Review of Mebane 'The Body Politic in Roman Political Thought'

Polis, 2019

2010

Political image-making -- especially from the Age of Augustus, when the Roman Republic evolved into a system capable of governing a vast, culturally diverse empire -- is the focus of this study. Explored are how various artistic and ideological symbols of religion and power, based on Roman Republican values and traditions, were taken over or refashioned to convey new ideological content in the constantly changing political world of imperial Rome from the fourth century B.C.E. down to the second and third centuries C.E. Religion, civic life, and politics went hand-in-hand and formed the very fabric of ancient Roman society. Visual rhetoric was a most effective way to communicate and commemorate the ideals, virtues, and political programs of the leader of the Roman State. Public memorialization could keep Roman leaders and their achievements before the eyes of the populace in Rome and in cities under Roman sway. A leader’s success demonstrated that he had the favor of the gods -- a form of legitimization crucial for sustaining the Roman Principate, or government by a “First Citizen.”

Among the most potent devices that Roman emperors had at their disposal to disavow autocratic aims and to put on display the consensus of ruler and ruled was the artful refusal of exceptional powers, or recusatio imperii. The practice had a long history in Rome prior to the reign of Augustus, but it was Augustus especially who, over the course of several decades, perfected the recusatio as a means of performing his ongoing hesitancy towards power. The poets of the Augustan period were similarly well practiced in the art of refusal, writing dozens of poetic recusationes that purported to refuse offers urged upon them by their patrons, or by the greater expectations of the Augustan age, to take on projects that exceeded their powers or the limits of a refined and unassuming style. It is the purpose of this paper to put the one type of refusal side-by-side with the other, in order to show to what extent the refusals of the Augustan poets are informed not just by aesthetic principles that derive, most obviously, from Callimachus, but by the many, high-profile acts of denial that were performed as political art by the emperor himself. The paper thus concerns ‘the culture of refusal’ in ancient Rome, analyzing the kind of cultural work that gets done by saying ‘no’ to big projects and to big powers in ways that are highly stylized, oft-repeated, and encoded as specifically Roman (the mos maiorum). Key texts in this discussion are Augustus’ Res Gestae, and Horace’s epistle to Augustus.

Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 42.1 (1-6), 2025

This short preface explains the context and purpose of Polis 42.1, Special Issue: New Directions in Roman Political Thought, edited by David T. West. It also summarizes the diverse approaches and lines of argument pursued by the contributors.

Past and Future, 2024

This critical analysis explores the transition of the late Roman Republic into the autocratic Principate, eventually creating the imperial dynasties of the Julio-Claudian and the Flavians. The reality of autocratic leadership after the civil wars of the first century BCE had to be cloaked within the terminologies of Republican institutions and through the co-option and control of other leading families and individuals. The crucial test for this new ‘settlement’ was the peaceful succession of political and military power from one leader to the next, preferably within the ruling family, i.e. how a dynasty could be established without triggering political revolts or another round of civil wars. However, the Republic itself had not been forgotten. Indeed, patterns of opposition to the Julio-Claudians were sometimes motivated by Republican sentiments, or at least cloaked in its terminology and with some effort to revive power to the Senate. On four occasions during this period there was either a call for a return to ‘Republican government’, or in invocation of republican political terms as a regulator of public life. The issues involved were raised as early as the succession of Tiberius in 14 CE, where the continuing institutional power of the Principate was clearly demonstrated. The events immediately following the assassination of Caligula (41 CE) and the decline in Nero’s government after the Pisonian conspiracy show that a return to Republican government was highly unlikely. Likewise, the events of 69 CE, where military commanders vie for control of the empire in a new cycle of civil wars, illustrates the institutional forces in operation against any return to a republican form of government. Instead, we have a shift of emphasis towards a re-interpretation of libertas in relation to the auctoritas of emperors during this period. By this time republican slogans were mobilized as symbolic propaganda for an empowered imperial administration that had already sidestepped the popular Assemblies and the Senate as sources of authority.

How did Romans perceive the changing relationships among leaders, the people, and the public sphere as their commonwealth (res publica) fell under the control of an emperor? This paper examines Ovid's uses of the Latin adjective publicus, 'public, common, open,' to unfold a vein of 'republican' political thought behind his poetic corpus. Ovid first celebrates Augustus' material benefactions as common goods for private consumption; then dramatizes the tragic consequences of arbitrary domination; and finally, from exile, treats the emperor himself as a public property, subject to his people's spectatorship and sovereignty of judgment. A final section applies Ovid's thinking on privacy, publicity, and information access to the United States, from its founders' emphasis on a free press to the interplay of secrecy, celebrity, and 'sunshine' laws under modern 'imperial' presidents.

Syllecta Classica, 2015

Ronald Syme's Roman Revolution is generally recognised as his literary masterpiece as well as a brilliant work of historical interpretation: that makes it a suitable subject for some of the techniques of literary analysis that are now applied to ancient historical writers. A manuscript of an earlier draft makes it possible to trace its genesis: some of his most famous epigrammatic formulations are late additions to his text, while some of his expansions of that early draft, particularly in the first chapters, suggest that he was already uneasy about areas which reviewers fastened on in their criticisms. His affectation of the manner of Asinius Pollio is discussed, together with his (overstated) pillorying of Livy. This connects with his deft use of what we now call focalisation, so that his interpretations blur imperceptibly into those that were, or could have been, expressed at the time. The paper goes on to discuss what is added by the frequent allusions to Tacitus, and how far we should press intertextual readings; a test-case is given by an apparent allusion to Shakespeare's Henry V. Syme's characterisation is sometimes thought limited, with the main players all interpreted in a similar cynical way so that events seem to replay themselves: but with ancient authors such patterning is seen to be a vehicle for interpretation, and the same generosity can be extended to Syme. Finally, the echoes of 1930s power politics are addressed from the viewpoint of Syme's audience, rendering them more susceptible to accept his leading themes: so these too contribute to the rhetoric of The Roman Revolution. 6 Chris Stray also suggests to me that Higham, "champion of old-style linguistic and compositional Classics, was having a dig at younger men who preferred the history of archaeology." 7 Syme 1939, 113. 8 Syme 1937a. "Octavianus" and "Antonius," or more usually "M. Antonius" have taken over in his JRS article of the same year, "Who was Decidius Saxa?" (Syme 1937b). But "Octavianus" figures in a precocious letter of his youth, written to a local paper in New Zealand to correct an error: Bowersock 541. 9 E.g. Tarn 65 (which I misattributed to M. Charlesworth at Pelling 1996, 67): "Because he stood for something more than mere ambition he could draw a nation to him in the coming struggle." But Tarn is referred to in warm terms in the Preface to Roman Revolution (viii). Alföldy 104 also refers appositely to Syme 1974, 482, a summary of a century of scholarship: "It was comforting to revere Augustus as the archetype of the good headmaster, firm and serene, who seldom has to exert the vast authority he holds in reserve."

The American Historical Review, 2006

2014

As Cooley observes in her recent commentary, the Res Gestae, as the posthumously published summary of Augustus’s life, ‘offers an invaluable insight into the political ideology of the Augustan era’. The inscription’s genre is hard to pin down: it has been likened to Roman funerary inscriptions, various laudatory inscriptions, a Propertian ‘verse epitaph’ (4.11), multilingual inscriptions of Hellenistic monarchs and other honorific decrees from the Greek East. Cooley plausibly diagnoses it as a composition sui generis. The lapidary nature of the text crams meaning into every word; Augustus’s choice of language is always significant. The opening sentence alone encapsulates Augustus’s exploitation of Republican themes in the construction of his own ideology. These twenty-one words stress Augustus’s youth, his raising of an army, that he did so on private initiative and at personal expense, that he thereby restored the res publica to liberty, and that this was necessary because of the oppressive domination of a faction (factio). Various scholars have suggested either Cicero or Caesar as inspiration for the ideology of the opening sentence, mostly depending on whether they focus on the first or the second clause. There is no need to choose between these two figures, however; the distinctive mix of Ciceronian and Caesarian idiom in RG 1.1 reveals Augustus playing political magpie in the Republic’s ruins. Comparing each element of the opening sentence to the political discourse of the late Republic reveals nuances of meaning that permit a more in-depth understanding of the Res Gestae as a whole and enable a deeper appreciation of the political traditions Augustus exploited to legitimate his regime.

Scriptura, 2012

Although the expansion of New Testament Studies to formal studies in Early Christianity and Late Antiquity have significantly changed modi of interpretation concerning Pauline material, the Cartesian effect has not been laid to rest. In addition, despite the problematisation of knowledge production which was initiated during the eighties of the twentieth century, the subject as primary originator of knowledge, born during the nineteenth century, is still haunting the production of knowledge within the field of Pauline studies, with little concern for the variety of diverse discursive practices compelling and enabling the production of a writing. Both these tendencies have infused the rhetorical paradigm within which Pauline letters have been read. I argue that a rhetoric of the body, functioning within the implicit tradition of Rhetorical Criticism, can enable the detection of discursive traces constituting a rhetoric of the body in the Graeco-Roman world. If a rhetoric of the body is used as interpretative framework for the letter to the Romans, no resistance against the Roman Empire can be discerned but rather an identification with a habitus that made a radicalisation of the Roman regulatory body possible.

The paper addresses a problem of method and one of substance. Methodologically, it considers the necessity of modeling in the study of ancient institutions. Substantively, it critiques minimalist interpretations of Roman government: those that depict Roman government as passive or reactive, for whom response to petitions is emblematic of ancient government. I then focus on the vocabulary of command, not least as its usage spans both general edicts and ad hominem rescripts, and suggests that its use helps to explain why provincials received rescripts as having general force. I then close with some general considerations on the study of government as an historical enterprise.

I examine how Roman bourgeois women transform the female body into a trope of timelessness, creating a link with another powerful trope, Rome Eternal. In particular, I look at how grace is naturalised and empowered to represent a link to the glories of Rome's past. This allows members of this class to circumvent the semiotic and temporal limits of the status markers that express other elites' ties to the inconstant power of the State, the nazione. The old or alta borghesia whose Vatican associations led to their political fall from grace after unification (1870) was thus able to reinvent itself as the guardian of manners and mores associated with the patria, a construction that is considered stable and "timeful" because its values are tied to Rome the eternal city. I cannot address here why women are more important as symbols of grace, permanence and of Rome itself. Suffice to say that the social body is marked as male. Please forgive the following metaphors, but they are germane: women are not naturally 'tamed' by the semiotic system of male social body; special measures are required to bring them into semiotic harmony with the unmarked, allegedly 'natural' maleness of the social body. By the same taken, their 'wild', non-normalised condition makes them particularly powerful carriers of social meaning once symbols of the community are grafted onto their bodies by special forms of body discipline.

This book investigates the working mechanisms of public opinion in Late Republican Rome as a part of informal politics. It explores the political interaction (and sometimes opposition) between the elite and the people through various means, such as rumours, gossip, political literature, popular verses and graffiti. It also proposes the existence of a public sphere in Late Republican Rome and analyses public opinion in that time as a system of control. By applying the spatial turn to politics, it becomes possible to study sociability and informal meetings where public opinion circulated. What emerges is a wider concept of the political participation of the people, not just restricted to voting or participating in the assemblies.