Psychoanalysis and the antinomies of an archaeologist: Andrea Carandini, the ruins of Rome, and the writing of history

Freud’s fascination with the ruins of ancient Rome was an element in the formation and development of psychology. This article concerns the intersection of psychoanalysis with archaeology and history in the study of that city. Its substantive content is an analysis of the life and career of Andrea Carandini, the best-known Roman archaeologist of the past 40 years. He has said and written much about his changing views of himself and about what he is trying to do in his approach to the recuperation of the Roman past. His scholarly publications and autobiographical testimonies are at the core of this article. After an early commitment to Marxism that ended in disenchantment and a crisis in his personal life, Carandini spent a decade undergoing psychoanalysis with the Chilean-born expatriate Ignacio Matte-Blanco. The latter gained a following as a theorist who built upon Freud’s ideas about the unconscious by producing a set of mathematically inspired concepts concerning the workings of temporality in human history in which emotional intuition took priority over the rational(izing) logic of empiricism. Much influenced by his psychoanalyst, Carandini developed a highly personal approach to the writing of archaeology and history. These writings are explored here in terms of Roman historiography, and in the wider arena of formulations of how the past is to be addressed and written about.

Catiline in the Underworld and Afterwards

This chapter reviews the reception of Cicero’s Catilinarians over the two millennia from Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae until the present day. Particular attention is paid to Virgil’s Aeneid, to Ben Jonson’s Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), and to Ibsen’s Catiline (1850). The chapter also surveys the influence of the Catilinarians on Roman poetry after Virgil, on Roman historiography after Sallust, and on Christian writers. The late antique, medieval, and renaissance declamations that draw on the Catilinarians (including two speeches each known as the Fifth Catilinarian) are discussed, as is the influence of Catiline on Florentine historiography. Plays and operas about Catiline by Voltaire, Salieri, Dumas, and others are included. Mention is made of the study of the Catilinarians undertaken by two American presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. The chapter ends by showing how in the twentieth century these speeches first started the young Bill Clinton on his path toward the White House.

Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe

The Emperor’s Babe goes back in time to consider the experiences of Africans living in Britain during the Roman occupation. Working within an Afrocentric feminist framework, Bernardine Evaristo “turn[s] history on its head” and presents an alternative version of Roman history informed by Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the scholarship of intellectuals like Peter Fryer, Ivan Van Sertima, and George M. James, scholars who share ideological views antithetical to the Western hegemonic intellectual tradition of ancient Greco-Roman historiography. Evaristo challenges the prevailing notion that Britain became multicultural in the twentieth century, and more significantly, acknowledges the presence and significant historical contributions of Africans in ancient Britain.