–13 sadness, pleasure of  323 satire 126 Saturnalia  67, 89, 172, 174, 247, 265 savoir-faire, social  195, 243 scurra 32–33 Sejanus 36 senate  87, 149, 176, 180, 236 Seneca  30, 210, 261, 304, 321, 361 servitude 64 servitude, celebrated  202, 227–28, 296, 299, 306, 334 servitude, implied  297 servitude, of a book  71 servitude, of the free  296 servitude, vulgar  329 sex  76–81, 95–97, 109–14, 131, 146, 159, 305 sex, see also “abuse, sexual” and “rape” shallowness  53, 198, 232, 269, 347 shame  63–64, 78, 94–95, 114–17, 132, 228, 236, 252, 281–82, 289–90, 354 short-circuits  22, 84, 95, 235, 329, 361 short-circuits, and happiness  237

signifier, fixing the  78 signifier, master  11, 20, 266 signifier, mobility of the  5, 59, 120 simplicity (simplicitas) 34–35 sincerity  4, 9–12, 17, 70–72, 79, 219, 347 sincerity, mooted  16 slaves  135, 287 slaves, as psychically free  304 slaves, “noble”  317 slaves, of love  309, 330 slaves, sympathy with  116–18, 306 slaves, voluntary  307 smallness  52–53, 61–62, 91, 95, 99, 105, 110, 144, 170, 183 smallness, and inconsequentialness  86 smallness, see also “trifles” society, and hierarchy  113, 284 society, and social tension  148 society, of the spectacle  48, 201, 282, 292, 363 society, reproduction of  321 Sontag, Susan  367 Spain  167, 173, 178–83 spectacle, agents of the  365 spectacle, narrator as  237, 355 spectacle, world as  363 spectacles  51, 82, 171–72, 351, 363–65 spectacles, offered by the poet  56 spectators, as carefree  63 spectators, ideal  267, 282 speech, and values  160 speech, castrated  117 speech, new  164 speech, Republican  61 speech, see also “freedom of speech” and “frankness” spontaneousness  6, 42, 159, 196, 201, 276–80, 307–09, 331, 341, 355 Statius, as “Statius”  7 Statius, see “narrator” status, social  132, 251, 287, 297, 303, 306, 308–09 Stella  48–49, 57, 180, 183, 223 Stertinius  102–106, 155 stupefaction  219, 221–22, 257 stupidity  2, 100, 142, 147 stupidity, see also “absurdity” style  28, 60, 231 style, artificial  362 style, high  62, 79, 122, 136, 203–04, 213, 258, 317

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

408  General Index style, politics of  358 subject, and power  3, 347 subject, and subjectivation  72, 354 subject, as subjected  133, 139, 223, 352 subject, hermeneutics of the  7 subjection, self-  138, 306 sublime, the  12, 108–10, 210–18, 323–26 sublime, the, and desire  113 sublime, the, and desublimation  139, 143 sublime, the, and the ridiculous  142, 350 sublime, the, as fiction  333 sublime, the, dethroning of  84, 258, 351 sublime, the, emptied out  356 sublime, the, generic  300–01 sublime, the, immanence of  84 sublime, the, mundane made into  282 sublime, the, pseudo-  352 sublime, the, vs the clever  352 submission  72, 215, 228, 265, 270–344, 356, 362 submission, abject  280 submission, as “submission”  79 submission, beauty of  284 submission, enjoined  212 submission, of the world  290, 334 submission, pleasure of  227 submission, praised  202 submission, social  97 substitution  11, 122, 124, 126, 128–29, 374 subtexts  13, 38, 153–54, 191, 202, 347 subtext, as written into text  45, 199 subtext, explicated  75 subtexts, political  40, 346, 359 subtexts, to power’s text  83–84 subversiveness  71, 232, 261, 264, 331, 366 surprises  54–55, 63, 116–17, 214, 219, 223, 280 surprises, as “surprises”  46, 316 surprises, expected  352 syllogisms, defective  19, 29, 88 syllogisms, quasi-  366 sympathy  118, 130, 132, 259, 262, 275, 316 sympathy, false  278 synecdoche  147, 218 synesthesia 199 Tacitus  185, 357 tautology 204 tendentiousness  37, 41, 290, 294, 306, 317, 339

Terence  231, 358 terror  62–63, 65, 87, 186, 337 thought, figures of  123, 207, 223, 264, 292, 310, 313, 376 Thrasea Paetus  51–52 Thyestes 161–62 Tiberius  291, 296 time  68, 78, 181, 267–70 time, and power  80 time, and the now  88, 100, 186 time, shallow  269 time, see also “past, the”, “present, the”, and “futurity” trace 364 tradition  17, 207, 258, 267 tradition, abused  227, 328 tradition, inadequacy of  84 Trajan  151, 163–64, 181–83, 187–88 Trajan, as reader  182 Trajan, triumphal  164 trauma, bodily  336, 338 trauma, disavowed  121, 136, 147, 341 trifles  98–106, 142, 155, 170–74, 177, 180, 194, 198, 232 trifles, as monuments  101 triumphs  44–45, 71, 82, 88–89, 109, 164, 236 triumphs, failures as  298 triumphs, artistic  358, 372 truth  68–75, 285, 348, 353 truth, and belief  73 truth, and poetry  161 truth, as “truth”  95, 311 truth, guaranteed  320 truth, half-  191, 283 truth, lived  172 truth, post-  243, 257 truth, see also “fidelity” tyrants  16, 22, 150, 166, 210, 373 unlearning 277–79 unspeakable, the  119–29, 132, 298, 363, 370 unwillingness 233 unwillingness, see also “reluctance” Venus  96–97, 123, 126–27, 206–07, 243, 325–39 Vergil  49–50, 131, 142–43, 156, 193, 223, 268, 294, 354–55 Verneinung 299

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/06/21, SPi

General Index  409 Vertov, Dziga  360 Vespasian 299 Vindex, Novius  191, 242–43 violence, hermeneutic  360 violence, linguistic  216, 236, 260 violence, symbolic  337, 369–70 Wang, Ping  360 witnessing  223, 285–68, 309, 319–20

wonder  3, 8, 221, 223, 255, 340 wonder, see also “marveling” yielding (esp. cedere)  49, 117, 204, 212, 225–29, 269, 273, 333, 351 yielding, and poetry  341 yielding, and reading  290 yielding, Great chain of  290 yielding, spontaneous  331