The Aeneid as ‘Weaker Text’ and Fulgentius’ Radical Hermeneutics

The shadow of Vergil and the tensions of competing interpretations constitute the main concern of this chapter. It first demonstrates that allegorical interpretation, although an established practice in both pagan-classical and Jewish-Christian culture, initially features only as a valued and legitimate interpretative practice when used by each side for their own literature, but is used to discredit the other side in arguments that seek to establish the aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual superiority of one side over the other—subsuming both their texts and their hermeneutics. It then goes on to show that Fulgentius’ Continentia Vergiliana marks the turning point at which a first Christian allegorical reading of a pagan text is executed in the form of a fraught, fictive dialogue between ‘Vergil’ and ‘Fulgentius’, bridging the gap of mutual recriminations of inferiority.

From Adultery to Incest

This chapter continues the investigation of rhetorical maneuvers clustering around social and amorous hierarchies in the fraught sphere of sexual agency by studying the trope of the sexually aggressive older female preying on a younger man in Tacitus’ Annals. On the basis of a detailed examination of the portrayal of Messalina and Agrippina, it argues that it is precisely the recognizable rhetoricity and artificiality in the deployment of this trope, here dramatized through rich intertextual echoes and connections (notably Vergil’s Aeneid and Euripides’ Bacchae), which narratively undercuts any unambiguous condemnation of female superiority over male inferiority, disrupts any simple re-assertion of traditional Roman gender hierarchies, and opens up the text to alternative interpretations beyond the reach of the narrator’s authority.

On Not Being Beautiful

‘x is more beautiful than y’ sounds a standard thing to say in Greek and Latin literature; but it raises intricate and interesting issues, not least from the standpoint of y. This chapter draws on symbolic logic to compare the relation between assessing superiority or inferiority in beauty and making choices in love in both Greek and Latin literature. The various dynamics, logics, and rhetorics of desire in the light of inferiority and superiority are subjected to close scrutiny, paving the way for a discussion that addresses not only the complex scenarios that unfold here (paying special attention to the various ways in which the amorous hierarchy is set in relation to other hierarchies) but also the intriguing fact that such questions of relative inferiority and superiority in erotic matters seem to pervade Greek literature more extensively and differently than Latin.

The Creative Superiority of Self-Reproach

This chapter’s new reading of Horace’s AP teases out how this text negotiates a delicate tension and balance between Horace’s own inferior social status and superior status as older expert, and the superior social status and inferior age/expertise of the young Pisones for whom he writes. It traces how the text renders productive the challenges that result from these asymmetries by modelling and performing a mode of critical thinking centred on self-critique and self-reflection. Taking into account the dimension of class difference enables a new understanding of the AP’s emphasis on coherence and its obsession with tragedy, by pointing to the challenges contained and represented in the political microcosm of the theatre where—just as in Horace’s pedagogical encounter with the Pisones—shifting power relations among an unwieldy mix of members from different classes, all jointly engaged in the performance of art and art criticism, need to be carefully negotiated.

Drawing Blanks

This chapter examines two exponents of satiric literature written under the politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, Phaedrus and Juvenal. It is unclear who (or what) both were; their names, shorthands for de-authored texts rather than stand-ins for historical individuals. The literal self-effacement at work here creates a paradoxical authority: the words on the page, loosened from a definite first-person speaker identity, slip and slide easily from person to person, yet the concealment wreaks havoc with the readerly desire to know the source behind the words, generating an energetic ‘erotics’ of the weaker voice. This chapter analyses their shared yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure, arguing that both not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity—name, body, and autobiography—ineffective, but that, in doing so, they also foreground and relish the particular potential of literature as the written word in its supposed inferiority to author-bound speech.

Social Inferiority and Poetic Inferiority—Martial’s Revenge in his Epigrams

In Epigrams 5.13, Martial addresses his self-portrait to a certain Callistratus, a freed slave of Greek origin who shamelessly flaunts his wealth. The initial stark contrast with the poet’s poverty in economic terms, however, is gradually overcome through a demonstration of the superiority of poetic fame over material possessions. This chapter charts how this poem negotiates a string of interrelated questions regarding social status, ethnic background, and centre versus periphery dynamics, and traces how Martial marshals his popular success with Rome’s urban readership to confront his own disadvantaged position within socio-economic, ethnic, and generic hierarchies so as to fashion a positive poetic identity for himself. Martial’s riposte to Callistratus, involving all of these inferiorities, takes its full significance in the defence of the epigram, a genre traditionally considered as a ‘weaker voice’ in and of itself.

Blackface and Drag in the Palliata

This chapter continues the preceding chapter’s mobilization of post-colonial perspectives and interrogation of traditional accounts of beginnings of Latin literature relative to Greece by studying the ‘double-drag’ of slave-women characters wearing blackface masks in Plautine comedy. It begins from the premise that some palliata texts, often taken to be foundational in Roman self-fashioning vis-à-vis Greece, are not strictly Roman at all, but that they do deliberately adopt an inferior position—indeed, multiple inferior positions: at the time the palliata was developed and performed, it belonged to acting troupes of lower-class and slave men, none Roman by birth, who traveled around central Italy, making the palliata out of bits and pieces of comedy in current circulation. Focusing in particular on Plautus’ Poenulus, this chapter offers reflections on the identity politics of the palliata as assertions of a barbarian identity, spoken by and to displaced and deracinated people.

How Do You Solve a Problem like Horace?

Taking its cue from Horace’s paradoxical dictum that ‘Greece took captive its brutish conqueror and brought its arts to rustic Latium’ (Ep. 2.1.156–7), this chapter explores parallels between the history of Latin literature and theoretical models elaborated by scholars of post-colonial literature. Continuing the first chapter’s broader methodological considerations, it models a post-colonially inflected reading strategy to analyze more lucidly the inter- and intracultural dynamics and politics of Latin texts shaped by (and, in turn, shaping and sustaining) the fraught Greco-Roman cultural relationship: how, where, and to whose (dis-)advantage does Greece work—and is made to work—as a silent referent in Roman literary and literary-critical knowledge? Horace’s Letter to Augustus serves to illustrate the insights this approach can generate in the study of individual Latin texts, of Roman philhellenism as a cultural paradigm, and in current debates on the status of European literature within post-colonial frameworks of world literature.

Claiming Inferiority

This chapter pinpoints engagements with alleged weakness as a central pre-occupation of Latin studies over the last thirty years and ponders the limitations of its conventional treatment and understanding by discussing a series of examples from Latin literature against the wider context of modern thought. Addressing central dimensions of the poetics of the weaker voice studied in detail in subsequent chapters—notably: authorial self-fashioning, hierarchies of genres, value judgements tied to literary history—it argues that, while there are many ways to stage a complex of inferiorities in any text, the central strategy in most, if not all, of them relies upon an upheaval of expectations: literary inferiority often, almost paradoxically, leads to an authorial voice of superiority as the ‘discourse of the low’ turns the tables on the ‘high’, and these texts marshal their own inferiority against the reader/audience, urging them to reconsider their judgement of superiority and inferiority.

Hidden Voices

Another often-muted voice, here in the terrain of sexual attraction, is the topic of this chapter, which sets out to bring out the hidden voices of homoerotic in desire in Horace’s Odes. Expressions of male-male desire in these poems have traditionally been played down by their interpreters, often treated as ‘merely’ a Hellenistic literary topos or a vehicle for the poet-speaker’s nostalgia. Taking its cue from re-assessments of homoerotic material in Latin literature in more recent scholarship, the discussion zooms in on a range of passages in the Odes where the poet-narrator implicitly or explicitly alludes to homoerotic desires, arguing that closer attention to focalization and perspective show that they convey conformations of desire far less unambiguously ‘heterosexual’ than is often assumed.