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.
For Tom
Acknowledgements
2. Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature 29
A. “But now I know that you really are going to Rome” 29
B. Welcome to the show: Epigrams 1 40
i. Run, rabbit, run 40
ii. Power and play in the hare and now 50
iii. Stage-managing the passions 60
iv. It’s not just about rabbits, you see 65
C. To whom it may concern: Epigrams 2+ 66
D. Trust and truth: a confidence game in Book 5 68
E. Bigger, better and badder: Book 6 76
F. High and mighty; near and far: Book 7 84
G. Turning things outside-in: Book 8 92
H. A poet’s will to power: Epigrams 9.pr 100
I. Agony, ecstasy, and emperor: Epigrams 9.1–4 107
J. Managing to both hit and miss the mark: anxiety and Epigrams 9.5 115
K. Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not 119
i. Unspeakably something: the Earinus cycle begins (Epigrams 9.11–13) 119
ii. Everybody loves the Ausonian Father. But why? (Epigrams 9.7) 129
iii. The kindest cut: Epigrams 9.16–17 133
iv. The poetry of (ir)reverence: Epigrams 9.36 and its environs 139
v. The poetry of reverence: Epigrams 9.79 and its affines 148
L. Oops: Book 10 150
i. Forgetting how to count in Epigrams 10.1–2 150
ii. Dichtung und Wahrheit: further autobiographical fictions (Epigrams 10.3–5) 157
iii. The (new) new start ends: Trajan (Epigrams 10.6) 163
iv. I am not going to say, “Master and God”: Epigrams 10.72 164
M. The new beginning as the end: Books 11 and 12 168
i. Approaching the palace, or not (Epigrams 11.1) 168
ii. Epigram is the poetry of private life and festal time (Epigrams 11.2–3) 172
iii. Ner va dials back the principate (Epigrams 11.4–5) 176
iv. Martial’s (confused) preface to his (wretched) postscript: Book 12.pr and 12.1–5 178
v. Now one is free to enjoy all of Helicon, or not (Epigrams 12.6 and 12.8) 183
3. Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity
A. An introduction to Statius’ Domitianic literature
B. Says this poetry, “This is how you are supposed to read this poetry”
C. All that glitters makes for a golden verse
D. The high and the low in the here and now
E. The ecstatic present (and the mundanity of the traditional sublime)
F. An introduction to Domitianic grammar and syntax: the psychic life of subjection
i. Mar veling 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 239
vii. True confessions of undeniable attachment to the present 242
G. Select nouns from the Domitianic lexicon 245
i. Freedom (but not that kind of freedom) 246
ii. Faith (for those naive enough to believe)
iii. Masters (so many, so marvelous) 259
H. Domitianic time all the time 267
I. Mastering the submission game: six case studies
i. Parroting and the mastery of affect (Siluae 2.4) 271
ii. The lion that was tamed (Siluae 2.5) 277
iii. As free as a freedman (Siluae 3.3) 283
iv. Dead boy: poor master, says the poet (Siluae 2.6) 301
v. Dead boy: poor master-dad, said the master-poet (Siluae 2.1) 313
vi. Castrated boy: lucky master, says the poet (Siluae 3.4) 323
4. Conclusion
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
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 ([
).” 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 (
; 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.”
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.”
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 powerand-pleasure from a “juridico-discursive” perspective.
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.”
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.
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 mastertexts. 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.
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]
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-tohate 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)
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.”
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 rollercoaster 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.”
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.”
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?
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.”
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.”
