GLADIATORIAL IMAGERY:
THE RHETORIC OF EXPENDITURE
“The gladiator: crude, loathsome, doomed, lost (importunus, obscaenus, damnatus, perditus) was, throughout the Roman tradition, a man utterly debased by fortune, a slave, a man altogether without worth and dignity (dignitas), almost without humanity” (Barton 1993, 12). No wonder that so many scholars of Horace, confronted with his image as a retired gladiator at the beginning of Epistles 1.1, either make little comment or smile wryly at the irony of the speaker's rhetoric and dismiss the trope as humorously extreme in its depiction of patronal relations as well as public performance.
[1] Cf. Kiessling and Heinze 1960, ad loc., on the technical aspects of the image; G. Williams 1968, 4: “humor and parody”; Kilpatrick 1986, 2: “ironic comparisons.” Acknowledging the darker side of the image, Johnson (1993, 12) pinpoints the problem: “Horace is not like the gladiator Veianius, and writing poetry is not like being condemned to hack one's way out of the theater of death.”
Tired of beseeching the crowd, already presented with the wooden foil symbolizing discharge, the speaker complains that Maecenas, his patron, wishes to confine him again to his old school and sport (quaeris / … antique me indudere ludo)[2] For a full quotation of the passage, see chapter 4.
Such highly figurative language has been read—and rightly, to a degree—as ironic metaphor: in complying with a patron, Horace was certainly no slave; and though perhaps his odes were not as well received as he might have wished, he never presumed to please the Roman masses. Thus, the opening of the poem is generally considered an elaborate conceit to justify the poet's decision[3] Becker (1963, 38) makes no comment on the the gladiatorial imagery and merely claims that in contrast to philosophy, “das Dichten … als bloBes Spiel und Getandel erscheint.” This figurative reading is eased by the play on Indus, a word also used to connote poetry. Hence, even critics who emphasize the seriousness beneath the irony subordinate the metaphor—the gladiatorial imagery—to its referent, Horace's generic choice. See Macleod 1983, 286, and Hirth 1985, 114–15.1 discuss this image further in chapter 4.
But what if this figurative image of a Indus (gladiatorial school) and the shows (munera) for which such training prepared, compounded by the gladiatorial reference at the end of Epistles 1.19, were given a more “literal” reading—one that privileges the terms of the metaphor rather than its referent—and were placed within the context of a larger cultural practice?
[4] On such a “literal” reading, see de Man 1979a, 3–19; Dunn 1995, 165–69; Hinds 1998, 10–16. This reading involves taking the rhetorical figure seriously so that, in the case of metaphor, the terms of the vehicle as a mode of persuasion are privileged over the tenor or referent.
What if these images were understood not only as ironic figures for Horace's compromised freedom but also within the context of imperial patronage as a form of public expenditure dependent on spectacle? As Paul Veyne remarks, “‘Giving gladiators’ became the best way to make oneself popular,” so that although the practice began as a funeral largesse, during the late Republic and early Empire it turned into euergesia “pure and simple,” a form of electoral corruption (1990, 222).[5] On gladiators, see too chapter 4, [nn. 24] and [25].
Both Suetonius and Augustus himself record the emperor's lavish spending on such gladiatorial games, mock sea battles (naumachiae), athletic competitions, beast hunts, and theatrical performances (Augustus, Res Gestae 22–23; Suet. Aug. 43). Although originally brokered through Maecenas as a middleman, might not the regime's expenditure on Horace as a public poet be reflected in this image of a munus, “gladiatorial display,” ultimately directed at a public, however difficult to define, whose loyalty and adherence the emperor desired? That is, perhaps we should view the poetic rhetoric of Horace's vision of patronal relations here as embedded in a greater cultural practice of expenditure that also functions rhetorically in its aim to control and to persuade.[6] See Dunn 1995, 171, for such an approach to the pronouns of lyric.
Over the past few decades it has become increasingly clear in literary studies that a text can be interpreted as neither an isolated document nor a simple reflection of its historical backdrop. Socioeconomic practices account for the conditions of any work's production as well as for many of the “symbol systems” by which a text communicates meaning to an audience. This is particularly true for Augustan literary patronage: social relations of exchange provided more than a context for the production of
Drawing on scholarship in cultural anthropology on gift economies, I interrogate in several Horatian poems the rhetoric that suggests the following related concepts. First, the public service (or munus) that the poet performs by writing his political poems constitutes a form of sacrificial expenditure, and ultimately a sacrifice of self, that the philosophically oriented first book of Epistles reclaims: as a priest of the Muses, or sacerdos Musarum, Horace's political poems provide the “gift” of purification for a people corrupted by the civil wars. Second, though many of the poems serve to reinforce a certain ideology of voluntarism in Augustan literary patronage, they also expose its contradictions. Just as gift—exchange societies conceal economic interests behind the concept of the disinterested gift, so the rhetorical language concerned with benefaction similarly occludes but may also reveal calculation in regard to the return gift of verse. Horace deploys different registers of imagery to expose the conflict between the “philosophy” of voluntary benefaction and the often—distorted reciprocity ethic by which the practice in fact operated in the upper echelons of Roman society. And third, Horatian poetic rhetoric often draws on larger cultural practices of expenditure in a way that produces an ideological effect sympathetic to his patrons even as it simultaneously provides the ground for the poet's gestures of autonomy. At the risk of simplification, my inquiry may be summed up by this question: if the gifts of patronage symbolically expropriate the poet's self, obligating him to make the return gift of poetry as the embodied or “reified” form of his labor, then
During the 20s B.C.E. the Augustan regime solidified its power by transforming political structures and by communicating a coherent—if negotiable and evolving—ideological vision.
[7] See Syme 1960 [1939], 387–475; Raaflaub and Toher 1990 for a reevaluation of Syme and more current views of the Augustan Principate. Zanker (1988) addresses the evolution of “ideology” in the plastic arts; see, too, Galinsky (1996) and the essays in Powell (1992). Critics of the past decade no longer see Augustus in the Orwellian terms of Syme, but increasingly take the position of Feeney (1992, 3) that ideologies of the period were a “product of contestation and dialogue” and that “‘Augustanism’ was not a dogma conceived by a small band and handed down to a receptive, passive audience.” On the “politics” of the terms “Augustan” and “anti—Augustan” in criticism of the period, see D. Kennedy 1992.
Although no mere propaganda, Horace's political poems contribute to, and arguably constitute, aspects of that vision: in particular, the sequence of poems called the Roman Odes presents a construction of history that both accounts for civil decline and lays the moral foundations for social and spiritual renewal. Recent criticism has tended to downplay the propagandistic character of these poems and, perhaps as a consequence, resists viewing them in a socioeconomic context of exchange relations.[8] See chapter 2, [n. 67], and my discussion later in the introduction.
However, any discussion of Horace's political poems must not only acknowledge a context of patronal benefaction but must also consider the degree to which that context intersects with other discourses of exchange and expenditure. Not much prior to 32–31 B.C.E., the literary evidence suggests that Maecenas, perhaps the figure then closest to Augustus (still called Octavian), gave Horace his celebrated “Sabine farm.”[9] Fraenkel (1957, 15) gives 31 B.C.E. as the terminus ante quern for the gift of the Sabine farm. The evidence for both gift and date derives from the comments of Porphyrio and Pseudo—Aero on Epodes 1.31 and Odes 2.18.12–14, and the implications of Satires 2.6. See chapter 3, [n. 6], for further and more recent bibliography on Horace's estate.
The political poetry of Horace's Odes 1–3 was written over the course of the next decade and published in 23 B.C.E., the very same years that decisively established Augustus in power. Rather than view the gift of land as an isolated act in the Horatian biography, or even as simply an example of the gifts presented by the elite to their friends, we should consider it both in the context of the massive land expropriation and redistribution that marked the 405 and 305 and in relation to sacrificial practices implied by the Horatian posture of the sacerdos Musarum, or “priest of the Muses.”Land grants, since the time of Sulla and even before, were both an incentive held out to prospective soldiers and, arguably, a means of securing loyalty—a political strategy that enabled a general to maintain relations with his veterans, once released from service, and thus to move from the sphere of military to political power. In the context of literary patronage,
[10] I borrow the term “ideological veil” from Gordon (1990a, 192), who, himself quoting from Merquior (1979, 24–34), writes that “ideology acts as an ‘unconscious veil distorting the image of social reality within [a] class and sublimating its interest basis.’”
Though the evidence for the benefaction of the estate is admittedly tenuous, deriving from the poems themselves with reinforcement from the scholiasts and Suetonius, scholarly literature has fostered a vision of Maecenas's gift as both indisputable fact and canonical myth. Whereas the mythic stature of the estate quietly reinforces the assumption of fact regarding its provenance, the illusion of empiricism in turn reifies the poet's relationship with his patron as one indissolubly linked with this act of benefaction. Rather than get caught in this circle of assumptions regarding historical events that elude empirical recovery, I choose to view Horace's estate as a symbol of benefaction that is variously constructed in his poetry and multiply implicated in cultural discourses and practices of the Augustan period: in addition to sacerdotal practice and hierarchical patronage, we see land expropriation and redistribution, Epicurean withdrawal from
In keeping with the excessively stratified nature of Roman society, and the biography of “freedman's son” that Horace presents for himself in his verse, representations of the estate reveal it particularly as a source of anxiety concerning the poet's status: Does the gift convert the freeborn poet too completely into a client, entailing too many obligations to those clearly superior in terms of political as well as socioeconomic status; or does it constitute a symbol of the poet's elite landholding rank, a gift in the spirit of voluntary and affective friendship? And, if the latter, do the estate's associations with aristocratic otium belie or create fissures in the poet's creed of modest living and rustic simplicity—an attitude at once propagan—distic or “Augustan” and self-interested? The answer to all these questions is, of course, affirmative, but which affirmative dominates is always determined in relation to the identity of the particular audience whose interests the speaker has in mind (and frequently identifies with).
To determine the actual lineaments of Horace's audience and the literate population in ancient Rome under the Principate is by no means easy, or even possible; the effort has occupied much recent scholarship.
[11] For discussions of the multiple audiences of Horatian verse, see Oliensis 1998, 6, and Gold 1992, 162–63. For levels of audience in relation to public readings or performance in particular, see Quinn 1982, 140–64. See Harris 1989, 222–29, for a quick overview of literacy and “book production” in the late Republic and early Empire. Both Quinn and Harris emphasize that literature was most often an aural experience, citing the common use of readers by the upper classes.
The difficulty is compounded by the numerous ways in which literature might be experienced—at a “public” performance, at a private recitation for a small circle, listening to a slave employed as reader, or, finally, reading-though probably vocalizing aloud—to oneself. Hence, there may very well have been those who “heard” poetry in the most public of contexts but who were not in fact literate themselves. Superimposed on this issue of the actual audience, as determined by the specific context in which a work was either heard or read, is the variety of audiences notionally implicated in the text itself. Thus, a single ode or epistle of Horace's has at least four different levels of audience, to whom it speaks regardless of the actual site of consumption: the addressee or the pronominal “you” of the lyric or epistolary form, Horace's patrons—Maecenas and Augustus—to whom individual poems or whole collections are addressed, the greater readership of Rome (for example, the public to whom Horace's epistolary collection[12] Oliensis (1998, 6–7) places Maecenas and Augustus, when not the addressees, in the category of “overreaders”—an audience implicated in, but not directly addressed by, a poem.
In spite of the frequency with which these several audiences may overlap, the generic transition from the Odes to the Epistles accentuates the distinction between “public” and “private” and actively reconfigures the relations between poet, patron, and audience, as Horace retreats from the public position of lyric priest, offering a gift of symbolic sacrifice, into the didactic role of the philosopher in his epistolary garden.The concept of the “gift,” I suggest, brings into focus this particular dynamic by which the social relations defining Horace's experience of literary patronage at once determine and are reflexively modified by his poems. The idea of a gift economy as a hermeneutic lens or methodological tool for interpreting this reciprocal dynamic is by no means unprecedented. In his monumental exploration of imperial euergetism in the Greco—Roman world, Bread and Circuses (1 990), Veyne shows the strong influence of Marcel Mauss's essay The Gift (1990 [1950]) and the subsequent work in cultural anthropology that it promoted. Moreover, scholars of personal or “social” patronage, such as Richard Sailer (1982) and Suzanne Dixon (1993), as well as of the Roman economy, such as Keith Hopkins (1983b, also offer interpretations informed by anthropological studies of the gift. Only Dixon's study, however, draws explicit parallels between the character of “primitive” economies and the meaning of gifts and debt in the Roman elite. Moreover, although the work of scholars such as Leslie Kurke (1991), among others, has demonstrated the relevance of anthropology to the interpretation of Greek literature, such scholarship has not, for the most part, been undertaken in Roman literary studies. Because anthropological studies have been invoked in discussions of the Roman economy and social relations, but rarely examined in detail as comparative paradigms and then not in the context of interpreting Latin literature, my first chapter attempts to be as explicit as possible about the relevant areas of comparison and the usefulness of anthropology as a hermeneutic point of departure.
Indeed, as Mauss's speculations suggest, the early history of Roman contract law may have reflected social attitudes toward material transactions that resemble those of the gift economies of Polynesia, Melanesia, and the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest—the societies on which he based his case studies (1990 [1950], 47–53) In his analysis of the rituals and language of Roman legal transactions Mauss, followed by Emile Benveniste and Pierre Bourdieu, observed that the ideas of “gift” and “contract” were originally compressed into a single vocabulary that later split into two (Benveniste 1973, 66–82; Bourdieu 1977, 172). In line with Mauss's observations, we find that the Epistles present a vision of Horace's “past” lyric self
[13] For discussions of the nexum and problems with the evidence, see Watson 1975, 111–24. See too the bibliography of Mauss 1990 [1950], 137 n. 5.
the body of the debtor was quite literally owned by the lender until the loan was made good. In his discussion of the archaic economy, Mauss views the nexum as a kind of transitional state between primitive gift exchange and Roman contract law (1990 [1950], 49). Though patronage was not legally a contractual relationship, Horace's literary treatment of benefaction—particularly in the seventh epistle—evokes the trace of contract law's “prehistory.”In addition, the mytho-historical past that Rome constructed for itself—the hybrid world of the Homeric era—displays social gift exchange in the rituals attending xenia, or guest-host friendship. Horace's own reference to xenia and the aristocratic gift exchange by which it functioned, again in Epistles 1.7, points up the degree to which such former social stages, whether mythical or historical, could provide a way of conceptualizing the obligations and expectations entailed in patronage. Traces of older economic systems inhabit the culture of the late first century B.C.E. as the “ideological fallout” of previous periods.
[14] Turner (1974, 14) claims: “The culture of any society at any moment is more like the debris, or ‘fall-out,’ of past ideological systems.” Cf. Kurke 1991, 88, for the relevance of this idea to archaic and classical Greece.
To what effect does Horace invoke these older systems and figure patronage in terms of a specifically contractual reciprocity? And what effect does such figuration have on the maintenance or reappropriation of poetic autonomy? That is, though Horace may present his debt as “paid off,” in what ways does he still need to reclaim authority? It is questions such as these that the chapters on Epistles 1 treat.Insofar as I introduce the conclusions drawn by cultural anthropologists about strictly “primitive” nonmonetary cultures, my paradigm of a gift economy may appear an inexact fit for Roman literary patronage in some particulars. However, as Charles Martindale has pointed out in his book on hermeneutics and classical scholarship, Redeeming the Text, a particular hermeneutic lens or methodology enables us to “perceive” phenomena that otherwise we might not see (1993, 2). Because critical access to the institution of patronage is mediated, for the most part, through textual sources, it is never free of the ideology inherent in language.
[15] See D. Kennedy 1992 on the problem of language and ideology for the critic of the Augustan period.
This problem of getting behind the language that a society uses to describe its own functions is of course compounded when so much of the documentary evidence available[16] See Habinek 1998, 8, for reading practices that challenge the notion of the transparency of the linguistic sign. On “historical empiricism” as a philological method that denies its hermeneutic status, see Galinsky 1992b, 1–40, and Peradotto 1983, 22.
However, anthropologists have long noted the discrepancies between the claims that a society makes and “the unrecognized system of ideas and organization of attitudes giving rise to the express statements of significance” (Goldhill 1986, 112). And though the dangers of distortion afflict any act of interpretation, a hermeneutic lens focused on the possible distortions and ideological veils in a society's own self-conception may in fact clarify rather than obscure.Nonetheless, I emphasize that my reading of Horace in the following chapters is an interpretation, and all interpretations are, for better or worse, translations into meaning: that is, by rendering the inaccessibility and opacity and refractoriness of a foreign culture into terms that are meaningfully productive for us, an interpretive reading necessarily performs a kind of translation. As Peter Rose points out in his defense of the relevance of a Marxist approach to classical antiquity, the intelligibility of our answers depends on the terms in which they are cast.
[17] Rose 1992, 22 n. 39: “for any answers about a different society to be intelligible to us, they must at least be cast in terms that are analytically productive for us.”
The type of reading practices that fall under the rubric “Marxist” in fact share a certain ground with anthropological approaches. Both note the presence of ideological distortions in a culture's self-conceptions; but whereas anthropology tends to emphasize the functional element of ideology and symbolic systems, Marxism focuses more on the potential antagonism between interest groups lying beneath an ideology that serves to maintain the position of those with economic power.[18] See Sailer 1982, 37–38, on these two views regarding patronage.
My interpretations of the social relations of patronage are informed overall by the writings of Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, Karl Polanyi, and Bourdieu, but I have eschewed a dogmatic or fundamentalist application of any single theoretical paradigm, preferring