1. The Gift Economy of Patronage
POETRY AND THE MARKETPLACE
Horace's Epistle to Augustus, 2.1, a survey of Roman literary history set within the frame of a recusatio, or “refusal poem,” ends with a striking conceit.
[1] Written in response to Augustus's request for a sermo addressed to him, Epistles 2.1 has naturally been viewed as somewhat strained in its flattery of the princeps: e.g., see Griffin 1984, 204; Brink 1982, 495, 561, 563. By contrast, Fraenkel (1957, 383) views Horace as “perfectly at ease,” while Kilpatrick (1990, 14) and G. Williams (1968, 71–77) remark the poet's tact and fair-mindedness. For discussion of Horace's evocation of the tension between verbal (written) and visual (performed) communication in Epistles 2.1, see Habinek 1998, 98–102. See Rudd 1989, 1–12, for an overview of the circumstances of the poem's composition.
After the conventional demurral that he is inadequate to the task of encomium but others are present to perform the duty, the speaker displaces the princeps and imaginatively identifies with the hazards faced by a ruler wishing for the precious boon of immortality.[2] Horace's assumption of Augustus's role as subject of encomium here is an ironic version of what Zetzel (1982, 96) calls the “paradigm of the displaced patron.”
In characteristic Horatian fashion, the speaker drives his point home through the rhetorical ploy of negation: he himself would blush with shame to be the recipient of disfiguring panegyric, fearing to be borne out into the street-the funereal echoes are unmistakable—as crumbling papyrus that has become the temporary wrapping of such goods as incense, spices, pepper, or the short-lived perishables of the vegetable market. By evoking a worst-case scenario in which the speaker, as subject of poor encomium, is destined to perish with his poet, Horace effectively demonstrates the importance of securing the talents of good writers:
sed neque parvum carmen maiestas recipit tua nee meus audet rem temptare pudor quam vires ferre recusent. 60 sedulitas autem, stulte quern diligit, urget, praecipue cum se numeris commendat et arte; discit enim citius meminitque libentius illud quod quis deridet quam quod probat et veneratur. nil moror officium quod me gravat, ac neque ficto 65 in peius vultu proponi cereus usquam nec prave factis decorari versibus opto, ne rubeam pingui donatus munere et una cum scriptore meo, capsa porrectus operta deferar in vicum vendentem tus et odores 70 et piper et quidquid chartis amicitur ineptis. But neither is your majesty suited to song of the small style nor does my modesty venture to try subjects that my strength refuses to bear. Zeal, moreover, foolishly annoys those whom it cherishes, especially when it recommends itself with measure and art; for one learns more quickly and remembers more easily that which one derides, than what one approves and respects. I have no patience for the service that burdens me, and I desire neither to be laid out anywhere in wax, with distorted features, nor to be celebrated in ill-formed poems, lest I blush presented with the boorish gift, and together with my poet, stretched out in a covered box, am borne into the street where they sell incense, perfume, pepper, and whatever else is wrapped in wastepaper. (2.1.257–70)
On the surface, the displacement of the emperor here serves as an ironic means of rhetorically justifying the refusals, and authenticating or “owning” the conventional inadequacies, expressed by the recusatio: if Horace were Augustus, he would be chary of the misshapen distortions of bad poetry; the same “modesty” or “sense of shame” (pudor) that prevents the poet from attempting the high style causes him to blush should he himself be presented with a “boorish gift” (pingui … munere). The obvious irony lies in the artistry with which Horace leaves us with a striking image by which we remember him, suffusing his visage with the red flush of life, even as he is borne out in a casket of commodities to be sold on the street.
But beneath the rhetorical manipulation of the addressee, the persuasive claim of “I can imagine your situation in a way that justifies mine” has an even more significant implication concerning poetic value and the tropes by which it is expressed. The phrase pingui donatus munere not only alludes to the Callimachean aesthetic by casting celebratory poetry—presumably epic—in the metaphorical terms of “fat sacrifice”; it also looks back to an earlier passage in the epistle, where the word munus refers not to verse but
[3] In its connotation of “fat sacrificial offering,” pinguemunus alludes specifically to Apollo's warning at the beginning of Callim. Aet. 1.23: “poet, feed the sacrificial victim to be as fat as possible, but keep the Muse slender.”
After referring to the poor encomium that Choerilus produced for Alexander in exchange for actual money, the speaker assures Augustus that “Vergil and Varius, poets cherished by you, dishonor neither your judgment about them nor your gifts that, to the great glory of the giver, they have borne away” (At neque dedecarant tua de se indicia atque / munera, quae multa dantis cum laude tulerunt/dilecti tibi Vergilius Variusque poetae, 245–47). These poets do not “dishonor” their patron insofar as their poems do not—the subtext implies—“disfigure” (dedecarant) him. All these references to poetic production and value suggest a spectrum of economic systems by which poetry is both produced and rhetorically figured. On one end of the spectrum is a form of “market economics,” where goods have an exact exchange value, and on the other is a gift economy, where the decorous gift of poetry presumably grows in value even as it ensures immortality.[4] Cf. the organic metaphor for the afterlife of verse in Odes 3.30.7–8, usque ego postera / crescam laude recens. As another poem in which Horace displaces Augustus and calls himself princeps, 3.30 presents the inverse of Epistles 2.1, where the poet imagines extinction.
Taking the Epistle to Augustus as a point of departure and frame for my discussion, this chapter lays out the principles of a gift economy that I perceive as relevant to the cultural practice of benefaction in ancient Rome. Ultimately, my aim in subsequent chapters is not to read Horace's poems as exemplifying a blueprint for the social principles underlying the ancient economy; rather, I wish to use anthropological theory in conjunction with the moral philosophy of Cicero and Seneca to shed light on what I see as an interrelated symbolic system in which Horace poetically figured some of the exchanges comprising his experience of patronage. The Epistle to Augustus is a good place to begin because it explicitly discusses the various goods, both material and abstract, that were exchanged in a relationship of literary patronage. As I suggest, the speaker takes pains to distinguish between poetry produced in direct exchange for cash and poetry that reciprocates more vaguely defined “gifts” (munera). In the latter case, as Vergil and Varius witness, Augustus's munera yield in return not only decorous poetry but also the laus or public glory of the giver's generosity: Indeed, the glory of reputation depends, to a degree, on its celebration in verse. Such celebration, whether implicit or explicit in poetry, constitutes a “good” in an exchange relationship; but it becomes problematic in a “market” situation where money directly purchases verse:
[5] Though a manuscript of the eighth-ninth century claims that Varius received 1,000,000 sesterces for his tragedy Thyestes, this was in the context of theatrical production to accompany public games. See Jocelyn 1980, 387–400, for a discussion of the evidence. As P. White (1993, 147) points out, “drama had an institutional function which set it apart from other kinds of poetry.” Brink (1982, 252) pointedly remarks on line 246 that the munera are “unlike the Philippi” of 234, 238.
generosity, in particular, has no place in a financial contract.The story of Choerilus as a paid hack in the service of Alexander provides the negative exemplum in this regard. As the scholiasts point out, Horace has somewhat altered the traditional story: according to Porphyry, Alexander claimed that he would rather have been Homer's Thersites than Choerilus's Achilles; and according to Pseudo—Aero, the king had arranged to give a gold coin for every good line and a blow for every bad one, with the result that Choerilus was flogged to death (see Rudd 1989, 114). But in Horace's version, Alexander, entirely devoid of literary judgment, is pleased with Choerilus's verses and pays him handsomely. By thus altering the received narrative details, Horace wishes not only to praise Augustus's discernment in regard to Vergil and Varius but also to make a statement about the negative effects of commodifying poetry. As Choerilus's ill-fashioned and misbegotten poems reveal, such verse more easily turns unseemly and distorts the image of a ruler:
gratus Alexandra, regi magno, fuit ille Choerilus, incultis qui versibus et male natis rettulit acceptos, regale nomisma, Philippos. sed veluti tractata notam labemque remittunt atramenta, fere scriptores carmine foedo splendida facta linunt. He was pleasing to the great king Alexander, that Choerilus who carried away royal coin, philippi, which he received for badly formed and ill-conceived verse; but just as black ink, when handled, leaves a mark and blot, so generally writers blemish bright deeds by their unseemly poems. (2.1.232–37)
[6] In these lines about a poet's disfiguring his subject, there may be a trace of the story that Alexander would rather be Homer's Thersites than Choerilus's distorted Achilles.
No doubt Choerilus produced bad poetry because he lacked talent, but Horace also implies that the openly venal exchange of verse for money is more likely to yield such flawed results than is the gift economy in which poets such as Varius and Vergil participate. The claim that were one “to summon [Alexander's] judgment to assess books and these gifts of the Muses” (indicium … / ad libros et ad haec Musarum dona vocares, 242–43), one “would swear it was born in the thick and heavy climate of the Boeotians” (Boeotum in crasso iurares aerenatum, 244) further supports this subtext that literary patronage should operate as a gift economy in order to be effective. “Gifts of the Muses” denotes the poetry contained in libros, but
We see a similar wish on the speaker's part to dissociate the “good” poet from a venal relationship in lines 118–20: fashioning verses may constitute “deviant behavior” (error), but this form of mild lunacy (levis haec insania) has its merits (virtutes). For the mind of the authentic poet—whom the language of madness validates—is scarcely greedy (vatis avarus / non temere est animus, 119–20); and when self-serving thoughts do motivate him, he runs the risk of finding himself in Choerilus's situation. The speaker implies as much when he humorously recounts the various ways in which poets damage their reputation, ending with hopes for early discovery and immediate imperial patronage. In this fantasy, as soon as Augustus hears of poets composing verse, “you obligingly send for us, forbid our poverty, and compel us to write” (commodus ultra / arcessas et egere vetes et scribere cogas, 227–28). These lines, in turn, prompt the reflection that it is worth a ruler's effort to be informed of the literary talents of those who would write encomia or, more metaphorically, about “those whom Merit, proved in both peace and war, would have as keepers of her temple” (qualis / aedituos habeat belli spectata domique / Virtus), for she is not “to be entrusted to an unworthy poet” (indigno non committenda poetae, 229–31). Alexander's poor judgment regarding Choerilus is then adduced as a case in point. What we may notice
Thus, in contrast to the material perishables of the street market, destined to disappear in the act of consumption, good poetry lives on, acquiring an organic life of its own. But in addition to securing cultural immortality, poems produced in an effective gift economy also create powerful ideology. Indeed, here we encounter perhaps the strongest case for eliciting poetry through gifts and benefactions rather than an immediate cash compensation. As I discuss in more detail below, the concept of the gift is associated ideally with voluntarism and spontaneity. The true gift, insofar as it does not look for a return, should stir an equally spontaneous, voluntary, and unconstrained gratitude. In the context of Augustan Rome, where poetry supportive of the contemporary regime could provide a valuable form of persuasion as it communicated the desirability of political arrangements, a seemingly spontaneous—that is, voluntary—inclination to celebrate the emperor or merely to give an endorsement, however qualified, would be a mark of authenticity and credibility. It is finally “the public” who would be most impressed by the appearance of spontaneity that a gift economy effects. For the public—whether an aristocratic readership or “listening audience” of nobiles, or a more general audience of the type that would have attended theatrical performances (such as the Eclogues apparently enjoyed)—ultimately vested Augustus with his authority. In many ways, the senatorial elite whose own pretensions to power first made them targets of the proscriptions would later become the audience whose endorsement Augustus would be most interested in acquiring and confirming. The appearance of voluntarism in the production of ideology—which functions to naturalize social and political arrangements—would only further its credibility.
chapter 3 explores the relationship between the gift economy and ideology in greater depth, but it is worth noting here how the speaker's recusatio suggests their interconnection. After the speaker praises Vergil and
nec magis expressi vultus per aenea signa quam per vatis opus mores animique virorum clarorum apparent, nee sermones ego mallem repentis per humum quam res componere gestas terrarumque situs et flumina dicere et arces montibus impositas et barbara regna tuisque auspiciis totum confecta duella per orbem claustraque custodem pacis cohibentia lanum et formidatam Parthis te principe Romam, si quantum cuperem possem quoque. [A]nd the features of illustrious men stand out no more clearly, rendered in statues of bronze, than do their character and spirit, presented in poets' work. And I would not choose to compose my poetic chatter, moving close to the ground, rather than verse on great deeds—singing about the lay of distant lands, and rivers, and citadels set on mountain peaks, and strange kingdoms, and the wars completed throughout the entire world under your auspices, and the bolts restraining Janus, custodian of peace, and Rome so feared by the Parthian, since you are our leader, if my ability were also as great as my desire. (2.1.248–57)
As Matthew Santirocco points out in his discussion of this epistle, the Augustan recusatio depends on a pretext of patronal pressure that poets, by employing the topos, advance on their own. By presenting the poet as capable of refusal, the recusatio thus places him “at some psychic and artistic distance” from the patron. Indeed, this epistle shows Horace appropriating Augustus to his own poetic agenda, a rhetorical strategy that allows the poet to maintain aesthetic independence even as it proves that he had a hand in the creation of political ideology (Santirocco 1995, 231, 243). I would add to his analysis the following points: First, the posture of refusal is possible only in a gift economy, in which poets respond to gifts (munera) but do not have to write poetry to order. Second, the brief description of the stability of the Roman Empire under Augustus's rule, the content of the poems the speaker would write if he could, takes on a paradoxical force and persuasiveness because he forgoes further elaboration. Finally, that the poems do serve the interests of the patron, however obliquely, indicates a psychic compulsion inscribed within the dynamic of a gift economy.
One might object that the persuasions of ideology would be a moot point by 12 B.C.E., the date assigned to the epistle, when Augustus's power had been relatively secure for almost two decades. However, as Richard Gordon has argued in his analysis of the iconographic representations of the
This epistle clearly demonstrates that the diction of munera, dona, and officia—the language of gifts and of services reciprocating benefactions, rather than a lexicon associated with coinage, buying, and selling—characterizes the exchanges of Augustan patronage. It also shows that the value of such gifts partially lies in an aesthetic of decorum, where the tasteful judgment of the giver, appropriately matching gift to recipient, is confirmed by the decorousness of the return. Moreover, as Horace's own stylized recusatio makes clear, the discourse of gift exchange, as opposed to the commodification of verse through open purchase, allows the poet to “give” what he can—he would give more if he could (si quantum cuperem possem quoque): in Horace's case, this “ideology of voluntarism” translates into the conventional Callimachean gesture of praise in the very negation of such intent. The speaker respects the principle of decorum in this manner, writing finely spun poems (tenui deducta poemata filo, 225) in accord with his own talent, rather than offering the “insipid gift” or pingue munus that dooms poet and ruler alike to the short-lived products of the street, destined to disappear in smoke. Finally, such a posture of voluntarism ironically serves the interests of political ideology—the stability of Roman imperium guaranteed by the figure of Augustus—by presenting it as a given, a political arrangement so “natural” that the speaker can choose (in the interests of writing good or “authentic” poetry) not to celebrate it. That is, by focusing on his inadequacy to the task of panegyric, the speaker appears to take for granted the vision of empire that he in fact has just constructed.
When we return to this epistle to examine the chronology of Horace's generic transitions in relation to the regime and its “requests” or benefactions, we shall see that the gift economy in fact imposed a degree of constraint, obligation, and debt on the poet that belies the ideology of voluntarism. These are the tensions of amidtia, of patronage among the elite, that the poems of Epistles 1, always making reference to the poet's lyric past,
THE EMBEDDED ECONOMY OF ROME
In his essay “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” Karl Polanyi distinguishes between capitalist societies that possess “an institutionally separate and motivationally distinct economic sphere of exchange” and those in which “the elements of the economy are … embedded in non-economic institutions.” In the latter type, no transaction has a purely economic value; rather, the “economic process itself … [is] … instituted through kinship, marriage, age-groups, secret societies, totemic associations, and public solemnities” (Polanyi 1968, 84). Premonetary societies most clearly display this social dimension of exchange in their many ritual forms of interaction. And though much of the work of cultural and economic anthropology focuses on societies that can be, or have been, studied as active systems, the literature of the ancient world provides abundant evidence of both premonetary gift exchange and its continued influence on social interaction even after coin was introduced. For example, the gifts that a host lavishes on a visitor in the Homeric poems are the material embodiment of the bond of xenia or “guest-host friendship.” The exchange of such goods serves the additional end of both social cohesion—oikoi or homes in different regions are linked together—and differentiation: that is, a certain gift or good might serve to distinguish its recipient as belonging to a particular rank.
[7] For a thorough reading of various types of exchange in Homer based on the models of reciprocity employed by Sahlins (1968, 1972), who modifies Polanyi, see Donlan 1993. In Sahlins's categories, Homeric gift exchange constitutes “balanced reciprocity,” a direct quid pro quo. Nonetheless, as Donlan observes, “the quasi-kinship quality of guest-friendship … imposes obligations of ‘generalized’ reciprocity, of the kind due from kin and friends, which go beyond the formal duties of hospitality and gift-giving”—i.e., balanced reciprocity (150).
To be sure, the Homeric world presents a fictional hybrid of different periods of early Greek history, and care must be taken in drawing firm conclusions about the reality of the economic practices depicted in the poems. All the same, their ideology of aristocratic gift exchange may be said to represent an early stage of the “status-based” or “embedded” ancient economy.[8] Donlan (1993, 137 n. 1) discusses the various problems associated with reading the Homeric poems for information about an actual social reality of the Greek world before the Archaic age. See Finley 1982 [1955] for such a reading.
Moses Finley, in particular, has developed this “primitivist” view of the classical economy, arguing that the idea of “profit” in a capitalist sense is
[9] See Finley 1973 for an overview of his ideas about the ancient economy; Finley's chapter “Aristotle and Economic Analysis” (1974) similarly concludes that the economy was not a separate sphere of activity in the ancient world—i.e., that it was not “disembedded,” to use Polanyi's term. For a view that challenges Finley's conclusions and the orientation of the Cambridge “primitivists,” see Cohen 1992 on Athenian banking.
As Keith Hopkins points out in a summary of Finley's conclusions, “classical man did not behave like economic man. There was in ancient society no moral reinforcement for productive investment, nor for profit maximization; no heavenly salvation was promised to the puritanical saver. Instead, high status involved competitive and ostentatious expenditure, whether in the service of the state, or in the local community, or in the pursuit of purely personal political glory” (Garnsey, Hopkins, and Whittaker 1983, xiii–xiv). But even though classical man may not have behaved like Max Weber's conventional economic man, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the economic motive of acquiring “symbolic capital” drives the gift-giving impulse in primitive man and thus, for Finley, in classical man as well. “Symbolic capital” refers here to both the status that the giver accrues and the debt or obligation that donation imposes on another.[10] On “symbolic capital,” see Bourdieu 1977, 171–83; Marker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990, 5, 13–14.
I shall discuss this term later in more detail, but the point here is that a form of economic calculation was very much present in classical man: the desire for symbolic returns, or “capital,” constitutes a wish for economic profit on one's expenditures. It is this relationship between debt, status, and expenditure that has led economists and historians alike to remark the gift-exchange ideology in both public and private benefactions in the Greco—Roman world: the posture of voluntary, decorous giving in fact serves to veil or mystify the economics of such exchange.It is important all the same to acknowledge that after the introduction of coinage, monetary transactions and modified markets were a distinct feature of ancient society.
[11] See Harl 1996 for the argument that Roman coinage was in use for both fiscal and commercial purposes more than scholars have previously acknowledged.
For Rome, in particular, scholars have emphasized that the second and first centuries B.C.E. saw a dramatic increase in the monetization of the economy.[12] Harl 1996, 38–72; Hopkins (1983b xx) notes that between 157 and 80 B.C.E., “the volume of roman silver coins in circulation increased tenfold (Hopkins (1980) 109).”
As Kenneth Harl notes, administrative and military costs of the Republic, and the imperial expansion of the years 200–90 B.C.E., demanded payrolls in coin; Hopkins, arguing for the “thickened network of Roman trade” in the first two centuries C.E., remarks that even in Egyptian villages labor contracts were often expressed in terms of money (Harl 1996, 38; Hopkins ig83a, xx). The work of these scholars is in keeping with Polanyi's claim that “the development from embedded to[13] Varro, Ling. 7.105 is a major source for interpretations of nexum. On both nexum and mancipatio, see Watson 1975, 111–49, esp. 135: “Mancipatio as contract is revealed by the weighing of bronze and the reference to it in the transferee's declaration, both of which are integral parts of the ceremony.”
Both of these were transactions conducted per aes et libram, an act that involved the weighing out of a fixed amount of bronze as a measure of value. Though nexum became obsolete in the late fourth century B.C.E., mancipatio continued into postclassical times. That these early forms of Roman contractus are roughly simultaneous with the advent of coinage underscores the relationship between money and contract as the beginnings of what eventually evolves into disembedded, motivationally distinct market systems.[14] Watson 1975, 137: “The business with bronze and scales involved an actual weighing out of the price and is not an indication of formalism in early Roman law. Not until around 280 B.C. did the Romans coin money[;] … the ceremony of mancipatio itself indicates unambiguously both that bronze had become the standard medium of exchange and that a fixed weight of bronze, such as a pound, had become a measure of value.”
And yet it is precisely the formulas involved in these exchanges, and the etymology of many of the terms referring to early forms of Roman contract, that led Marcel Mauss to perceive in them the older characteristics of primitive gift exchange (1990 [1950], 48–53). In light of Mauss's perception that early Roman law displays the “traces” of gift exchange, and that “the Semitic, Greek and Roman civilizations were the first to draw a strong distinction between obligations and services that are not given free, on the one hand, and gifts, on the other,” Bourdieu has commented: “It is no accident that the vocabulary of the archaic economy should be entirely composed of double-sided notions that are condemned to disintegrate in the course of the history of the economy, since, owing to their duality, the social relations they designate represent unstable structures.” (Mauss 1990 [1950], 48; Bourdieu 1977, 17s).
[15] See also Benveniste 1973, 53–162.
If the institution of nexum, or debt-bondage, suggests the initial ideological fallout or historical debris—one side of the earlier double-sided notion—then the Roman ideology of benefactions,[16] Eisenstadt and Roniger (1984, 166–85) discuss the mixture of clientelism (or patronage) and free market economy in terms of an “ascriptive-hierarchical” society in which clients have some access to markets, but still exchange goods and services with their patrons. Nicols (1995, 1–9) places Republican and Imperial Rome in this category.
Paul Veyne's monumental book on euergetism in the ancient world (1990) takes the concept of the gift as its organizing principle. As Oswyn Murray points out in his introduction to the English edition, Veyne's study in fact implies a distinction between the concepts of gift economy and gift exchange. A gift economy presumes the absence of real reciprocity—that is, the goods and services exchanged are incommensurable and cannot be acquired in any other way. Veyne's book deals with private expenditure for the public good, a subject somewhat different than personal patronage in the upper classes, but we should nonetheless recognize in the above distinction elements of Richard Sailer's definition: it is the asymmetry of the relationship—the difference in status and public position—that results in each person offering something to which the other does not have access. In contrast to such a “gift economy,” gift exchange implies a “society halfway to becoming ‘rational’ in our sense, since people could count the values in this exchange, and establish a market in the gift” (Murray 1990, xiv.).
[17] Indeed, this is precisely what Tchernia (1983, 101) argues to have occurred in the trade between the Gallic peoples and Italians in the first century B.C.E.: in return for a steady supply of Gallic slaves, Italian merchants traded wine; while the Gauls themselves distributed wine as a prestigious gift after the fashion of a potlatch, the Italian merchants, “By multiplying the occasions for the giving of gifts and counter-gifts between the Gallic peoples and the Romans, … conferred an exchange value upon commodities which had until then above all had a use value.”
In some ways, we could argue that this objection to the terminology of “exchange” retrojects the nineteenth-century application of the term in the analysis of market and commodity relations back onto the alien, “primitivist” economy. Moreover, as I shall discuss further, it is precisely the interconvertibility—or exchanges—of material and symbolic capital that distinguishes the economics of a gift economy. In any case, Veyne himself avoids the concept of exchange for other reasons as well: in keeping with the emphasis on voluntarism in the philosophical literature on benefactions, he stresses that the ancient world perceived public giving as a kind of duty and privilege reserved for the wealthy upper classes.This public or civic function of the private individual both subsumed the ideology of aristocratic gift exchange in the Greek polis and (more
[18] See Kurke 1991, 89, for the transition from aristocratic gift exchange to euergetism in the Greek polis; for the financial criteria of equites and senators, which changed under Augustus, and the need for conspicuous consumption to establish status and ensure political loyalty—the mark of an embedded economy—see Suet. Aug. 41; Finley 1973, 46, 53, 56; Duncan—Jones 1974, 17–32; Hopkins 1983, 168.
Indeed, the financial demands on the politically ambitious in the late Republic and early Empire were so great that the nobility, though rich in land, had to resort to borrowing huge sums of cash (Finley 1973, 56). But the spending of such vast amounts of money on public games, dinners, or distributions to the pkbs was expected of the powerful and, ideally, was supposed to be voluntary and free of self-interest. Discussing Aristotle's distinction between the liberal and the magnificent man (Me. Eth. 4.4), Veyne emphasizes that “Euergetism is the manifestation of an ‘ethical virtue,’ of a quality of character, namely magnificence,” and he goes on to comment that the magnificent man “gives without receiving presents in exchange. He devotes his fortune to higher values, civic or religious, and does not introduce his bounty into the system of exchange of favours that characterizes the more modest virtue of liberality” (1990, 14). In keeping with Aristotle's definition, Suetonius records Augustus as unstintingly generous to all classes, but willing to withhold distributions in order “to show that he did all this not to win popularity but to improve public welfare” (Aug. 42). And yet, as Tacitus so memorably acknowledges, Augustus maintained power by having “charmed all with the sweetness of leisure,”[19] Tac. Ann. 1.2: cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit.
a phrase that implies the effects of—or the “symbolic capital” garnered by—the emperor's considerable expenditures on “bread and circuses.”The Roman philosophical writers, too, analyzed the art of giving as a quality of character, and both Cicero's De officiis and Seneca's De beneficiis provide a kind of handbook for the proper behavior of a Roman aristocrat. However, even in the case of private benefaction, where the more modest virtue of liberality is exercised, an emphasis on voluntarism in these writers conflicts with and sometimes conceals the actual code of reciprocity. Seneca, for example, patently claims that “In benefits the book-keeping is simple—so much is paid out; if anything comes back, it is gain, if nothing comes back, there is no loss. I made the gift for the sake of giving. … The good man never thinks of [benefits] unless he is reminded of them by having them returned. … To regard a benefit as an amount advanced is putting it out at shameful interest.” On the other hand, in problematic contrast with the injunction to the giver to forget the benefit once conferred is the prescription “to surpass in deed and spirit those who have
[20] See also Sen. Ben. 2.17.7: “The best man is he who gives readily, never demands any return, rejoices if a return is made, who in all sincerity forgets what he has bestowed, and accepts a return in the spirit of one accepting a benefit.” All translations of De beneficiis are from the Loeb edition (Basore 1935), unless otherwise noted.
One might say that by placing the burden of gratitude on the recipient, the giver is free to forget in the secure, if repressed, knowledge of delayed return.Cicero acknowledges more explicitly the conflict between a prescriptive ideology of honorable giving and the self-interested exploitation of the system: “In granting favours, on the other hand, and in requiting gratitude, the most important function of duty (if all else is equal) is to enrich above all the person who is most in need of riches. But people generally do exactly the opposite; for they defer above all to him from whom they expect the most, even though he does not need them” (Off. 1.49).
[21] Unless otherwise noted, translations of De officiis are by M. Atkins from the edition of M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (1991).
Despite this acknowledgment, Cicero himself enacts a form of the conflict, insofar as the publication of his letters is a deliberate attempt to reap the symbolic capital of overt generosity (see Dixon 1993, 452). Discussing these paradoxes, the social historian Suzanne Dixon claims that they are more acute in the upper classes, where the “ideology of internal egalitarianism” leads to a certain “notional reticence about the essential reciprocity of all giving” (453, 454).As I have suggested, the economic transactions of literary patronage are embedded, to a certain degree, in these social practices of personal—as well as imperial—expenditure. However, the tensions in the prescriptive literature on benefaction are precisely what renders its explanatory power less than sufficient for my analysis of the relationship between the public poetry of Odes 1–3 as a form of “expenditure” and the more private poetry of Epistles 1. Thus, in keeping with historians such as Veyne and Dixon, I turn to the writings of cultural anthropology to provide a hermeneutic lens for the rhetoric of benefaction in Horatian verse, considering attributes of a gift economy from the perspectives of both anthropological functionalism and social domination.
Expenditure
In his seminal work on the nature of the gift, Essai sur le don, Marcel Mauss analyzes the phenomenon of expenditure in terms of the potlatch: the ritual giving, destruction, and consumption of goods practiced by native tribes and peoples of the American Northwest (Tlingit and Haida) and British Columbia (Haida, Tsimshian, and Kwakiutl). For these tribes, public ceremonies of gift giving, and sometimes pure destruction of goods, serve
Status here is best understood in terms of symbolic capital—both the reputation in the eyes of the community and the credit in relation to the recipient, which the giver accrues by giving away goods. By exercising the capacity to give away material worth, the giver converts material capital into the symbolic capital of honorable generosity. In keeping with Bourdieu's extension of this term, we may also consider it as the prestige value that material objects may possess, often in excess of their actual worth, or that less tangible “goods”—such as a poem's praise, a dedication, or the favor of a social introduction—confer on their recipient in the Roman context.
[22] Bourdieu 1977, 177–78: “The only way to escape from the ethnocentric naiveties of economism, without falling into populist exaltation of the generous naivety of earlier forms of society, is to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation—which may be ‘fair words’ or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc.”
Moreover, as Bourdieu claims, social and economic values are entirely interconvertible: if certain material goods or “gifts” have a social or “prestige” value that confers symbolic capital on both the donor and the recipient, then this credit can be converted back into a narrowly conceived economic value. Again extending this idea to the Roman economy of patronal benefactions, we perceive that despite the incommensurability of the goods exchanged, it is their inaccessibility except through exchange that contributes to the economic value of symbolic goods and vice versa. Thus, we may consider again the example of Cicero's recommendation of Trebatius to Caesar, discussed in the introduction: when Cicero rebukes his youngThis loan of status, by which the gift reflects both on the recipient and back on the giver, is apparent in Horace's frequent use of the word decus to describe Maecenas in relation to himself: “glory,” “ornament,” “honor”—the range of meanings suggests the honor that Maecenas confers on the poet through association with him and by his benefactions to him, as well as the glory that the poet reciprocates by honoring his patron in his poems.
[23] Odes 1.1.2, 2.17.4, 3.16.20. P. White 1993, 18: “The loan of status was especially important for anyone who hoped to mix with the elite.” See Gold 1987, 121, on the phrase praesidium et dulce decus meum.
But this reciprocal exchange of status, in which giver and receiver are both distinguished by the gift, depends, as Mauss suggests, on a third party to witness the transaction. It is in the eyes of the community that the giver accrues status by giving away wealth; conversely, wealth confers status on the recipient by virtue of its desirability in the eyes of others. Status depends, to some degree, on the envy of those who possess less, and the public display by which this envy is incited underscores the word's etymological root in the Latin videre (to see). What we understand as a “status symbol” is ineffective unless it can both be read by a large audience that is literate in a particular cultural code and, at the same time, be accessible only to a fraction of that public. As Peter White points out, the gifts made by a potens amicus to a poet in the late Republic and early Empire might be of greater symbolic than material value, serving to distinguish the status of the beneficiary in connection to the donor (1993, 88). The complexity of this triangular relationship, and the necessity of the witness to exchanges of status, is concisely summed up in Andrew Wallace—Hadrill's comment about the delicate balances of political patronage: “The people below you estimate your standing in the eyes of those above you; and those aboveSocial Cohesion
The gift-exchange psychology underlying Roman patronage involves more than a competition for status. Though the rivalrous consumption and giving away of goods constitute a “war of property,” the obligation to receive gifts ensures the opposite—the creation of social bonds. Three related features of the process of gift exchange contribute to this creation of community or social interrelatedness: first, the tendency of the gift to pass to a third party in place of pure reciprocation; second, the tendency of the gift to increase in value—that is, the reciprocal gift is often larger than the initial one that elicited it; and third, the frequent “intermingling” of souls and objects, as Mauss would characterize it, that occurs when a person perceives the object given away as an extension of the self. Before exploring these features in relation to the Roman world and the Horatian experience of patronage, we should look more closely at the anthropological writings that best exhibit them.
In his analysis of the Maori, a hunting people of Polynesia, Mauss isolates a quality called the hau, or the spirit of the gift, which causes the receiver to reciprocate and give a present in return to the original donor.
[24] On the notion of the hau, see Mauss 1990 [1950], 10–13; Sahlins 1972, 150–83.
Though Mauss has been criticized for falsely perceiving a mystical force in the concept of hau, his study nonetheless points up both the essential movement of the gift—its tendency to be passed on—and the frequent presence of a third party that turns the simple exchange into a process of circulation.[25] Lévi—Strauss (1987, 47) writes, “But instead, in The Gift, Mauss strives to reconstruct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture a supplemental quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau.” See Derrida 1992, 76–77, for further discussion of Levi—Strauss's critique of Mauss and Mauss's invention of the hau as an explanatory force.
For example, in Marshall Sahlins's revisionary treatment of Mauss's analysis, the hau is translated as an “excess”—that is, a “return on” or “product of” the original gift—that must be given back to its source. Sahlins cites the custom of Maori hunters who, when they have killed birds in the forest,Sahlins here prefers a purely economic understanding of the concept of hau, but a more recent interpretation of this Maori term inclines once again to the spiritual understanding of Mauss. Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property opens with chapters that explore the anthropological literature on gift exchange as a way of understanding characteristics of the gift that apply to art. Hyde's analysis of the Maori ritual particularly emphasizes the ceremony—called whangai hau, or “nourishing the spirit”—by which the priests return a portion of the birds to the forest. As Hyde points out, the etymological root of “generosity” is the word genus, generis, “offspring” or “stock”—a noun related to the verb gignere, “to beget” or “to produce” (1979, 35). In the animistic world of the Maori, the spirit of the forest is made generous, is encouraged to become abundant, by the ceremonial gifts of the priests. When Hyde generalizes this particular scenario into a paradigm that contrasts gift circulation with commodity exchange, he asserts that the spirit of increase or generosity has the effect of establishing social bonds between the parties involved (18–19, 35–39). Because hau can also mean “excess,” or the power of increase, it could suggest the libidinal element of emotion—the emotional excess that accompanies a gift. Hyde implies as much when he appropriates an essentially psychoanalytic language to discuss the communal ego created by gift circulation (17–18). Viewing the ego as an elastic concept, a libidinal pool of emotional energy that may widen to constitute a social entity, Hyde thus extends Mauss's observation that gift exchange causes souls and objects to intermingle. Understood psychoanalytically, such intermingling results from the libidinal cathexis, or emotional attachment, to the object given to another. It is this emotional valuation of the object exchanged that Hyde captures in the phrase “the erotic life of property.”
Hence, contrary to the exchange of commodities in a fully disembedded economy, where the precise monetary value of an object allows for the
[26] For descriptions and analysis of the kula, see Malinowski 1961 [1922], 81–104, 350–65; Mauss 1990 [1950], 21–31; Hyde 1979, 12–18.
These decorative goods are not simply traded between two individuals but rather are passed from one person to another in arcs extending over considerable geographical territory. Moreover, while the receiver of an object does acquire a form of “ownership” over it, the relation is, as Mauss remarks, far more complex, entailing “ownership and possession, a pledge and something hired out, a thing sold and bought, and at the same time deposited, mandated, and bequeathed in order to be passed on to another. For it is only given you on condition that you make use of it for another or pass it on to a third person, the ‘distant partner,’ the murimuri” (1990 [1950], 24). It is this tendency of a gift to pass on to a third person and not necessarily back to the original giver that helps create social bonds: for, as Sahlins notes, when two partners trade, “balanced exchange may tend toward self-liquidation.”[27] It is worth quoting Sahlins (1965, 178), in full here: “The casual received view of reciprocity supposes some fairly direct one-for-one exchange, balanced reciprocity, or a near approximation of balance. It may not be inappropriate, then, to footnote this discussion with a respectful demur: that in the main run of primitive societies, taking into account directly utilitarian as well as instrumental transactions, balanced reciprocity is not the prevalent form of exchange. A question might even be raised about the stability of balanced reciprocity. Balanced exchange may tend toward self-liquidation.”
The circulation of decorative objects among the “primitive” tribes of the islands off New Guinea may seem a far cry from the exchanges of Roman patronal relations, but, as will become clear, the point of the comparison lies in the cohesion that results from an ongoing passage of gifts. Such cohesion may be seen to be of two kinds, both integrating different social strata and solidifying bonds among those at the top of that hierarchy. Although persons of lower rank participate in many of the peripheral gift exchanges that take place beside and in conjunction with the trade of the kula, the giving and receiving of the bracelets and necklaces as high “prestige” objects is generally reserved for the “chiefs” alone (Mauss 1990 [1950], 27–29). Such objects serve to distinguish their recipient as belonging to a particular social stratum even as, by marking that rank, they underscore the recipient's obligation to give generously in keeping with the
It is the “symbolic capital” or prestige value of the ornamental jewelry that makes the analogy to the Roman world illuminating. Such objects fulfill a social function suggestively similar to that of such diverse symbolic goods in the Roman world as a book's dedication or the Roman office of the priesthood. Thus, when Horace calls Maecenas his decus, both “glory” and “ornament,” he not only displays the status that his patron's association and wealth have conferred on him, as discussed earlier, but also circulates this symbolic capital to those included as addressees in his poems. To be sure, Augustus, Vergil, Agrippa, and Pollio all possess their own resources, both material and symbolic. Nonetheless, the prestige of the dedication, as an ornament, casts its reflection on others: it creates a “ring” or network of status that reinforces the self-conception and interaffiliation of the elite. In contrast to such circulation among the upper echelons of society, we might consider the distinction or honor of a “symbolic good” such as the priesthood, a civic office generally filled by the elite—one that, as the next chapter argues, has particular relevance for Horace's public posture as “priest of the Muses.” Though many sacerdotal positions were electoral, under the Principate they were increasingly used as instruments of patronage (Gordon 1990c, 221). And as Gordon has claimed, the prestigious appointment to such an office brought with it the reciprocal duty of vast expenditure on real goods, a form of public prestation whose end was the creation of symbolic capital or the loyalty and gratitude of the masses (194). Thus munus, in its sense of “public office” or responsibility, evinces the double-sidedness of the vocabulary of the ancient economy and reveals its etymological origins in the Indo—European root *mei, meaning “exchange” (Benveniste 1973, 79). And yet these examples demonstrate not “balanced exchange [that] may tend toward self-liquidation,” but rather the circulation and transmutation of capital, both symbolic and material. It is in this regard—the socially motivated expenditure and interconvertibility of forms of wealth—that we remark the “gift economy” of patronage.
Disequilibrium and the Perpetuation of Debt
Though the circulation of many goods in primitive societies operates according to “spheres of exchange,” or social tiers, the stratification of Roman society was such that the “goods and services” exchanged in the patronal system often crossed lines of status and could not be acquired through
[28] See Gregory 1982, 49, on spheres of exchange.
Quoting Sahlins's view concerning the potential liquidation of balanced trade, Sailer specifies that “a precise one-for-one exchange—that is, a complete and conscious absolution of debt—leaves both parties free to break off the relationship without moral recriminations” (1982, 15–16). Sailer points here to the mutually reinforcing character of the criteria he uses to define patronage: because the unequal status of the two parties implies an incommensurability of the goods and favors exchanged, indebtedness is perpetual and ambiguous.[29] As Seneca (Ben. 3.9.3) comments, “Since benefits may be given in one form and repaid in another, it is difficult to establish their equality.”
Sailer addresses patronage in the upper classes, but one of the most conventional of such exchanges in formal patrocinium has traditionally been conceived in terms of the political support that a cliens gave to his patron in return for legal protection and material benefits (Sailer 1982, 29; Wallace—Hadrill 1989, 68–69). The nature of such favors or duties precludes precise determinations of value, because in an embedded economy they have no exact “exchange value”—they are outside a monetary system that could provide them with a common denominating term. Moreover, even if a good did have an exchange value, such as the legacies that clients often left their patrons as a final gesture of honor,[30] Sailer 1982, 29, 71–73. Significantly, Horace left all his property to Augustus, a gesture that points up the emperor's stature as a patron and that became common practice after his reign.
it was offered as a gift and hence carried an emotional value that eludes quantification. Such impossibility of determining precise values leads each party to feel potentially still in debt to the other, thereby ensuring that the relationship continues.Ambiguity of debt arises from other sources as well. For example, the rivalrous desire to outdo the other—as in the competitive potlatch-consistently produces a gift in excess of the first, thus maintaining and reconfiguring the disequilibrium of debt initiated by the initial expenditure.
[31] For such ambiguity, though not rivalrous on the surface, see Cic. Fam. 2.6.1–2 and the discussion of the passage in Sailer 1982, 17.
Moreover, in a highly stratified culture in which “gifts” are exchanged as benefida and officia across the invisible lines of status, the recipient of a benefaction remains, in a sense, forever indebted to a benefactor of a higher order. In contrast to actual monetary debt, Seneca claims that “to the [creditor for a benefit] I must make an additional payment, and even after I have paid my debt of gratitude, the bond between us still holds; for, just when I have finished paying it, I am obliged to begin again, and friendship endures” (Ben. 2.18.5). A person unable to repay his benefactor in full instead disseminates similar benefactions to those of lower status. In placeIn a telling passage of De officiis, Cicero himself distinguishes between monetary exchange (or debt absolved) and the duties and benefactions that characterize patronage: “As someone has happily said, A man has not repaid money, if he still has it; if he has repaid it, he has ceased to have it. But a man still has the sense of favour, if he has returned the favour; and if he has the sense of the favour, he has repaid it.”
[32] Cic. Off. 2.69: Commode autem, quicumque dixit, “pecuniam qui habeat, non reddidisse, qui reddiderit, non habere, gratiam autem et, qui rettulerit, habere et, qui habeat, rettulisse.” I translate here from the Loeb edition (W. Miller 1913).
Cicero quotes this dictum to point out that patronage of the poor who are unable to repay the service in kind leads to a lasting emotional gratitude that cultivation of the rich may not yield. Notwithstanding the problematic politics of his comment, his example underscores the contrast between the closure of a relationship based on monetary exchange and the sense of ongoing emotional indebtedness in response to a favor. Moreover, the paradox of still retaining the favor, despite having returned it, points up the social implications of the connotative range of the word gratia: on the one hand, gratia refers to a favor done by one person for another, and thus reflects a concrete action or service; on the other hand, the word suggests the feeling of gratitude—“the sense of the favor,” as the translation would have it—that the recipient of such a service experiences.[33] This latter meaning also reflects the sense of gratia as “influence” exercised by the benefactor over the recipient. Hellegouarc'h (1963, 202–8) provides the fullest lexical discussion of the term.
Hence, a person could both return a favor and yet still have it; most important, this double valency of the word, a kind of connotative elasticity, suggests the social function of cohesion that patronage serves.[34] See Sailer 1982, 69–78. Wallace—Hadrill (1989, 71–78) discusses patronage more in the context of social integration—the capacity of the system to incorporate “outsiders,” either those newly arrived in the city of Rome or people living on the city's periphery.
Though repaid, a favor leaves behind a sense of thankfulness that binds the receiver to the giver.Finally, we should note here a point to which we shall return in chapter 3. Couched in the comparative terms of monetary debt, Cicero's dictum illuminates the apparent paradox behind the exchange of favors (”apparent” because the connotations of gratia become paradoxical only in a monetary context): though repaid, gratia leaves behind an excess or residue, a trace of itself—something that, in fact, causes the favor to increase in value. Cicero refers to increase even more specifically when, quoting Hesiod, he claims: “But if, as Hesiod bids, one is to repay with interest, if possible, what one has borrowed in time of need, what, pray, ought we to do when challenged
[35] Trans. W. Miller 1913, Loeb edition: Quodsi ea, quae utenda acceperis, maiore mensura, si modopossis, iubet reddere ffesiodus, quidnam beneficioprovocati facere debemus? An imitari agros fertiles, qui multo plus effemnt quam acceperunt?
From the viewpoint of anthropological “functionalism,” this increase suggests both the Maori's concept of the hau and Hyde's idea of “libidinal excess”—the tendency of the gift to accrue value in its passage and to provide the social glue for community.
[36] See Sailer 1982, 37–38, for the conflict between Marxism and anthropological functionalism as opposing hermeneutic lenses for examining ancient patronage. The functionalist view suggests that “in societies with great differences of wealth and prestige, patron-client bonds, cemented in accordance with the reciprocity ethic, provide cohesion between different class and status groups” (37).
For it is precisely because a person can never truly pay back a benefit to the original donor-making gratia an ongoing emotion (or sense of obligation)—that the gift is passed down to a third party.[37] Seneca (Ben. 2.25.1) asserts: “For what so much proves a grateful heart as the impossibility of ever satisfying oneself, or of even attaining the hope of ever being able to make adequate return for a benefit.”
Hence, community arises both from the emotions stirred by the gift and from the movement of reciprocating benefactions down a hierarchical network of relations. Discussing this functionalist or integrative view, Wallace—Hadrill writes that “what justifies describing the network as a whole as a patronage network is that it involves exchanges between those closer to the centre of power and those more distant from it, and has the effect of mediating state resources through personal relationships” (1989, 77). While the functionalist view of patronage recognizes reciprocity as necessary to integration, it emphasizes the social rather than the economic dimension of exchange: that is, functionalism ultimately sees the exchange of goods and services as emanating from the need and desire for social cohesion rather than from a desire for profit. Cicero, again, suggests such a patronal ideology when he claims that people “are ‘bound’ together in strong fellowship, by the giving and receiving of benefactions [or favors], so long as they are mutual and pleasing” (ex beneficiis ultra et citro datis acceptis, quae et mutua et grata dum sunt … firma devinciuntur societate; Off. 1.56).[38] This is my own translation.
Delay and the Mystifications of Time
But the same qualities that provide for social cohesion may also be seen as exploitative. As Bourdieu points out, the temporal delay between a first gift and its reciprocation may symbolically bind the recipient to the donor, but it also serves to mystify the economic aspect of this type of exchange:
[39] See Bourdieu 1977, 188, on the reproduction of systems of domination.
Indeed, Seneca makes a point of distinguishing between the verb reddere, employed in the context of monetary repayment, and referre gratiam, “requiting a favor” in the economy of benefida:We are, as you know, wont to speak thus: “A. has made a return (gratiam rettulit) for the favour bestowed by B.” Making a return means handing over of your own accord that which you owe. We do not say, “He has paid back the favour” (gratiam reddidit); for “pay back” is used of a man upon whom a demand for payment is made, of those who pay against their will. … Making a return means offering something to him from whom you have received something. The phrase implies a voluntary return; he who has made such a return has served the writ upon himself. (Ep. 81.9)
[40] Trans. Gummere 1920, Loeb edition.
Yet the consistent use of analogies drawn from a monetary context in Seneca's and Cicero's examples reveals the “socially maintained discrepancy between the misrecognized or, one might say, socially repressed, objective truth of economic activity, and the social representation of production and exchange” (Bourdieu 1977, 172). Although such analogies are invoked to demonstrate the differences between the functioning of debt and credit in a coin or “disembedded” economy and their operation in a gift economy, the recourse to such models nonetheless points to the very real potential for economic calculation in the distribution of benefits.
[41] The use of economic metaphors to discuss interpersonal relations that were not specifically contractual is certainly not new in the Roman writers and was common among the Greeks; Aristotle considers certain categories of friendship in such terms. See the discussion in Konstan 1997, 78–82.
Such potential is underscored not only in verbs that elsewhere do refer to “returning” benefida as a specifically economic activity but also in the metaphor of “buried treasure” or “investment” used to characterize benefia[42] For the metaphor of buried treasure, see Sen. Dial. 7.24.2; Sailer (1982, 25) discusses the image. For the use of verbs that connote monetary activity, and that contradict Seneca's distinction between reddere and referre, cf. Sen. Ben. 3.9.3: Cum aliter benefidum detur, aliter reddatur, pariafacere difficile est.
When Seneca compares a benefidum to a thesaurus alte obrutus to be dug up only in need, his language quite literally “reveals” the concealing (obrutus) of an investment for the future. And the presence of a third party may contribute to the delay that conceals the economic interest in these transactions, further deflecting attention from the desire for profit.[43] Dixon (1993, 458) quotes Cicero writing to Atticus that when he praises Varro to Atticus, he wishes Atticus to tell Varro so that the latter might “give cause for satisfaction” (Att. 2.25.1).
When Bourdieu analyzes the “labor” devoted to the social repression of the “objective truth of economic activity” (1977, 172,194), he is concerned specifically with economies in which there are no markets, not the “ascriptive-hierarchical” society of Rome in which patronage coexisted with a modified market system. Yet as the discussion earlier in this chapter makes clear, Bourdieu's comments apply to benefaction as retaining an element of “double-sided notions that are condemned to disintegrate … since … the social relations they designate represent unstable structures which are condemned to split in two” (172). In this scheme, given that the two resulting types of relations originated in “one” set of social relations, it is reasonable that the social sphere should retain traces of the economic and vice versa: thus, just as the status system of patronage and benefactions contains elements of the economic calculation that Bourdieu perceives as the “repressed economic truth” of gift economies, so Mauss's analysis of early Roman contracts speculatively attributes a mystical or primitive attitude to a specific res, a thing or service, that is always part of the transaction.
Such an attitude, of course, is precisely one strategy of the mystification to which Bourdieu alludes. Thus the power inherent in the “thing,” or the hau of the Maori, which Mauss in essence generalized as the gift's power to compel reciprocation or circulation, serves to disguise the economic interest behind exchange by enchanting certain goods—“personalizing” them so that as gifts, they are extensions of the giver rather than embodiments of economic value. Again, we may note that the system of benefaction suggests just such social, even libidinal, enchantment or misrecognition in the multivalency of gratia as a “social” concept that expresses the gratitude, the concrete favor, or the influence and obligation generated by gifts. Alternately, the conventions that accompany the transfer in Roman contract may be traced back to the “power” of the thing in its social aspect (the “other side” of the double-sided originary notion). The etymology of
[44] See Watson 1975, 134–49, for the distinction between mandpatio and traditio: mandpatio, which constituted the transfer of res mancipi, or “land, rustic praedial servitudes, slaves, oxen, horses, mules, and asses,” included a ceremony per aes et libram, “with a scale and a fixed weight of bronze” (136). Traditio referred to the physical transfer or delivery of property that was res non mancipi, or those things that were excluded from the category of res mancipi (145). See [nn. 13] and [14], above.
Nexum, or debt-bondage, as an early and extreme form of contract per aes et libram, thus implies (ironically, given the absence of “pleasure” here) that the “legal ‘lien’ springs from things as much as from men” (48).If the nexum, as I claimed above, constitutes the initial ideological fallout of an economy in the process of becoming disembedded, the concomitant idea of “social bonds” may be visible in the frequent language of “binding” that appears in the prescriptive and epistolary material on social relations.
[45] See Cicero's use of the word devinciunter in Off. 1.56 (quoted above). Note, too, Cic. Fam. 15.11.2, in which Cicero discusses his indebtedness to Gaius Marcellus for both his private favors and public services to the Republic, and refers to such debt as a binding vinculum. Cicero refers to M. Aemilius as “bound by favors” (meis beneficiis devinctus) to him (Fam. 13.27.2).
That is, the contractual nature of debt-bondage and the libidinal bonds between persons, whether in a patronal relationship or in a more elite relation of amidtia between those of high status, may reflect the two directions into which the archaic economy, as Bourdieu would have it, “split in two.”[46] Significantly, when Cicero recommends Trebatius to Caesar, he writes that he “hands him over to you from my hand to yours, as they say” (hominem tibi ita trado de manu (ut aiunt) in manum tuam istam, Fam. 7.5.3). As Shackleton Bailey (1977, ad loc.) suggests, the phrase de manu … in manum “may derive from grasping by the hand in token of acquired ownership.” That is, it may signify mandpatio, or the “taking in the hand” of certain res.
Indeed, as a condition in which a debtor “pays off” his obligation through labor over time, the nexum may even be said to express in disembedded form the element of temporal delay that serves to mystify the economic aspect of gift exchange.GIFT AND DELAY IN THE HORATIAN CHRONOLOGY
Although the individual chapters of this book all explore the concept of a gift economy as a poetics informing Horatian verse—particularly the relationship between the Odes 1–3 and Epistles 1—it is nonetheless important to set the sequence of these two collections in a broader temporal context. As I suggest in the introduction, attempts to reconstruct the historical backdrop to Horace's relationship with Maecenas, and to the regime at large, necessarily involve some assumptions regarding irrecoverable facts. However, such a reconstructed scenario clearly exhibits the temporal delay by which the reciprocity ethic is represented as voluntary benefactions or favors. The evidence on which we may build our speculation can be broken down into three main categories: the external bits of biographical information that can be gleaned from Suetonius, the internal evidence of the poems themselves, and the relationship between the dates of publication of the poems as collections and the progress of the regime in establishing its authority. As has been recently argued, Horace may well have received up to five pieces of property from either Maecenas or Augustus himself, in addition to the sporadic gifts of actual money that the emperor may have made.
[47] See P. White 1993, 147–48; Lyne 1995, 9–11, and the sources cited therein; and see my introduction, [n. 9].
Most significantly, what appears to be the first grant of land—the Sabine farm—is made at a time just preceding, if not virtually simultaneous with, the victory at Actium. The political odes of books 1–3 are then written over the next decade; their decisive shift in genre, from satire to lyric, coincides with the period during which Octavian, later Augustus, secured the foundations of his political power. Though the so-called Roman Odes evolved into a sequence after their initial composition, they nonetheless all date to the years 29–26 B.C.E., just around the time when Octavian (in 27 B.C.E.) acquired significant proconsular authority and changed his name to Augustus, even as he made a show of yielding all his power to the Senate and people. Moreover, the second of the two major redistributions of governmental authority that ceded powers to Augustus while appearing to restore the Republic occurred in 23 B.C.E., the very same year as the Odes 1–3 were published as a collection.[48] See Eder 1990, 103–11, forafull discussion of the restructuring of government during the 20s.
As already noted in the introduction, when Horace then publishes his Epistles 1 in 19 B.C.E., his opening poem makes a literal “show”—in this case, the metaphor of a gladiatorial show—of declining to write more lyric.What is striking about this chronological sequence is the staggered, yet almost choreographed, timing of the gift-reciprocated-by-a-countergift
Significantly, after the publication of Epistles 1 in 19 B.C.E, Maecenas appears only once more in Horace's poems, in Ode 4.11. Human nature abhors a vacuum, and scholars have been quick to give voice to the poet's silence: Maecenas's absence from Horace's later works has been variously interpreted as indicating a fall from power caused by some indiscretion, a power struggle with Agrippa, and a withdrawal from imperial literary patronage intentionally planned by the regime.
[49] See G. Williams 1990, 258–75, for a lucid discussion of the evidence and the idea that Maecenas's withdrawal from the scene was preconceived.
Much of the evidence for a cooling of relations between the emperor and Maecenas stems from Suetonius, and more than one source points to the contrary. Whatever the causes of this change in Horace's texts, the poems do suggest that Maecenas no longer plays the role of a patron who brokers Horace's relationship with the regime at large and that Augustus has become more actively involved. One of the clearest documented examples of an actual request comes from Suetonius's biography of Horace. After narrating the princeps's commission of the Carmen saeculare and the fourth book of Odes, Suetonius quotes a fragment of a letter in which Augustus chides Horace for failing to address a sermo or “conversational poem” to himself. Since Suetonius's diction andAs to his writings, Augustus rated them so high, and was so convinced that they would be immortal, that he not only appointed (iniunxerit) him to write the Secular Hymn, but also bade him celebrate the victory of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus over the Vindelici, and so compelled (coegerif) him to add a fourth to his three books of lyrics after a long silence. Furthermore, after reading several of his ‘Talks,” the Emperor thus expressed his pique that no mention was made of him: “you must know that I am not pleased with you, that in your numerous writings of this kind you do not talk with me, rather than with others. Are you afraid that your reputation with posterity will suffer because it appears that you were my friend?” In this way he forced (expressit) from Horace the selection which begins with these words[.]
[50] Suet. Poet., Vita Horati, trans. Rolfe 1924 [1914], Loeb edition.
Suetonius goes on to quote the beginning of the Epistle to Augustus, 2.1. Although the verbs that Suetonius employs here—iniunxerit, coegerit, expressit—suggest a strong degree of compulsion, scholars have often attempted to soften their force.
[51] Fraenkel (1957, 364) understands these verbs to reflect Suetonius's own context, post—Domitian Rome. However, as G. Williams (1990, 269–70) points out, Horace himself uses the verb cogere in the Epistle to Augustus: cum speramus eo rem venturam ut … arcessas et egere vetes et scribere cogas (2.1.226–28). Williams, Santirocco (1995, 236–37), and Griffin (1984, 189–91) acknowledge the power relations implicit in these verbs even as they admit actual compulsion to be absurd; P. White (1993, 114–15) claims that such language was typical of the way poets and their amid discussed “suggestions” about poetry they might write. I believe White goes too far in emptying these verbs of any coercive implications; see my introduction, [n. 25].
Moreover, as some would argue, the teasing tone of the emperor may also be understood as undermining the initial impression of patronal demand.[52] E.g., Putnam 1986, 22–23; for the contrasting view, see Griffin 1984, 191, who quotes Macrobius's observation that “power does compel, not only if it invites but even if it beseeches.”
Finally, the epistle can even be cited by those who claim that the reference to patronal pressure reflects the highly stylized convention of the recusatio, fabricated by the poets as part of their own posture of refusal. For though, as already noted, the epistle ends with Horace's admission of talents inadequate to the task of epic, we know from Suetonius that Augustus did not ask for such verse; rather he wished to be the addressee of “conversational” poems or sermones, a category many understand as inclusive of either the Epistles or the Satires.[53] Suetonius's use of sermones is generally interpreted as referring either to satires or epistles, understood as Horace's more “conversational” poems (those of his “pedestrian” Muse). However, Habinek (1998, 100) reads sermonesas strictly the conversations represented in Horatian satire: by responding to Augustus's request with an epistle rather than a satire, Horace reinforces the poem's thematic emphasis on privileging written communication over visual spectacle.
To introduce theYet from the point of view of gift exchange, Suetonius's diction of compulsion may not be so far off the mark. For by referring to Horace as potentially familiaris, Augustus invokes the discourse of amidtiaor elite patronage, whose language and conventions presume an intimacy or “proximity” that disguises the more economic interests of the relationship. As Bourdieu points out,
The general law of exchanges means that the closer the individuals or groups are in the genealogy, the easier it is to make agreements, the more frequent they are, and the more completely they are entrusted to good faith. Conversely, as the relationship becomes more impersonal, i.e. as one moves out from the relationship between brothers to that between virtual strangers …, so a transaction is less likely to occur at all, but it can become and increasingly does become purely “economic” in character, i.e. closer to its economic reality, and the interested calculation which is never absent even from the most generous exchange (in which both parties account— i.e. count—themselves satisfied) can be more and more openly revealed. (1977, 173)
Augustus, by suggesting that Horace (with an eye to posterity) is potentially embarrassedby an intimate—familiaris—relationship with the emperor, ironically plays on the muddy distinction between patronage and friendship. In a sense, the emperor taunts the poet with the economic reality beneath the fiction of voluntary benefaction: because Horace did not include Augustus in the circle of amid addressed either in Epistles i or Satires 2, the poet must see their relationship as only contractual. In other words, Augustus does more than jokingly suggest that Horace might be embarrassed by being seen as liking power and thus uneasy about being associated, albeit indirectly, with the less savory aspects of the emperor's rise to prominence—perhaps the most overt implication of his humor; the emperor also, as a superior, challenges the poet not to experience gratia and to feel a justified independence based on the satisfactory fulfillment of a mere exchange.
[54] Sailer (1982, 21), challenging Hellegouarc'h, asserts the importance of gratia regardless of the status differential between beneficiary and donor.
In this sense, patronal compulsion may exercise itself by selfconsciously drawing attention to the affective component of the relationship and thus, covertly, to the continuing indebtedness that Horace ought to feel.Such an analysis puts the diction of the speaker's recusatio in the Epistle to Augustus in a different light. As we recall, the issue of immortality is there cast in terms of aesthetic refinement and decorum—the poetic gift that lacks discrimination, pingui munere, dooming poet and subject alike to
But beneath the ideological veil of voluntarism we can detect traces of the discourse of reciprocity or debt made good, a discursive web of images that I analyze in greater depth in chapters 4 and 5. Here, in the Epistle to Augustus, we may note that the language with which the speaker characterizes the poetic gift “that burdens” him (quod me gravat)—an attention for which he “has no patience” (nil moror officium, 264), a “zeal foolishly oppressing the one whom it cherishes” (sedulitas autem stulte quern diligit urget, 260)—recalls that of Epistles 1.13, the poem traditionally understood as a playful if fictive evocation of a cover letter to accompany a copy of Odes 1–3 presented to Augustus. In this epistle, the speaker instructs Vinius Asina not “to incite dislike for the poems [he] delivers through the zealous performance of duty” (ne … odiumque libellis / sedulus importes opera vehemente minister, 4–5) and urges him to toss away the poems if the “heavy” pack begins to chafe rather than throwing them down unceremoniously at Augustus's feet (si te forte meae gravis uret sarcina chartae, / abidtopotius quam quo perferre iuberis / clitellas ferus impingas, 6–7). The ironic gravis … sarcina chartae, “heavy pack of papers,” may very well be alluded to in the later poem when the speaker, identifying with Augustus, claims nil moror officium quod me gravat. That is, not only does the refusal justify itself on Callimachean grounds, but it also refers to a previous delivery of poems—poems similarly neoteric in their aesthetic affiliation (and thus the ironic opposite of gravis) but nonetheless possessing a significant pondus, or authoritative weight, in their ideological contribution to Augustus's interests. Finally, the speaker of 1. 13 refers to his poems as verses that may “delay” the eyes and ears of Caesar (carmina quae possint oculos aurisque morari / Caesaris, 17–18), diction similar to that at the beginning of Epistles 2.1. While the language of unduly “delaying” or “catching the attention of” an addressee or recipient of verse is somewhat conventional in Horace's poems to his patrons
[55] By these specific allusions, not just Odes 1–3 but also Odes 4, if dated before the epistle, would certainly be included in the dynamic of reciprocal munera. See Brink 1982, 552–54, on the dating. Indeed, an alternative reading of nil moror officium quod me gravat might subtly imply that Horace, still speaking as writer rather than recipient of verse, wishes to have nothing to do with the officium of composing panegyric, a service that he finds oppressive and has already executed with Odes 4. From this point of view, the embarrassment regarding posthumous reputation that is both an issue in Augustus's own letter, as narrated by Suetonius, and an image informing the funereal metaphor at the end of the Epistle to Augustus turned out to be remarkably on target: Odes 4 has not fared well with critics of Horace, many of whom consider its encomiastic pieces hollow, insincere, and aesthetically inferior. See further references cited in Putnam 1986, 21 n. 5.
The recusatio in this instance refers to a past debt made good even as it asserts an ideology of voluntary giving.By returning to Horace's letter to Augustus after examining the characteristic features of a gift economy, we may now perceive more clearly some of the contradictions in Augustan literary patronage. The spectrum of systems—poems at one end purchased for money, at the other end produced voluntarily as gifts—appears less polarized: once temporal delay and the posture of decorous giving are understood as social strategies for veiling the calculated exchanges of material and symbolic capital, the economic interest behind literary benefaction is revealed. At the same time, anthropological functionalism suggests that the symbolic capital of loyalty and gratitude elicited by gifts produces social cohesion. Indeed, Wallace—Hadrill's claim, discussed in the introduction, that any critical analysis of patronage must speak in terms of both structure and ideology sums up this imbrication of economically interested exchange and the language of libidinal voluntarism—of friendship, affection, goodwill, and gratitude—through which those exchanges were conducted.
Social cohesion, we noted, results particularly when the gift passes to a third person, a feature of “primitive” gift circulation (such as the kula) that, mutatis mutandis, also marks the basic triangulation or “network” of patronal relations in Roman society. Our theoretical paradigm suggests that literary patronage displays not the ongoing circulation of a prestige object but the transmutation of forms of “capital”: a material boon such as land produces the symbolic capital of gratitude or obligation, which, in turn, becomes poetry that reaches an audience beyond the patron alone.
As the speaker claims in the letter to Augustus, a poet's gifts not only immortalize Rome's leading men but also serve the public state by educating the young—the poet's civic function: “although reluctant in battle, illsuited
[56] We also see traces of the Callimachean aesthetic in the emphasis on paruis … rebus (small things).
Though these lines denote the use of poetic texts as a means of shaping the speech patterns of the young, the poet helps shape moral character as well with precepts and noble exempla (126–30), a civic function clearly visible in the Roman Odes. As scholars have long pointed out, the quintessential expression of the poet's role as the didactic spokesman for civic values is Aristophanes' depiction of Aeschylus in the Frogs, and Horace's vision of poetic service here recalls the comic poet's view of Greek tragedy. In this regard, as we shall see in the next chapter, Horace's munus of poetry invokes a discourse of euergetism—private expenditure for the public good—even as it suggests a form of political or civic office. Reciprocating the regime's gifts with the production of ideology, the speaker—in the metaphoric posture of a priest, the public office of sacerdos—converts the symbolic capital of benefactions received into cultural capital of poems for the people. Let us then turn to an analysis of exemplary poems of Odes 1–3 in which discourses of religious, political, and social exchange combine to present Horatian lyric as a form of expiation for the crimes of the civil wars.