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Literature
Lecture 18: Roman philosophy
=Horace
-Another poetic genius of the early Augustan period
-Wide-ranging poetic corpus.
-The Roman Odes: the finest exposition of the Horatian voice.
=Elegist
-In contrast to the polymath Horace, a group of poets who were his
contemporaries obsessively focused on one kind of poetry: the elegists
-Propertius, Tibullus, the rare female poet Sulpicia, and Ovid.
-It should not be thought that elegy simply translates real lives
wholesale into verse, without the mediation of intertextual erudition and
artistry. There is passion and raw emotion, but there is also a strong
sense of the role of the love poet as being subject to aesthetic choice.
-Roman love elegy had considerable influence over the development of
the subjective expression of first-person emotion in poetry: perhaps the
defining characteristic of poetry in the modern world.
=General overview of Ovid’s amatory works: Amores, Ars amatoria,
Remedia amoris
-By the time Ovid came to write, the elegiac tradition was already well
developed. What he did with the tradition of self-display was to drive it
to extremes
-“Every lover is a soldier”, Am. 1.9.1): every lover enters into a
discourse of erotic imagery in dialogue and in conflict with his society,
literary, social, and political.
-Ovid’s amatory works put private life on display – or rather, show us
how private life is always already on display, a fiction played out for
real, a reality fantasized, which are the main issues throughout the
Ovidian corpus.
-Amores: a collection of short poems playing with the topoi of love
elegy: the locked-out lover, the slave go-between, the traditional
symptoms of love, the rich rival, the witch-bawd, infidelity, the
military, political, and poetic alternatives, and even the occasional
successful erotic encounter.
-Ars amatoria: a didactic poem in elegiacs which teaches the reader
how to be a good lover: how to catch a woman, how to keep her, and
(addressed to women) how to catch and keep a man.
-Remedia amoris: teaches us how to be good at breaking up.
=Fiction and reality, truth and falsehood, secret and public
-Constantly to tease the reader over the question of whether he
means what he says, whether he is talking about love or about poetry,
fiction or reality.
-To play with the reader’s desire to know:
1. Book I Elegy V: Corinna in an Afternoon (Amores)
“It was hot, and the noon hour had gone by:
I was relaxed, limbs spread in the midst of the bed.
One half of the window was open, the other closed:
the light was just as it often is in the woods,
it glimmered like Phoebus dying at twilight,
or when night goes, but day has still not risen.
Such a light as is offered to modest girls,
whose timid shyness hopes for a refuge.
Behold Corinna comes, hidden by her loose slip,
scattered hair covering her white throat –
like the famous Semiramis going to her bed,
one might say, or Lais loved by many men.
I pulled her slip away – not harming its thinness much;
yet she still struggled to be covered by that slip.”
2. The poem plays around with light and half-light, hiding and sight,
covering and uncovering. As Corinna teasingly plays at refusing to
uncover herself, so Ovid, the poet, plays at refusing to uncover
himself, his poetry, his sex, to the reader.
3. The famous covering-cum-pointing gesture of Venus in art
-Truth and falsehood, fiction and reality, secrets and publicity,
sincerity and pose: these are the concerns of a lover, and are at issue
throughout the amatory poetry, for they are central to the project of
subjectivity which always raises crucial questions in Augustan poetry.
-The refusal to tell secrets, to let us see fully what is going on, the
pretence that we are spying on something private; the pretence that
we are sneaking a look at something hidden. All these things
contribute to creating the poetic and erotic force of love poetry.
-Having just told the story of Mars and Venus, in order to encourage
lovers to be relaxed about infidelity, Ovid strikes a pose of pious
indignation at anyone who would divulge the secrets of the mystery
religions:
“It’s not credible that Phoebus would kiss Diana that way,
but Mars often does that with his Venus.
‘What are you up to?’ I cried, ‘spreading my joys around?
I claim jurisdiction over my girl!
What’s yours is shared with me, what’s mine with you –
Why has some third come into our property?’”
=General overview of Roman philosophy
-Greek origin:
1. Philosophy had entered Rome as a Greek importation, and those
who taught it mainly stemmed from Greece or from still further east
of Italy
2. Romans who wished to study philosophy generally travelled to
Athens or to other Greek-speaking centres.
3. The formation of Roman philosophy is the process of the gradual
adoption and adaptation of Greek philosophical doctrines by Roman
authors.
-Beginning of Roman philosophy
1. Early in the principate of Augustus, Quintus Sextius founded a
school that combined Stoic ethics with such principles of
Pythagoreanism, but short-lived. Apart from this, there were no
exclusively Roman schools of philosophy, as distinct from the longestablished Academics, Epicureans, and Stoics.
2. Prior to Lucretius and Cicero, there had been no philosophical
writings in the Latin vernacular.
3. Early philosophers:
3.1. Lucretius (95–50 bc): Epicurean, On the Nature of Things (De
rerum natura), didactic poem
3.2. Cicero (106–43 bc): Academic, Republic (De republica), Laws (De
legibus), Stoic Paradoxes (Paradoxa Stoicorum Academica)
3.3. Varro (116–27 bc): Antiochean, On the Latin Language (De lingua
Latina)
3.4. Seneca, the younger (ad 1–65): Stoic, Consolations, On Anger (De
ira), On the Shortness of Life (De brevitate vitae)
-Roles of philosophy in Rome
1. Although few Romans cultivated and wrote philosophy at a high
level, their number is counterbalanced by the many whom it touched
and influenced vicariously:
1.1. Horace and Virgil had studied philosophy, includes Stoic and
Epicurean themes in their verse.
1.2. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, had already found it politic to
have a court philosopher, and two centuries later the Stoic Marcus
Aurelius would sit on the imperial throne.
3. It is difficult to think of a society where members of the upper
class were more generally aware of philosophy than seems to have
been the case in Imperial Rome. For some of them, that awareness
will have been quite superficial and scarcely positive, but every
senator or knight would have known the difference between the
values of a Stoic and those of an Epicurean.
-Legacy of Roman philosophy:
1. The influence of Cicero and Seneca was enormous on many
thinkers from the early Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth
century, outstripping in its general diffusion the impact of even Plato
and Aristotle
2. Montaigne’s essays constantly reflect his reading of Seneca’s
Moral Letters to Lucilius / Locke drew heavily on Cicero’s On Duties
(De officiis) for his political thought / Hume modelled his celebrated
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion on Cicero’s On the Nature of
the Gods.
=Cicero
-General overview
1. Self-awareness as a philosopher: his conception of his role as a
pioneer Roman philosopher. He adopted that role most insistently in
the last two years of his life: “Philosophy [at Rome] has lain dormant
up to now, lacking any illumination in Latin. If I, when I was busy,
have been of some service to my fellow citizens, I should also, in my
leisure, try to help them by casting light on philosophy and
advocating it.” (Tusculan Disputations i 5)
2. In that short period (46–44 bc), Cicero wrote well over thirty books.
3. His voluminous philosophical writings range over most of the
topics and thinkers that were talking points during the period when he
wrote.
4. Cicero’s status as a world-historical figure owes much to his
extraordinary combination of rhetoric, politics, and philosophy.
-Cicero’s Stoicism over against Epicureanism
1. His position is unequivocally opposed to Epicureanism.
2. The Stoic ethical imprint is unmistakable
3. He disliked the rigidity and technical refinements of Stoicism
4. Yet he strongly approved: philosophy’s focus upon rationality,
social obligation and control of the passions.
5. These cardinal features of Stoicism chimed well with his nostalgia
for the Roman rectitude he found largely absent from his own times.
-Cicero’s Pragmatism over against Idealism
1. In the De republica, criticizing Plato’s utopianism, Scipio Africanus
(the main spokesman, the great soldier and statesman) favours a
mixed constitution, with an elected meritocracy and a judicial system
that emphasizes the equality of all in law.
2. Rather than design an ideal state, Cicero emphasizes pragmatism
and the value of checks and balances established over a long period
of trial and error, as reflected in Rome’s early struggles and eventual
success.
3. In effect, Cicero is defending the mature Roman constitution.
4. The naturalness and necessity of justice for a successful
community. That theme is developed, with the help of Stoicism, in the
De legibus: “the law is the highest reason, situated in nature, which
commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. The very
same reason, when it has been established and perfected in the
human mind, is law.” (i 18)
5. Connections are then drawn between perfected reason, wisdom,
natural justice and the divinely directed commonwealth of gods and
humans.