Roman Discourse Research Articles

Dream Divination in a Context of Social Disruption: Julian’s Vision of the Two Trees

The late Roman discourse on divinatory dreams and their interpretation reflects a context of cultural fragmentation. The political turbulence of the 350s to 360s was due partly to the ongoing external war with the (Persian) Sasanians, but also to the internal struggle between the heirs of Constantine for rule over the Roman empire, still undergoing a process of Christianization when Julian was acclaimed Augustus in 360. A third arena of fragmentation was religious beliefs and practices during the 350s and 360s. The contested transformation of Rome in the religious sphere was the context of Julian’s dynastic vision of the two trees, received in late 358 or 359.

Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis (review)

Reviewed by: Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis Dana Robinson Christine Luckritz Marquis Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022 Pp. 212. $65.00. Death of the Desert begins and ends with a single incident: Theophilus of Alexandria's raid on the monks of Nitria and the expulsion of the Tall Brothers in 401 c.e. In the pages between, we are guided through an exploration of multiple modes of violence: prayer and psalmody as weapons against demonic powers, memory sanctions as violent erasures toward others and toward the self, and the Roman discourse of "barbarians" and the boundaries of empire as real and rhetorical violence toward the imagined Other. All these modes coincide in Theophilus's raid and in the ways it was later remembered; in Luckritz Marquis's reading, this moment was the real end of any monastic Golden Age and the beginning of a selective rehabilitation of memory that in itself did violence to the monastic past. Luckritz Marquis frames the project by arguing that the Sayings of the Desert Fathers cannot be taken as straightforward historical witnesses for events of the late fourth and early fifth centuries and, perhaps more controversially, that fourth-century witnesses such as Palladius, Cassian, Rufinus, and Theophilus himself are more valuable despite (or because of) their political, personal, and theological entanglements. Most pointed of all is her claim that many modern scholars of this period have been so formed by colonialism that they are uncritically ready to accept fifth- and sixth-century claims that the monastic Golden Age was violently brought to an end by outsider, "barbarian" attack. Instead, she suggests, the built-in violence of Christian asceticism and Roman imperialism created the conditions under which Theophilus's violent raid served as flashpoint. The individual chapters strike out into a varied landscape of theoretical discourses while attempting to keep the overall trajectory in view—an organizational challenge, especially given current expectations that book chapters should [End Page 259] function as reasonably free-standing units. Luckritz Marquis provides summaries of the argument at the beginning and end of each chapter, which is helpful for the reader to keep track of the multiple layers of analysis as they unfold, but can also produce a repetitive feel for a reader of the whole book. But this is a complaint about how current publishing conventions push authors in unfortunate formulaic directions, not about Luckritz Marquis's argumentative coherence, which is strong throughout. Chapter One treads some familiar ground regarding the desert as a locus of ascetic imagination, but raises the stakes by casting the relationship between monk-settlers and demon-inhabitants as one of violent colonization. This violence extends to the ascetic body, as monks attempt to transform both self and desert. Despite the usual contextualization of Theophilus's raid as part of the Origenist controversy (and the book blurb highlighting this context), the immediate theological stakes of this dispute remain subordinate to the political and rhetorical. Origen's thinking itself surfaces only in this chapter's discussion of demonic bodies (although his influence through Evagrius is also clearly present). Chapter Two takes up the subject of prayer and psalmody, again through the lens of violence and materiality. Prayers are weapons against the demons, but they are also instruments of divine violence against the self. Luckritz Marquis turns to Evagrius and Cassian on pure prayer and angelic bodies, portrayed with images of fiery transformation in the later retrospective of the Sayings. The monk in states of true prayer becomes fire, with all its purifying and destructive potentialities. Thus "divinized embodiment was understood as inherently violent" (72). Chapters Three and Four turn to the relationship between ascetic training and modes of violence against human others. The mapping of internal and external violence becomes even sharper in Chapter Three, which identifies parallels between the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, the violent Christian destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria (instigated by Theophilus), and monastic memory training. Chapter Four turns to the Roman discourse of the "barbarian" Other and...

The Performance of Parrhesia in Philo and Acts

This article examines the role of the performance of frankness in the work of Philo of Alexandria and in the book of Acts. With respect to Philo, the differences are highlighted in the use of παρρησία between the various series of his writings. With respect to Acts, the role of scripture is emphasized in authorizing the frankness of the disciples. Comparing both, it is argued that the performance of frankness functions as a means to display inner freedom for Jews in the Roman Empire (for Philo) and for Christians within Jewish synagogues in the Roman Empire (for Acts), a freedom that consists of a sense of dignity and status. The comparison demonstrates the extent to which Philo and the book of Acts participate in a shared Roman discourse from Jewish perspectives.

A Roman Portrait of Abraham in Paul’s and Philo’s Later Exegesis

Abstract This article analyzes Bible exegesis as a key to understand the increasingly Roman orientation of Paul. Philo of Alexandria, Paul’s slightly older contemporary, is introduced as a point of comparison, as his move from the earlier Allegorical Commentary to the Life of Abraham clearly documents an intellectual journey towards Roman discourses, which is characteristic also of Paul. The argument is presented in three steps: initially the image of Abraham in Galatians is compared to that in Romans and the new discourse of exemplarity in the latter is highlighted. In the second section Philo’s image of Abraham is analyzed in its dramatic change from systematic Bible commentary to exemplary ethics. The third section deals with the Roman context. The latter is illuminated by looking at some passages in Philo’s later treatise Every Good Man is Free, which addresses Roman audiences on their own turf by discussing Greek and Roman heroes. It is shown that these Pagan portraits are animated by the same discourse of exemplarity as Philo’s and Paul’s Roman portrait of Abraham in their later exegesis. As the Pagan anecdotes have parallels in Roman literature, they provide a context for Paul’s and Philo’s exegesis in a Roman key.

Seneca the Elder, the Controuersia Figurata, and the Political Discourse of the Early Empire

This paper studies examples of how exponents of Roman declamation could insert into arguments on the trivial, even fantastic, cases known as controuersiae statements of striking relevance to the political culture of the triumviral and early imperial period. This is particularly apparent in the Controuersiae of Seneca the Elder but some traces remain in the Minor Declamations attributed to Quintilian. The boundaries separating Rome itself from the declamatory city referred to by modern scholars as Sophistopolis are significantly blurred even in those instances where the exercise does not turn on a specific event from Roman history, and there is much to be gained from how the declaimers deploy Roman historical examples. Some of the most sophisticated instances of mediated political comment exploit the employment of universalizing sententiae, which have considerable bite when they are related to contemporary Roman discourse and experience. The declamation schools are a forum for thinking through the implications of the transformation of the Roman state and deserve a place within any history of Roman political thought.

Dido como alusión a Cleopatra en la Eneida

En la representación alusiva de Cleopatra a través de Dido se demuestra que la obra de Virgilio no es un capítulo más del discurso romano del imperialismo, sino una versión literaria matizada en la que se resaltan aspectos humanos y en la que se problematiza lo político, rehuyendo una caracterización esquemática. In the allusive representation of Cleopatra through Dido it is shown that Virgil's work is not another chapter of the Roman discourse of imperialism, but a nuanced literary version in which human aspects are highlighted and in which the political aspect is problematized, avoiding a schematic haracterization.

Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity by John David Penniman

Reviewed by: Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity by John David Penniman Shaily Patel John David Penniman. Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 352 pp. “Words have a weight, a density,” John David Penniman writes in his prologue to Raised on Christian Milk (ix). They are “never neutral” and contain within them shades of past and present usage, references to embodied realities, and a formative power to construct these realities anew (x). Penniman describes his project as “a story about the weight, the histories, and the symbolic power of food in early Christianity” (xi). And yet, Raised on Christian Milk is more than a story; it is a methodological template for understanding how early Christians fashioned the Christian self—in this case, through the use of food and food imagery. Penniman departs from previous scholarship in considering food as something more than a marker of social identity or a means of tracing the construction of said identity. His driving interest concerning food in early Christianity is the extent to which shared food correlates with shared essence. That is to say, food is not only a means by which various groups delineated their respective identities; it is also a means of “cultivating and perfecting human nature” (4). In 1 Corinthians 3:1–3, for example, Paul claims that he gave the Corinthians milk to drink because they were not prepared for solid food. For Penniman, this implies a means for perfecting the Corinthians, a “developmental process that they could not achieve on their own” (5, emphasis added). But Paul’s appropriation of the link between nourishment and intellectual development is not unique; rather, this notion is embedded in wider Greco–Roman discourses of human formation (5). For Christians who came after Paul, the trope of milk and solid food became a “regulatory principle that enabled early Christian authors to designate boundaries between mature and immature, perfect and imperfect, wise and simple, orthodox and aberrant” (6). Christians could frame food as a regulatory principle precisely because Christian discourses about food tapped into an extant framework for understanding human formation—that of Greek paideia (14). Penniman’s first chapter explores these broader discourses. Using evidence from medical and philosophical texts, he argues that “the movement from milk to solid food was part of a dynamic and constantly shifting argument about how a person might be ‘properly formed’” (24). In short, food affects the soul (25). This connection between food [End Page 115] and formation is reconfigured in notions of Roman “family values,” particularly those of marriage and child-rearing (36). The health of the empire was dependent upon the health of the family unit, making proper development a state concern (37). In this context, breast-feeding becomes a vehicle for forming both body and mind and transmitting identity, thereby securing the imperium (38). The second chapter of Raised on Christian Milk delineates how Jewish notions of food were inflected by distinctive scriptural concerns while maintaining paideia’s central notion of fashioning and transmitting cultural essence (52). Penniman’s discussion of 1 Corinthians here is deeply important to the remainder of his volume. Paul claims the Corinthians were not prepared for solid food; for Penniman, this is a statement about the lack of pneuma in the church at Corinth (71). This lack results in a concomitant lack of spiritual maturity, meaning that the Corinthians were not properly formed (71–2). Paul’s milk, then, is prescribed to disseminate pneuma and inculcate growth and unity within the community (72). It is a means of spiritual formation. In his third chapter, Penniman situates Pauline concepts of milk and solid food within second-century theological debates. Since these dual concepts could not be readily mapped onto Paul’s tripartite anthropology of spiritual/psychical/fleshly, competing interpretations proliferated (82). For example, both Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria maintain that milk was an identifying characteristic of a unified Christian community nourished by God (107). Even so, the two do not offer a cohesive solution to the problem of incongruent Pauline categories, resulting in increasingly diverse notions...

Apparently Other

In conversation with recent scholarship on Roman physiognomy, dress, and imperial prose fictions, this article traces the way in which ancient Christian martyr texts participate in broader Roman discourses of appearance and status in their construction of the Christian and the non-believing, apostate, or blaspheming other. After introducing the nexus between appearance, status, and identity in Roman society and culture more generally, this article considers the way in which these physiognomic and sartorial conventions function in two imperial prose fictions—Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses—before turning to a similar consideration of two Christian martyr texts, namely, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons. The article contends that the martyr texts, like the imperial fictions, construct the other, in part by appealing to long-standing Roman physiognomic and sartorial expectations. The non-believers, apostates, and blasphemers are visibly conspicuous for their non-elite deportment and slave-like physical features—features which, in a Roman context, mark their bodies as legitimate objects of violence. The Christians, in contrast, showcase a posture befitting the elite (those safeguarded from licit violence), not that of slaves or low-status damnati/noxii (those condemned to violent death in the Roman arena). In so doing, these martyr texts literarily reimagine Roman social strategies of violent humiliation as celebrations of honorable Christian identity, while they simultaneously deploy characteristically Roman discursive strategies to construct a humiliated, blaspheming other.

Carpento certe: Conveying Gender in Roman Transportation

This article analyzes the prominent role played by a particular vehicle, the matronly carriage (carpentum), in the construction of Roman gender. Its focus is on the conveyance’s two most significant appearances in literary representation. First, I examine the various accounts of the vehicle’s best-known and most dramatic tableau, Tullia’s use of a carpentum to drive over her dead father king Servius Tullius’ body, arguing that the conveyance functions to articulate the cultural anxiety surrounding the passage from daughter to wife. I suggest that the story of Tullia’s carpentum, as a quasi-mythic exemplum of “feminine transportation,” looms as a dangerous threat in need of accommodation. Next, I examine the story of the Roman matrons’ demonstration in favor of the repeal of the lex Oppia, which had prohibited, among other things, their right to ride in carpenta. I argue that the accounts of Livy and others seek to offer a solution to the challenge posed by the physically protesting women by redefining their vehicular mobility as state-authorized, and as directly tied to their reproductive function. Thus, while Latin literature often articulates urban traffic as a familiarly frustrating system of obstacles, my analysis uncovers a contrasting Roman discourse, one that identifies traffic with the fertility of the city and its ability to reproduce Roman citizens.

Art and Archaeology

In 1830 a hoard of Roman silver weighing some 25 kilograms was recovered from farmland near Berthouville, between Rouen and Caen. The silver was mostly worked into drinking vessels and associated items such as jugs, ladles, and bowls. Two statuettes of the god Mercury confirmed this as a votive deposit, as indicated by various dedications from Romano-Gallic pilgrims, notably on nine pieces left by Quintus Domitius Tutus (‘Mr Safe’) in the mid-first century ad. Restored by conservation experts at the Getty Museum, the cache – along with several other treasures from Gaul – has served as witness to ‘Roman luxury’ in an exhibition on tour in the USA. The exhibition's catalogue is a volume that earns its place in any classical library. The Berthouville Silver Treasure and Roman Luxury may not add very much to our understanding of luxuria in Roman discourse: it is left unclear what happens when a ‘luxury object’ is put out of circulation, or at least transferred into the enclosed economy of a sanctuary; and if Mercury was a deity of fortune favoured particularly by freed slaves, perhaps a set of silver spoons was not such an ‘elite’ attribute as supposed? Beyond such factors of value, however, the figurative elaboration on display is striking. At the centre of a libation bowl we find the Lydian queen Omphale in a drunken slumber, exposing her derrière – as if to say ‘Beware how you imbibe’. One wine pitcher shows Achilles leaping aboard his chariot, with the body of Hector trussed in tow; turn the jug round, and there is Achilles again, now himself stricken in battle. On another pitcher, Achilles is among Greeks mourning the death of Patroclus; and there is Hector's corpse in a pair of scales, as the price of his ransom is assessed. We would be impressed to find such ‘sophisticated’ iconography upon objects in use at some stately villa at Rome or around the Bay of Naples. What does its appearance in the moist pastures of Normandy signify – at least for our preconceptions of ‘provincial taste’?

Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12

When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit suicide (Epist. 1.19.23-5, 31). (1) The paired erotic invectives, Epodes 8 and 12, however, thematize the poet's sexual impotence and his disgust during encounters with a repulsive sexual partner. The tone of these Epodes is unmistakably that of harsh invective, and the virulent targeting of the mulieres' revolting bodies is precisely in line with Archilochean poetics that uses sexually-explicit, graphic obscenities as well as animal comparisons for the sake of a poetic attack. Epodes 8 and 12 may, in fact, offer Roman culture's most overtly misogynistic tone. (2) In spite of the vehemence in the speaker's verbal assaults, he is reacting to his own perceived sexual weakness. In fact, Horatian iambic continually notes the unmartial status and weakness of the speaker's body. He is programmatically imbellis acfirmas parum (Epod. 1.16) and his final appearance is that of enervated old man: he is jaundiced, breathless, feverish, and aged on account of Canidia's powers (Epod. 17.21-6, 31-4). (3) Accordingly, I posit here that bodily invective in Epodes 8 and 12 functions metapoetically. I call attention to the repetition of stylistic terms--mollitia, inertia, and rabies--within Epodes 8 and 12, and show how these two poems can be seen as part of Horace's ongoing project to distinguish his own emerging iambic project from the incipient genre of Roman love elegy. (4) To these two elegiac terms, mollitia and inertia, the Horatian iambic speaker adds the quintessentially iambic rabies, a term that the poet Horace himself will later call the emotion that first generated iambic poetry. My reading thus suggests that Horace was well aware not only of the tropes and topoi of Roman love elegy, (5) but also of its vocabulary of style that routinely associates the human bodies of its characters with the central stylistic qualities of the poetic genre. While critics have disputed the chronology, (6) most agree that Horace's Epodes were published soon after Actium, in approximately 31/30 BCE, and were followed by the publication of Propertius's Monobiblos and Tibullus's Book 1 in 28 and 27 BCE, respectively. (7) We thus have evidence in the intergeneric dialogue that I draw out of Epocies 8 and 12 for the existence of two-way influence between the poets of Roman iambic and elegiac erotic poetry, what Peter Heslin (2011, 60) has aptly called an extended process in which each poet defined himself against the other[s]. Furthermore, Horace's poems articulate iambic refusal to valorize these terms that generally characterized effeminacy or other failings of normative Roman masculinity in broader Roman discourses of gender and sexuality. Iambos, despite its transgressively obscene content, thus serves to uphold and reinforce the status quo in a period where elite Roman masculinity was challenged through social forces, upset by the political instability of the Triumviral period, and was witness to the emergence of alternative masculinities in the sartorial self-expression of Roman elites like Caesar and Maecenas and in the poetic aesthetics of Roman love elegy. (8) For many decades, Epodes 8 and 12 were considered so obscene that they were censored from publication and ignored by critics of Horadan iambic. (9) By the late 1980s, however, these Epodes began to be re-evaluated as integral part of Horace's first lyric collection. (10) William Fitzgerald's groundbreaking study (1988) argued for the interrelation between the political, invective, and erotic poems of the Epodes, and has laid the foundation for much later criticism focused on the sociopolitical context of the Epodes' production and on Roman sexuality. …

In the Land of the Giants: Greek and Roman Discourses on Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields

Even before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, some remarked on the area’s resemblance to the known dangers of Sicily’s Mount Etna. This awareness was expressed in observational accounts of Vesuvius’ geology and in mythical stories that linked Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields with battles by Jove or Hercules against the giants. This article explores the ways in which observational and mythical accounts of Vesuvius and the Phlegraean fields can inform each other.

In the Land of the Giants: Greek and Roman Discourses on Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields

Abstract Even before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, some remarked on the area’s resemblance to the known dangers of Sicily’s Mount Etna. This awareness was expressed in observational accounts of Vesuvius’ geology and in mythical stories that linked Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields with battles by Jove or Hercules against the giants. This article explores the ways in which observational and mythical accounts of Vesuvius and the Phlegraean fields can inform each other.

Antigua disciplina: el ejemplo romano en los tratados militares ibéricos, c. 1560-1600

The military history and the imperial image of Rome offered an essential framework for conceiving the strategic role of the army in the early modern Portuguese and Spanish monarchies. “Disciplina” (discipline) was a key element of the military thought of the epoch. The term referred not only to the growing professionalization and standardization of military practices (such as drill itself), but also to the development of a specific field of knowledge regarding war. This article analyses the works of several Portuguese and Spanish military authors of the period and the importance of Rome in their reflections and proposals. The article's objective is twofold: to identify and analyse a particular kind of Roman discourse and to contextualize the literary genre of martial arts as a cultural phenomenon whose significance goes considerably beyond the limits of military history.

Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference by Andrew S. Jacobs (review)

Reviewed by: Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference by Andrew S. Jacobs Joshua Ezra Burns Andrew S. Jacobs Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012 Pp. 320. $75.00. In this study Jacobs mines the early Christian literary tradition for reflections on the circumcision of Jesus. Noted in passing in Luke 2.21, this foremost sign of Jesus’ Judaism naturally concerned interpreters trained on Paul’s famous refutation of its necessity. Their efforts to reconcile those facts yielded a variegated discourse of cultural difference highlighting Jesus’ otherness amidst his Jewish surroundings, and, by extension, the Christians’ evolving sense of otherness in Roman society. If Jesus was to overcome his Judaism and his materiality, his submission to circumcision would seem to signify his mastery of those qualities en route to his transcendence. That argument, Jacobs shows, resonated with Christian thinkers aiming to manage the internal and external differences which defined the Church as it took on the features of the hegemonic “impossible orthodoxy” (91) of the post-Nicene age. The book presents a series of case studies variously plotted by context and form. An introduction establishes Jacobs’s theoretical framework against the backdrop of a fluid Roman discourse on cultural imperialism. Chapter one proceeds with an account on the social stigma of Jewish circumcision in the Roman world, a fact likely informing the attitudes toward that rite expressed by Paul, Luke, and other apostolic authors. Chapter two addresses efforts by Justin and Origen, among others, to factor Jesus’ circumcision into an orthodox theological argument at once internalizing and negating Christianity’s Jewish roots. In their accounts, Jesus’ submission to the archaic Jewish rite was an early mark of his self-sacrifice, a motif revisited by later patristic authors and revisited throughout Jacobs’s study. Chapter three addresses a concurrent exegetical development citing Jesus’ circumcision as a defense against alleged Christian heretics seeking to de-Judaize Christianity, a strategy used by Tertullian against the Marcionites and by Augustine against the Manicheans, as well as by Jerome against Jovinian against the [End Page 641] latter’s effort to dematerialize Christ. Chapter four examines the use of a corresponding heresiological argument by Epiphanius. Revisiting the territory of his previous book Remains of the Jews, Jacobs here focuses on the Ebionites, whom Epiphanius alleges to have cited Jesus’ circumcision in order to justify their own adherence to the Jewish law. In casting the Ebionites as Christian heretics, he argues, Epiphanius at once laid claim to their Judaism and dispossessed it, exemplifying the paradoxical nature of his orthodoxy and its contrarian logic of Jesus’ Jewishness. Chapter five offers further, sporadic exegetical insights gleaned from commentaries on Luke by Origen, Ephrem, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, Proclus of Constantinople, and Philoxenus. Finally, chapter six deals with ritual invention of the Feast of the Circumcision. Though conveniently coinciding with the first day of the Julian calendar year and the established feast of Basil of Caesarea, the supposed date of Jesus’ submission to the Jewish law is the subject of two pseudonymous Byzantine-era homilies conflating the Savior’s circumcision of the flesh with Paul’s circumcision of the heart. The public celebration of Christianity’s management of its Jewish past, Jacobs therefore argues, served to extend its triumphalist rhetoric into a Roman cultural sphere now likewise subject to the totalizing discourse of the church. As Jacobs acknowledges, the varied exegetical evidences he surveys exhibit no univocal or linear development in thought by which one might measure the cumulative effect of those evidences on early Christian culture (14). In his conclusion, however, Jacobs offers a metanarrative describing the efforts of early Christians to “pass” as typical Romans by forgoing the physical mark of circumcision, which kept Jews from achieving that effect. In accomplishing this effect, their theologians invented a Christian Jesus who merely pretended to be Jewish for the sake of advancing his salvific mission. But with the rise of Docetism, the pretense became more nuanced. Now Jesus had also to pass for a human being, occupying a gendered male body in order to fulfill the Jewish law and, later, to perform his ultimate act of...

L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine by Sandra Boehringer (review)

Reviewed by: L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine by Sandra Boehringer Kirk Ormand Sandra Boehringer. L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007. 405 pp. Paper, €35.00. Until recently, I held several informed assumptions about sexuality in the ancient world: (a) that without exception the ancient Greeks and Romans did not define categories of sexual activity by the sex of the object of desire (as in the modern categories of hetero- and homosexual); (b) that female homoerotic activity occupied roughly the same space of social value in ancient Greece as in ancient Rome; (c) that in so far as it could be discerned, female homoerotic activity was depicted in Greece and Rome according to the male pederastic model; (d) that no significant discourse existed about a form of female homoeroticism that was outside of the asymmetric norm defined by such a model; (e) that in keeping with the male pederastic model, women who were sexually attracted to other women were figured as gender deviants, and particularly as being masculine; and (f) that such women were regularly figured as having monstrously large clitorises which were thought—fantastically—to mimic an erect phallus. Thanks to Sandra Boehringer’s incisive study, I now believe every one of these assumptions to be wrong. Boehringer does three things remarkably well in this book. She argues for the presence of an ancient Greek and Roman discourse about female-female sexual behavior. She demonstrates convincingly that there was an understanding of such behavior that was entirely outside of discussions of hermaphroditism and/or women with unusual masculine traits. And finally, she traces shifts and developments in attitudes toward this idea of female homoeroticism with acute attention to the historical contexts of her literary, visual, and scientific sources. Unlike some other critics who have wanted to see a notion of modern “lesbianism” in the ancient world, moreover, Boehringer develops her arguments within a careful Foucauldian framework. As she says late in the book, “une catégorie n’a de valeur que dans un système, et le système de valeurs des Anciens n’est pas le nôtre” (362). Unlike that of Hallett and Brooten, then, Boehringer’s female homoeroticism is not a transhistorical essence that has been curiously interpreted by the Greeks and Romans. Rather, Boehringer sees a separate category of sexual behavior about which the Greeks and Romans wrote, often obliquely, sometimes disparagingly but, surprisingly, only very rarely with a suggestion that such behavior presented a problem. After laying out her theoretical approach, Boehringer proceeds chronologically, beginning with Greek lyric poetry, including sections on early Greek myth, Attic pottery, Greek comedy, Greek philosophy (esp. Plato and Aristotle), Hellenistic poetry, Augustan poetry (esp. Ovid), Roman satire and invective (Petronius, Martial, Juvenal), a brief section on scientific and astrological writings, and ending with an epilogue on late imperial Greek literature (Lucian). I will focus here on some of the readings that provide the most important challenges to current scholarship on ancient sexual practice. Boehringer’s reading of Sappho, which draws on the work of Winkler and [End Page 163] Stehle, is important for later developments in the book. She is careful to distinguish the “I” of the poem (sometimes, as in poem 1, the multiple Sapphos within the narrative frame) from the figure of Sappho the author (54). She then goes on to demonstrate that, contrary to the arguments of scholars in the middle of the last century, the language that the narrator uses to describe her love affairs is the (usually euphemistic) language of physical pleasure typical of archaic Greek lyric (56–58). But what is particularly important about Sappho’s expressions of desire is that, “cet érôs n’est jamais décrit comme une différence stigmatisée par le monde extérieur et condamnée par la société.” Even more to the point, in a complex poem like 31 (φαίνεταί μοι), the speaker draws no distinction between the feeling of desire expressed by the speaker and the desire suggested to be felt by the young man in the poem who sits opposite the beloved. In fact, as Boehringer makes abundantly clear, no...

Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity Alexandra Pappas Michael Squire . Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xxvi, 515. $120.00. ISBN 978-0-521-75601-3. Squire's ambitious book on the complex relationship between the verbal and the visual both opens and concludes with instructive readings of modern advertising campaigns and their exploitation of the rich communicative capabilities of mixed media; while the advertising industry seems to understand clearly the symbiosis between words and images, most classical scholarship has mistreated this fundamental link, he argues. The counterintuitive frame of the contemporary is appropriate, for this is a provocative book that is currently relevant and sure to excite fruitful debate and future research—for classical philologists, classical art historians, art historians at large, and the interdisciplinary range of scholars engaged in word and image studies. With sweeping reviews of the theological and aesthetic histories of images and texts grounded by expertly developed case studies, Squire sets forth strategies for approaching the interrelationship of the seeable and the sayable in general, [End Page 513] and offers critical insights into Graeco-Roman examples in particular, some familiar, and some essentially untreated before now. The book is divided into three main parts. It begins by teasing out the origins of the word-image divide that has led many scholars to ask the wrong kinds of questions, in particular of antiquity (part I, 15-193). Squire's premise is deceptively simple and methodologically profound: the sixteenth-century Reformation privileged the verbal over the visual and asserted the necessity of reducing the visual into purely verbal terms as a means of knowing the divine. Ever since this theologically informed separation of form from content, Squire elaborates, scholars of images and texts—from the German aesthetic theorists Hegel and Kant to the historians of art Winckelmann and Lessing—have operated from this fundamental Lutheran premise of division, often unwittingly. This new critical approach gets us away from ill-formed treatments of images as simply "illustrating" texts (122-39), or of ecphrastic texts as purely verbal, literary phenomena (139-46), as recent scholarship has tended to do. Squire moves us toward readings that are sensitive to the interconnection and interdependence between visual and verbal cultures, that resist privileging one medium over the other and assuming a bipartite separation between them in the first place (189-90). Part 2 divides into two chapters that focus on inscribed texts in the same physical space as images, the full verbal-visual contexts of which have been largely neglected until now—a carved epigram amidst the sculptural groups in Tiberius' grotto at Sperlonga (202-38) and the epigrams alongside the paintings in the so-called "House of Propertius" at Assisi (239-93). Squire demonstrates, for example, how the audience viewing the paintings in the "House of Propertius" as a collection in turn would have read the appended epigrams as an assemblage as well—a process that pulled the reader-viewer in multiple programmatic directions and thus opened up potential responses rather than shut them down (291). The two chapters of part 3 shift slightly to examine how texts and images in Graeco-Roman antiquity that did not literally share the same space nonetheless still worked "through and against each other in related ways" (11). Here, Squire proves the point by analyzing as "iconotexts" various ecphrases of Philostratus' Imagines alongside Campanian wall paintings, first of Polyphemus (300-56), and next of food and other subjects categorized in antiquity as xenia and currently as "still life" paintings (357-428): readers of Philostratus' ecphrases of Polyphemus paintings would have brought their visual repertoire of actual paintings of Polyphemus to the experience, resulting in a multilayered reader-viewer response to Philostratus' tableaux as well as Polyphemus' own fraught history of viewing (352). Thus, xenia paintings, anything but "still," actively engaged Roman discourses about reality and representation, nature and art that invited careful navigations of what was real and what was not (e.g., 372). Squire's thesis about the multidirectional exchanges between images and texts persuades this reader. Some readers will want more than the relatively brief discussion of scholarship on word and image that...

Book Review: The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict

Book Review: The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict

Passover Plots

Various modern fictions, building upon the skeptical premises of biblical scholars, have claimed that the gospels covered up the real story about Jesus. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is one recent, popular example. While conspiracy theories may seem peculiar to modern media, the gospels have their own versions of hidden secrets. For Mark, e.g., Roman discourse about crucifixion obscures two secret plots in Jesus’ passion, which the gospel reveals: the religious leaders’ conspiracy to dispatch Jesus and the hidden divine program to sacrifice Jesus. Mark unveils these secret plots by minimizing the passion’s material details (the details of suffering would glorify Rome), substituting the Jewish leaders for the Romans as the important human actors, interpreting the whole as predicted by scripture and by Jesus, and bathing the whole in an irony that claims that the true reality is other than it seems. The resulting divine providence/conspiracy narrative dooms Jesus—and everyone else—before the story effectively begins. None of this would matter if secret plots and infinite books did not remain to make pawns or “phantoms of us all” (Borges). Thus, in Borges’ “The Gospel According to Mark,” an illiterate rancher family after hearing the gospel for the first time, read to them by a young medical student, crucifies the young man. Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is less biblical but equally enthralled by conspiracies that consume their obsessive believers. Borges and Eco differ from Mark, from some scholarship, and from recent popular fiction, in their insistence that such conspiracy tales are not “true” or “divine,” but rather humans’ own self-destructive fictions. Therein lies a different kind of hope than Mark’s, a very human, if very fragile, hope.

The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict. By GEORGE HEYMAN.

The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict. By GEORGE HEYMAN.