Download Barbara Vinken (Hg.) Translatio Babylonis

Barbara Vinken (Hg.)
Translatio Babylonis
Barbara Vinken (Hg.)
Translatio Babylonis
Unsere orientalische Moderne
Wilhelm Fink
Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Center for Advanced Studies LMU (CAS)
Umschlagabbildung:
Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, 1868 (Ausschnitt)
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Inhalt
BARBARA VINKEN
Einleitung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
The Egyptian Within: A Roman figure for Civil War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
13
SUSANNA ELM
When Augustine spoke of Babylon what did he see?
Dress and Empire in the Two Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
29
ANDREA FRISCH
Christian Humanism and the Double Translation of Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . .
43
ALBRECHT KOSCHORKE
Der innere Orient des barocken Trauerspiels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
53
ANDREA POLASCHEGG
Wir (alle) sind Babylon (gewesen).
Eine deutsch-babylonische Genealogie der Moderne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
63
CORDULA REICHART
Römische Elegien – Griechische Liebe? Goethes Babylon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
91
HEIDE VOLKENING
Alltag und Orient (E.T.A. Hoffmanns Der Goldene Topf ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
ECKART GOEBEL
Esmeralda. Victor Hugo – Goethe – Thomas Mann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
ANNA-LISA DIETER
Adonis in Paris oder Orient im Okzident:
Balzacs Roman Illusions perdues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
JOHN T. HAMILTON
Cléopâtre pour Cléopâtre. Das innere Absolute und die Wiederbelebung
der Zivilisation in Gautiers Une nuit de Cléopâtre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
MARKUS MESSLING
Massimo Bontempelli und Emilio Cecchi.
Exorzismus des ‚Orients‘ und ästhetischer retour à l’ordre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
6
INHALT
MICHAEL RIESER
Spleen lumineux de l’Orient? Die Pyramiden von Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
BARBARA VINKEN
Nana: Venus à rebours. Das Paris des II. Empire als Wiederkehr
Roms/Babylons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
CORDULA REICHART
Der ewige Streit um Victoria. Kult und Kulturkampf bei Proust . . . . . . . . . 221
REBEKKA SCHNELL
Das Schillern der Figuren: Prousts „Venise tout encombrée d’Orient“ . . . . . 243
PERSONENREGISTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
AUTORENVERZEICHNIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
BARBARA VINKEN
Einleitung
Bertolt Brecht hat die Formel vom Moloch und Baal für eine Moderne geprägt, die
sich darin wieder erkennt und selbst kritisiert. Mit Moloch und Baal erinnert
Brecht an die Menschenopfer praktizierenden Kulte des alten Orients, gegen die
sich Juden und Christen definierten. Das Alte Testament ist voll vom Kampf gegen
solche Kulte, welche erst die Neuzeit als Schreckensbilder endgültig überwunden
glaubte. Nach dem Selbstverständnis des Christentums wie der Aufklärung war das
in Europa gelungen. So hat im 19. Jahrhundert Joseph de Maistre, an den in jüngerer Zeit René Girard anknüpfte, dieses Gelingen noch einmal emphatisch aufgerufen. Er sah in der Überwindung der Sündenbocklogik den zivilisatorisch entscheidenden Triumph des Westens. Dazu steht der bei Brecht zum Gemeinplatz
gewordene Vergleich der modernen Welt mit den von Baal oder Moloch geprägten
Schrecken des alten Orients quer. Neben die Vorstellung einer je nach Perspektive
durch das Christentum oder die Aufklärung zivilisierten Moderne tritt so das Bild
der Moderne als einer barbarischen Epoche, in der die verheerenden, Menschenopfer fordernden Götzenkulte im Herzen des Abendlandes zurückgekehrt sind und
mit der Macht der Wiederkehr des Verdrängten wüten. Man hat der intuitiven
Drastik dieser Selbstdiagnose angesichts der Schrecken des 20. Jahrhunderts nicht
von ungefähr Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Aber die inhaltliche, orientalische Seite
der Schreckensformel hat man unter „Rhetorik“ verbucht; der Sache nach ist sie
kaum je in den Blick geraten.
Geistesgeschichtlich ist diese Wiederkehr des Orients in der Moderne der sogenannten „orientalischen Renaissance“ im 19. Jahrhundert zuzuordnen, die wesentlich mit dem Namen Edgar Quinets verknüpft ist. In seinem wegweisenden Essay
„De la renaissance orientale“ (1841) beschreibt Quinet die Geschichte der Welt als
eine Art Hochzeit, die nur dann fruchtbar ist, wenn sich Orient und Okzident
vereinigen.1 Ebenso wie die Renaissance des 16. Jahrhunderts Europa von Grund
auf erneuert habe, führe die orientalische Renaissance zu einer fundamental veränderten Gesellschaft: Durch die Rückbesinnung auf die eigenen Ursprünge verspricht sich Quinet eine Regeneration, ja eine Wiedergeburt Europas. Der Orient
sei nach dieser zweiten Renaissance nicht mehr das Andere, Exotische, Barbarische
gegenüber der aufgeklärten westlichen Welt, sondern deren integraler Bestandteil.
Diese optimistische Vision realisiert sich – freilich in einem ganz anderen Sinne, als
Quinet meinte: Der Orient erweist sich als Einschluss des Anderen im Eigenen, als
unvordenkliche Spaltung im Herzen des Abendlandes. Der Diskurs über den Orient im 19. Jahrhundert führt nicht zu einer Selbstvergewisserung Europas, sondern
1 Edgar Quinet, „De la renaissance orientale“, in: Revue des Deux Mondes 28 (1841), S. 112-130.
8
BARBARA VINKEN
vielmehr zu einer radikalen Erschütterung des eigenen Selbstverständnisses: Er evoziert konfliktträchtige Fragen über das Verhältnis zwischen Neuem Testament und
jüdischer Bibel, über den Ursprung und die Definition Europas, und, damit zusammenhängend, über die – klassisch-abendländische oder vielmehr babylonische – Natur Roms, die sich in der europäischen Geschichte fortschreibt.
Die orientalische Renaissance stellt daher einen Wendepunkt in der westlichen
Selbstwahrnehmung dar, als sich von hier aus die beiden Fundamente unserer Kultur – Bibel und antike Überlieferung – ganz anders ausnehmen. Das Paradigma des
Orients zur Beschreibung und Kritik der Moderne verdankt sich dabei maßgeblich
dem Einfluss der deutschen Mythenforschung. So etabliert Friedrich Creuzer in
„Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen“ (1810-12)
eine für die vergleichenden Religionswissenschaften wegweisende „Alterthumskunde“, die Okzident und Orient verbindet, indem sie das systematische Fortwirken orientalischer Grundformen in den antiken Mythologien aufweist. Exemplarisch ist hier der im Werk Creuzers hervorgehobene Phalluskult, der unter den
Namen Venus/ Aphrodite/ Diana/ Cybele/ Astarte/ Ischtar Varianten eines Typs
darstellte, der in der Creuzer-Rezeption (in der Übersetzung Guigniauts) typisiert
und französisch ausgebaut wurde. Die Heimat dieser Kulte war der Orient und vor
allem Babylon. Auch das antike Rom selbst, folgt man Creuzer, hat die orientalischen Kulte nicht mehr beherrscht, sondern umgekehrt beherrschten sie Rom: mit
Julius Caesar wurde der römische Venuskult zum Staatskult.2 Mit Venus triumphierte in Rom – so Creuzers Provokation – im Herzen des Okzidents der Orient.
Der Marienkult hat, nicht weniger synkretistisch, viele dieser Elemente integriert.
Und so wurde der orientalische Kult vom Christentum weniger überwunden, als
vielmehr – in Hegels Worten – „aufgehoben“. Das Christentum entpuppt sich in
dieser Optik als Fortschreibung eines orientalischen Musters, dessen Wirksamkeit
latent, und gerade deshalb von den Zeitgenossen verkannt bleibt. Aufgedeckt werden diese verborgenen mythischen Strukturen im Medium der Literatur. Balzac
und Flaubert, Zola und Proust buchstabieren ihre Gegenwart durch diese Mythen
hindurch. Den gegenwartsbezogenen, realistischen Texten unterliegen präzise mythische Strukturen, welche die Zeit von Julimonarchie, zweitem Kaiserreich und
dritter Republik bestimmen. So erzählt etwa Zolas Nana die französische Geschichte der Gegenwart vor der Folie der römischen Geschichte, in der orientalische Kulte insistieren: Wie Venus Allegorie des kaiserlichen Roms, so ist Nana Allegorie des zweiten Kaiserreiches; römische Venus, die Zola getreu Guigniaut, dem
Creuzerübersetzer, mit der Großen Mutter Astarte/Cybele kurzschließt und ihr
zugleich die Züge der Gottesmutter Maria einschreibt.
Die Gegenwart wird – exemplarisch, aber nicht nur bei Zola – durch eine orientalische Linse betrachtet und bekommt dadurch eine ganz andere historische Tiefendimension. Zum Vorschein kommt dabei ein Selbstverständnis von Moderne,
2 Vgl. Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 4 Bde.,
Leipzig/Darmstadt: Carl Wilhelm Leske 1837-1843.
EINLEITUNG
9
das nicht fortschrittstrunken ist, sondern sich im Gegenteil vom globalen Triumph
mythisch erledigter, totgeglaubter Kulte bedroht sieht und die eigene Zeit im Bild
orientalischer Kulte zu erkennen und entziffern versucht. Das Selbstverständnis der
Moderne spaltet sich im Verdacht eines unerhörten Rückfalls, der das von Hegel
historisierte und von de Maistre beglaubigte heilsgeschichtliche Schema der Erlösung von grausamen Götzendiensten in seiner Dramatik übernimmt, um in diesem
Drama statt der siegreichen Ideologie von der humanistisch-tugendhaften Antike
das verheerende Repertoire anhaltender Unheilsgeschichten wieder zu finden.
Der Titel des vorliegenden Bandes schließt das geschichtliche Übertragungsmodell des Westens mit „Babylon“ als Chiffre des Orients – und Chiffre Roms – kurz.
Für Augustinus ist das von Gott abgefallene Rom, wie Susanna Elm in ihrem Beitrag zeigt, Inbegriff der civitas terrena; es wurde gegründet „als das zweite Babylon
und als Tochter des ersten Babylons“.3 Ist Rom also neues Babylon, so meint translatio Romae immer schon translatio Babylonis. Rom wie Babylon sind dabei an die
Figur des Brudermords geknüpft, den Augustinus im Alten Testament, in der Geschichte von Kain und Abel, vorgeprägt sieht, und der sich in der Stadtgründung
Roms, im Mord von Romulus an Remus wiederholt. In den römischen Bürgerkriegen nimmt dieses von Kain vorgezeichnete Muster exemplarische Gestalt an, das
fortan die europäische Geschichte heimsucht.4 In der Fortschreibung der römischen Geschichte nistet verkappt das Paradigma eines „inneren Orients“, das die
fortschrittsgläubige, heilsgeschichtliche Dimension der translatio imperii konterkariert. Dieser innere Orient ist Figur einer Spaltung im Eigenen, die auf einen ‚orientalisierten‘ Anderen projiziert wird, und qua Übertragung in immer neuen Figurationen wiederkehrt. Geschichte gerät so zur blinden Wiederholung des römischen
Fluchs von Brudermord und Bürgerkrieg. An Stelle der äußeren Bedrohung tritt
die „Latenz des nie überwundenen Bürger- und Bruderkriegs“.5
Was mit der translatio Babylonis immer schon in den Blick gerät, ist die untergründige und unbeherrschbare Dynamik der rhetorischen Figuren und Topoi,
durch die Rom bzw. Babylon übertragen, überschrieben und zugleich kryptisch
entstellt wird. ‚Orient‘ bezeichnet demnach keinen bestimmten geographischen
Ort, sondern fungiert als diffuse Chiffre für verschiedene, mit ‚Fremdheit‘ konnotierte Völker und Eigenschaften: Dient etwa den augusteischen Dichtern Ägypten
als Projektionsfläche für die Barbarei des Bürgerkriegs, so sind es bei Petrarca die
despotischen Türken, an denen die vermeintliche Überlegenheit des Westens profiliert wird. Dabei geben die verschiedenen Figurationen des Orients weniger Aufschluss über das Verhältnis von Abend- und Morgenland, denn über die Brüche
3 Aurelius Augustinus, Der Gottesstaat, XVIII,22, hg. u. übers. von P. Simon u. C.J. Perl, Paderborn:
Schöningh 1979, S. 333.
4 Augustinus, Der Gottesstaat, XV,5, S. 11-13.
5 Anselm Haverkamp, „Arcanum translationis. Das Fundament der lateinischen Tradition“, in: Tumult. Schriften zur Verkehrswissenschaft, Bd. 30: Römisch, hg. von Walter Seitter und Cornelia Vismann, Zürich/Berlin: diaphanes 2006, S. 19-30, hier S. 19f.
10
BARBARA VINKEN
und Konflikte im westlichen Selbst, die auf einen orientalischen Schirm projiziert
werden. So fungiert Ägypten, wie Michèle Lowrie in ihrem Beitrag zeigt, bei den
augusteischen Dichtern insgeheim als Figur der inneren, römischen Barbarei, ebenso
wie sich die vermeintlich türkisch-orientalischen Laster für Luther und Calvin als
urchristliche Sünden entpuppen (vgl. der Beitrag von Andrea Frisch).
Die bekannte, inzwischen zur Vulgata der Forschung erhobene OrientalismusThese von Edward Said ist vor diesem Hintergrund anders zu lesen: Der Orient
steht nicht im Dienst der von Said vermuteten Selbstlegitimation des Westens;
vielmehr lässt er die Moderne in einem genuin orientalischen Licht erscheinen. Die
von Said stark gemachte Vorstellung einer Opposition von Okzident und Orient
erweist sich als pure Illusion. Der Orient tritt gerade nicht als das ganz Andere auf,
sondern er zeigt sich als das Herzstück des Eigenen, das nie ausgetrieben werden
kann.
Anhand exemplarischer Analysen von der römischen Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert beleuchten die hier versammelten Beiträge, wie das Erbe Babylons mannigfach
rezipiert, überschrieben und umbesetzt wurde. Der innere Orient erweist sich
dabei als höchst variable, schillernde Figur, die in verschiedensten Konfigurationen
auftritt: Er begegnet in Gestalt eines „wandernden Orients“ im barocken Trauerspiel, an dem zugleich versteckt die politische Situation Schlesiens unter den Habsburgern verhandelt wird (Albrecht Koschorke); als „Spleen lumineux de l’Orient“,
der sich bei Baudelaire in den Pariser Triumphbögen, Siegessäulen und Obelisken
als Sinnbildern einer gescheiterten translatio imperii bricht (Michael Rieser); in
Gautiers Kleopatra, die als orientalische Königin das Ideal des l’art pour l’art inkarniert (John T. Hamilton); im Vexierbild der Esmeralda in Thomas Manns Doktor
Faustus, die als orientalische Sphinx zugleich deutsch-französisch kodiert ist und
auf die intertextuelle Spur Hugos und Goethes führt (Eckart Goebel); in Emilio
Cecchis Programm der Austreibung des ‚inneren Orients‘, dessen Versuchungen
die europäische Gesellschaft unter Preisgabe des humanistischen Vernunftideals
verfallen ist (Markus Messling); in Form eines Wunderbaren bei E.T.A. Hoffmann,
in dem sich die Gegenwart in ihrer ganzen Alltäglichkeit präsentiert (Heide Volkening); oder in Gestalt eines spezifisch „deutschen Babylonismus“, in dem das babylonische Altertum eine erstaunliche Synthese mit der deutschen Kultur der Jahrhundertwende eingeht (Andrea Polaschegg).
Babylon triumphiert nicht nur in Rom, sondern auch in Paris, in Venedig und
in Berlin: Die Hauptstadt der Welt, das Paris des 19. Jahrhunderts, entpuppt sich
bei Balzac und Zola als neues Babylon, wie die Beiträge von Anna-Lisa Dieter und
Barbara Vinken zeigen. Einige Jahrzehnte später, in Prousts Recherche, verschmelzen im Pariser Bois de Boulogne zeitgenössisch-modische mit heidnisch-antiken
Kulten, und Venedig erweist sich als „tout encombrée d’Orient“ (vgl. die Beiträge
von Cordula Reichart und Rebekka Schnell). Im Berlin des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts schließlich ersteht, wie Andrea Polaschegg zeigt, gar der Turm zu Babel in
neuer Gestalt wieder.
Der Band macht so eine andere Genealogie der Moderne entzifferbar, die nicht
auf linearem Fortschritt und teleologischer Erfüllung beruht, sondern auf der Wie-
EINLEITUNG
11
derkehr orientalisch-antiker Muster und Figuren, die ungeahnte, vielfältige Konstellationen mit der jeweiligen zeitgenössischen Kultur eingehen. Die Literatur legt
diese mythischen Muster offen, die in den zeitgenössischen politischen Diskursen
häufig verborgen bleiben. Hier werden somit die literarisch-figuralen, historischen
und kulturellen Recodierungen eines inneren Orients lesbar, der zu allererst Aufschluss über die gebrochene, gespaltene Identität der westlichen Gesellschaft selbst
gibt. Das hier untersuchte Orientparadigma hat somit nicht nur kritisch-analytische Funktion, sondern könnte darüber hinaus auch zu einem anderen Selbstverständnis des Westens bzw. des Subjekts führen, durch das innere Konflikte und
deren Projektionen als solche erkannt werden. Jenseits des viel beschworenen clash
of civilizations markiert die Literatur einen anderen Raum, in dem eben diese
(auto-)destruktive Logik wenn nicht überwunden, so doch zumindest entlarvt werden kann.
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
The Egyptian Within: A Roman Figuration of Civil War
The trope I will call “the Egyptian within” grafts ancient prejudicial stereotypes
onto “the enemy within,” a conventional figuration of civil war. This hybrid arose
in the context of Egypt’s role in the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, once
Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt after Pharsalus in 48 and his heir Octavian pursued Antony and Cleopatra there after Actium in 31. Cicero had vituperated his
Roman opponents during the turbulent last twenty years of his life as uncivilized
barbarians or accursed monsters lacking “humanitas”.1 But it is the Augustan poets
who developed “the Egyptian within” as a trope by transferring Cicero’s language
onto Cleopatra, whom they foreground as the enemy.2 Although the eclipse of
Antony’s representation masks the civil war as foreign and lends a patina of justification to an otherwise horrific bloodbath, the poets create a complex trope for the
abject deeply buried within the self.
This orientalism has a different aim from the self-justificatory degradation of
Easterners in the West analyzed by Saïd.3 It projects onto a notional other division
within the self and reveals more about internal conflict than about Roman attitudes
toward others.4 It both occludes and represents civil war and thereby offers a strategy for coping with its social and political devastation. Like all figurations, it cannot be contained – it became available for imperialist appropriation and was directed outward. Just as empire and civil war are inextricably linked at Rome as
elsewhere, this figuration returns in the tradition to re-inscribe the discord that
undergirds expansion.
1 Ingo Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence: The Construction of Reality in Cicero’s Speeches, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 2011. For Cicero’s lexicon of humanity with special attention to the “enemy
within,” see p. 196-200.
2 Maria Wyke, “Augustan Cleopatras: Female Power and Poetic Authority,” in: A. Powell (ed.),
Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus, London: Bristol Classical Press 1994, p. 98140, breaks ground with her feminist analysis of these poems’ representations, particularly in contrast to the woman-empowering, maternal Egyptian depictions of this and other queens, p. 101103, and the positive representation of strong women, such as Livia, at Rome, p. 109. Cleopatra is
a “problematic signifier,” p. 128.
3 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books 1978.
4 Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, p. 389, analyzes how the enemy who is “part of the self ” was
turned into an “other” during the extreme violence that resulted when republic consensus broke
down into civil discord.
14
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
Egypt
The Egypt of the first century BCE was a rich multi-cultural environment, already
famous for its antiquity in Plato (Timaeus 22B) and Herodotus (Histories 2).5 The
ancient native culture had undergone successive waves of first Greek, then Roman
imperial expansion. Alexandria was a Ptolomaic capital of Greek learning, conquered and made a senatorial province by Augustus, where Egyptian hieroglyphics
brushed (or would brush) shoulders with the Egyptian Demotic script, the local
dialect of demotic Greek, classical Greek, Aramaic, Coptic, and Latin.6 This historical Egypt is related to, but distinct from the Egypt of the Greco-Roman imagination, an object of fascination and desire since at least Herodotus, who depicted it
in the fifth century as an exotic place that inverts not just Greek, but universal
customs.7 While most particular reversals, however, are more curiosities than perversions of fundamental norms, two aspects of Egyptian custom emerge as unique:
living with and worshipping animals and, even less laudable from a Greek point of
view, a dependence on monarchy (“they were not able to live a long time without a
king,” Herodotus, Histories 2.147). The Augustan poets lend a negative coloration
to animal cult and slant monarchy into tyranny when they make Egypt figure the
internal enemy of the Roman civil wars.
Erich Gruen’s recent challenge to reductive scholarship on ancient orientalist
stereotypes shows that alongside the construction of an exotic foil to the normative
Greco-Roman self, there existed appreciative and integrative ways of conceptualizing others.8 Beyond Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo (first century BCE)
thought about Egypt as differing from Greece, but with points of overlap and exchange.9 They evaluated many Egyptian customs in a positive light and saw some
5 Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 2011, p. 106.
6 The range of scholarship covered by those who study Roman Egypt, from historians of Roman
imperial administration to literary critics tracing local social context in Greek Alexandrian poetry
to papyrologists seeking to trace multi-lingualism, can be gauged by e.g., Daniel Selden, “Alibis,”
Classical Antiquity 17 (1998), p. 289-413; Pedro Bádenas de la Peña; Sofía Torallas Tovar; Eugenio
R. Luján; María Ángeles Gallego (eds.), Lenguas en Contacto: el testimonio escrito, Madrid: CSIC
2004; Sófia Torallas Tovar, “Linguistic Identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt,” in: A. Papaconstantinou
(ed.), The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids, Farnham: Ashgate
2010, p. 17-43; Andrew Monson, From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and Economic Change
in Egypt, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge Univ. Press 2012.
7 Gruen, Rethinking the Other, p. 76-114; on Herodotus, p. 76-90.
8 Gruen, Rethinking the Other. The book has been critiqued for a simplistic approach to alterity, but
he carries his point that the ancients had more than a simply condemnatory and reductive attitude
toward other societies. See the review by Michael Broder, Bryn Mawr Classical Studies, 2011.08.24.
For another exploration of nuanced views toward others, see also Larissa Bonfante (ed.), The Barbarians of Ancient Europe: Realities and Interactions, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge Univ. Press 2011.
9 Gruen, Rethinking the Other, p. 90-111. Grant Parker, “India, Egypt and Parthia in Augustan
Verse: the post-orientalist turn,” Dictynna 8 (2011), paragraphs 1-30 (http://dictynna.revues.
org/691) makes Herodotus and Diodorus the exceptions for an otherwise generally negative portrayal of Egypt in Greek and Roman literature, paragraph 10; see also Jan Assmann, “Egypt,” in: A.
Grafton et al. (eds.), The Classical Tradition, Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ.
Press 2010, p. 300. Horace, who orientalizes in the Cleopatra Ode, uses the pyramids without
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
15
as deserving imitation. Cultural stereotypes about Eastern peoples circulated alongside more nuanced understandings; conflict and collaboration existed side by side;
the same person could articulate more or less tolerant, appreciative, or informed
statements about other people at different times, under different circumstances.
Gruen limits the virulent depiction of Egypt in antiquity to satire, where foreigner
and native alike are skewered, to invective in oratory, where the opponent always
gets drubbed, and to the poetic depictions of Actium, where Cleopatra takes the
spotlight.10 The origin of “the Egyptian within” in the Roman civil wars stands out
all the more against the diverse, nuanced, and less judgmental approaches to Egypt
among contemporary thinkers.
The monster of civil war
The Egypt of perverted norms found in Augustan poetry reveals more about Roman
anxieties during the collapse of the Republic than about their attitudes toward
Egypt per se. The projection onto the Eastern other uses genuinely Egyptian material, e.g. animal-headed gods and monarchy, to activate a contrast between the
humane and the monstrous that Cicero had used to demonize his opponents Catiline, Piso, and Antony during earlier rounds of internal disturbance (63 to 43).
Cicero’s was the dominant intellectual voice during the formative years of Vergil
and Horace,11 so it is small wonder they picked up distinctively Ciceronian concepts, in this case, “humanitas” and its opposites.12
“The Egyptian within” sets the subhuman against the fully humane, depraved
behavior against ideal universalized norms. This orientalist figure deploys stereotypes distinct from the curiosities recorded in Herodotus and other Greco-Roman
intellectuals. Cicero had already inherited the trope that traitors fall short of humanity. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, written in the 80’s when Marius and Sulla
prejudice in Odes 3.30; they are a “wonder of the world,” see Robin G. M. Nisbet and Niall Rudd,
A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book III, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 2004, p. 369.
10 Wyke, “Augustan Cleopatras,” p. 112, emphasizes the anomaly of her poetic depictions, as well as
that of those in the Augustan period, particularly in contrast to other positive representations of
Egypt, p. 127-8. Jürgen Paul Schwindt, “Rom und der Osten oder Von der Schwierigkeit, sich zu
orientieren (von Catulls Odyssee zu Horaz’ Aeneis),” Dictynna 9 (2012), paragraphs 1-12 (http://
dictynna.revues.org/856), isolates the Augustan period as one when East and West began to be
conceptualized more systematically.
11 Denis C. Feeney, “The odiousness of comparisons: Horace on literary history and the limitations
of synkrisis,” in: M. Paschalis (ed.), Horace and Greek Lyric Poetry, Rethymnon Classical Studies Vol.
1 (2002), p. 7-18. Vergil was seven and Horace two during the Catilinarian conspiracy, Vergil
twenty-six and Horace twenty-one when Caesar was assassinated, each a year older when Cicero
fell to proscription, p. 17-18.
12 Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, emphasizes Cicero’s conceptual creativity; “humanitas” passim, focused treatment p. 201-16. Particularly relevant here, “humanitas demarcates the synchronic distinction between civilization and barbarity within Roman culture in Cicero’s here and now, thereby
introducing a dividing line that cuts across the Roman citizen body,” p. 203. Richard Reitzenstein,
Aufsätze zu Horaz, Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges. 1963, p. 111-13.
16
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
engaged in civil war, illustrates the commonplace: “o feros animos! o crudeles cogitationes! o derelictos homines ab humanitate!” (“O wild spirits! O cruel thoughts!
O men abandoned by humanity!” 4.12).13 The Latin “ferus” (wild) applies to beasts
as well as men and the author capitalizes on the paradox by juxtaposing “homines”
with “humanitate.” Cicero ratchets up such rhetoric in his speeches against Catiline
(63), the leader of a conspiracy by indebted and disaffected nobles who plotted a
coup.14 Our sources from the victors’ side make it hard to determine how much
Cicero exaggerates when he claims they planned to burn down the city – what we
call a crime against humanity. Cicero goes beyond chastising Catiline as an inhuman beast and presents him as a “monstrum,” in Latin a portent, something to be
pointed out as beyond the pale, as supernatural, with links to the homo sacer
(Cicero, In Catilinam 2.1).15 Cicero depicts Catiline’s character as self-contradictory and conflicted (Pro Caelio 12), an internalization of political dissension.
Beyond recognized traitors, Cicero extends this language to his personal opponents (In Pisonem fr. 1). Instead of acknowledging legitimate conflict, Cicero dehumanizes his fellow statesmen, painting them with the same brush as those who
tried to destroy the city. His invective against Antony in the wake of Caesar’s assassination sets the stage for a smear campaign whose elements the poets transfer to
his future consort Cleopatra more than a decade after Cicero’s death. In the Philippics, Antony is not just a “monstrum” (Phil. 13.49, also of his brother Lucius), but
an impure, shameless, effeminate (“impuro, impudico, effeminato”, 3.5) threat to
Roman liberty, who, when nude and drunk, attempted to set a diadem on Caesar’s
head.
hunc igitur ego consulem, hunc civem Romanum, hunc liberum, hunc denique hominem putem…? (Philippics 3.12)
Should I therefore consider this man a consul, a Roman citizen, free, should I consider him finally a man (homo)…?
The elements that recur are: tyranny, sexual profligacy, inverted gender roles,
drunkenness, and dehumanization. These all contrast with the normative Romanness expected of a citizen and a consul.
Sallust’s depiction of Catiline, written shortly after Cicero’s Philippics, develops
this discourse further with the paradoxical unification of contradictions, more extensive dehumanization, and consorting with foreign enemies. His famous portrait
of Catiline makes of him a bundle of antitheses: noble and depraved; strong in
13 Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, p. 208.
14 Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, p. 131 of Cat. 1: “The first step towards remedying the potentially
fatal affliction of the state thus consists in a radical segregation of friends and enemies: the externalization of the danger will reestablish well-defined boundaries between the domestic and the foreign.”
15 Viktor Pöschl, Horazische Lyrik, Interpretationen, 2nd ed., Heidelberg: Winter 1991, p. 92 makes a
parallel with Livy’s calling Sp. Maelius “monstrum”; Robert M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy,
Books 1-5, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 1965, p. 550 sees Maelius as sacer; Roberto Fiori, Homo
sacer: dinamica politico-costituzionale di una sanzione girudico-religiosa, Naples: Jovene 1996,
p. 393-96; Michèle Lowrie, Horace’s Narrative Odes, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997, p. 153.
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
17
body and spirit, but subject to immoderate desires; profligate and greedy, he accords with the vices of his times, which Sallust marks as contradictory among
themselves (“divorsa inter se mala,” Bellum Catilinae 5). He alleges a plethora of
transgressive acts: affairs with a noble maiden, with a Vestal virgin, the murder of
his own son to free the field for wooing a new bride (15). Sallust repeats (with glee?)
the rumor that Catiline made his fellow conspirators drink human blood to seal
their pact (22) and attributes a link between treason and cannibalism to popular
imagination. With a cardinal sin of civil war, Catiline conspires with foreigners
against Rome. The Gallic Allobroges eventually betray him and emerge as heroes,
but the episode inverts proper relations: the foreigner protects Rome against the
internal enemy.
A generation later, the Augustan poets blend Eastern elements with similar dehumanizing language from the representations of Catiline and Antony and transfer
it to Cleopatra to create stereotypes with a long history, but more than a straightforward degradation of the other with a capital ‘o,’ they produce a complex trope
for civil war.16 Horace’s Epode 9 and so-called Cleopatra Ode (Odes 1.37) are the
earliest of these and establishes the basic structure.17 Revilement of subjugation to
a woman, eunuchs, and Egyptian motifs slam Cleopatra in the epode, but it is the
ode that turns the oriental inward. Horace famously pivots from an initial degradation of Antony’s paramour to a more admiring and sympathetic representation.
The negative portrayal in the first half depicts her as crazed, out of control, drunk
on fortune, surrounded by debauched eunuchs in an amalgam of inverted norms
of self-control that span sexuality, bodily ingestion, and emotional self-mastery. She
additionally threatens tyranny to the Capitoline, the seat of empire. Confrontation
with Caesar (Octavian) provides an educative shock: he brings her from crazed fury
to true fears as he chases her with the intent of chaining up this “fatale monstrum”
(deathly portent, Odes 1.37.21). Like Catiline and Piso in Cicero’s rhetoric, she is
a portent;18 like Antony, she is drunk and perverts sexual norms; all these villains
threatened to enslave the free republic and force it to serve a tyrannical master.
16 Pöschl, Horazische Lyrik, p. 81 suggests Horace thinks of Antony and not just eunuchs in the Cleopatra Ode with cum grege turpium virorum (with a flock of foul men, 1.37.9) and recalls the “abschreckendes Bild der sexuellen Verirrungen des Antonius” forwarded by Cicero. He underscores
the feminization of orientalizing tropes, p. 82-3. Antony is a recurrent motif in Ellen Oliensis,
Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 1998; for this poem,
p. 143; “Horace’s Roman comrades can enter the Egyptian present because Cleopatra has disappeared into the Roman past,” p. 144. Andrew Feldherr, “‘Dionysiac Poetics’ and the Memory of
Civil War,” in: B. W. Breed, C. Damon, and A. Rossi (eds.), Citizens of Discord: Rome and its Civil
Wars, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 2010, p. 223-32, analyzes how Cleopatra becomes a figure for
Horace’s own poetry (p. 223) and how Bacchic elements reveals “a foreign presence in the heart of
civic order” (p. 227).
17 Wyke, “Augustan Cleopatras,” p. 106-108, 111, examines orientalism in the depiction of Cleopatra. For a fuller treatment of Odes 1.37 than offered here, see Lowrie, Horace’s Narrative Odes,
p. 139-64.
18 Pöschl, Horazische Lyrik, p. 91-2 compares “monstrum” here of Cleopatra to Cicero’s characterization of Catiline as such at Pro Caelio 12 and Cat. 2.1, cited above, and adds Lucan’s use of similar
vocabulary for Ptolemy.
18
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
Horace makes no mention of civil war and completely elides Antony as Octavian’s
civil opponent. These suppressions have been interpreted as a pro-Augustan and
propagandistic whitewashing of the battle of Actium as a foreign war.19 But not
only could Horace not hide the civil war context from his readership, even had he
wanted to, he could also anticipate that contemporary readers would recognize his
reprise of a discourse brought to such fruition in Cicero.
When the poem pivots to a Cleopatra transformed by shock, she embodies the
contradictions of civil war all the more.20 She is a woman who does not fear death
like a woman (“nec muliebriter,” 22); her nobility (“generosius,” 21) is manifested
in her willingness to commit suicide to preserve her freedom. The paradigm of the
Republican suicide in the pursuit of liberty against Caesar was, of course, Cato. She
may resemble the Stoic sage with her serenity in the face of death, but Cato’s suicide
also became a primary figuration of civil war.21 The killing of fellow citizens goes
within to become the killing of the self. Furthermore, such courage only made her
fiercer (“ferocior,” 29), an attribute of Catiline (Sallust, Catiline 43).22 She recalls
the conspirator’s extreme contradictions as much as noble Cato. Although the latter may get better press, both are implicated in civil war. Horace blends the by now
familiar topoi of Cicero’s civil war discourse with Eastern elements: death by snakebite – the famous asps – marks her exoticism after her transformation as much as
the eunuchs do before.23 This blending distances the internal enemy. But once
readers recognize these features as those of the internal Roman enemy known from
Cicero, the alien reveals as in a mirror the internal conflict and contradiction that
the Romans wanted so very much to extirpate.24
Egyptian or Trojan?
To appreciate the complexity with which Vergil deploys orientalism as a trope for
civil war requires setting his version of Actium on the shield of Aeneas against alternative tropes of ethnicity spread over the Aeneid as a whole.25 The battle itself
19 E.g., Wyke, “Augustan Cleopatras,” p. 112.
20 Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority, p. 139: “If the disrupted symposium encapsulates the
chaos of Rome’s civil wars, by the poem’s end a woman has come to embody all the monstrous furor
these wars unleash.”
21 Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority, p. 143: lists additional Roman suicides due to civil
war (Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Antony).
22 Pöschl, Horazische Lyrik, p. 99: “ferocia animi zeigt Catilina noch im Tod (Sall., Cat. 16, 4)”; “Als
Tacitus das Ende der Republik und die Anfänge des Prinzipats beschreibt, erwähnt er unter den
Ursachen für den Erfolg des neuen Regimes, daß die unbeugsamsten Republikaner im Bürgerkrieg
gefallen waren” (Tac. Ann. 1.2.1).
23 Robin G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970, p. 419: “The double snake was a royal symbol in Egypt.”
24 Feldherr, “Dionysiac Poetics,” p. 231: “working through the recognition rather than the erasure of
the self within the other becomes the force that truly promised to end Rome’s civil war.”
25 For civil war on the shield, see Andreola Rossi, “Roman History on the Shield of Aeneas,” in: Citizens of Discord, p. 145-56. Egypt has deep roots as a paradigm for civil war for Vergil. He had al-
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
19
pits Egyptians against Romans in familiar polarized terms.26 Antony, surrounded
by barbarian wealth (“ope barbarica,” Aeneid 8.685) and followed by the unspeakable evil of his Egyptian wife (“sequitur (nefas) Aegyptia coniunx,” 8.688) battles it
out against the future Augustus; animal-headed gods – themselves portents (“monstra,” 8.696) – target the Olympian deities.27 Cleopatra is identified not by name,
but by rank: as a queen (“regina,” 8.696) who leads her troops with an Egyptian
rattle, she threatens tyranny. The snakes behind her portend her suicide. As for
Horace, some have seen sympathy for the vanquished in the images that follow,
where the Nile opens its embrace to the defeated and Augustus receives tribute
from resistant nations during his triple triumph, and therefore understand Vergil to
question the passage’s dominant triumphalism.28 But the more layered treatment of
others afforded by the poem’s epic scope offers a stronger critique of the Egyptian
paradigm.
Beyond any tonal coloration, Vergil counteracts the justificatory orientalism of
the shield by setting up an alternative orientalist dynamic: those who utter bigoted
language are thwarted or punished. Although this brand of orientalism also furthers the imperial agenda, it operates in an assimilationist rather than dehumanizing mode. Here the figure is not Egyptian, but Trojan.29 The foundational Easterners eventually lose any oriental markings when they are subsumed into Italian
culture and, in the end, any diversity celebrated by the poem is limited to the
multiple ethnicities inhabiting the Italian peninsula. Once again, orientalism figures internal strife. The war between Trojans and Italians prefigures the so-called
social and civil wars that pitted Romans against their neighbors and their selves in
the century before the poem’s composition.30 Vergil laments in his own voice the
disturbance pitting against each other two races that would enjoy eternal peace in
the future (“aeterna gentis in pace futuras,” 12.504). But rather than an irredeemable clash of civilizations, an internal rift that cannot be healed, what the Trojan
paradigm suggests is the possibility of accommodation after civil war.
The categories with which various characters revile the Trojan immigrants are
effeminacy and dress rather than the monstrosity that attaches to Egyptians. Iarbas,
the Dido’s North African suitor, rails to his father Jupiter against Aeneas as a Paris
26
27
28
29
30
ready used it as such at Georgics 210-18; Michèle Lowrie, “Rege incolumi: Orientalism and Security
at Georgics 4.212,” in: H.-Ch. Günther and E. Cingano (eds.), Studies on Vergil in honour of Mario
Geymonat (26.1.1941–17.2.2012), Nordhausen, forthcoming 2015. This passage contrasts with a
more positive representation of Egypt as a lush landscape and the source of the bugonia that will
restore Aristaeus’ bees; Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press 1979, p. 272.
David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 1993, p. 25.
Parker, “India, Egypt and Parthia,” p. 7-8.
Robert A. Gurval, Actium and Augustus: The Politics and Emotions of Civil War, Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press 1995, p. 243-3: on indignatus, which evokes sympathy.
The distinction between Troy and Egypt as models for integration and disintegration respectively
has become clearer to me through discussion with Therese Fuhrer.
Breed, Damon, and Rossi, Citizens of Discord, Introduction, p. 5.
20
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
with a “half-man entourage” (“semiuiro comitatu”), who wears a Maeonian bonnet
and perfumes his hair (Aeneid 4.215-17). In the end he causes damage to Dido
rather than Aeneas. Numanus Remulus harshly contrasts the manly Italians with
the bonnet and sleeve-wearing Phrygians, twice-conquered effeminates who revel
in bright colors, perfumes, and ecstatic religion (9.599, 614-20).31 Ascanius answers the charge of insufficient manhood with a shot through the head (9.632-5).
The dress, however, has to go. When Juno, finally capitulating to Jupiter, allows the
Trojans to settle in Italy, she requires their assimilation to local culture. This means
giving up marks of distinction, language and clothing in particular (12.825). Jupiter accepts the pact of Trojan lineage at the price of their culture (12.834-6).
This surface assimilation, however, only masks fundamental underlying differences within Roman identity that are expressed through hybrid ethnicities. While
the Trojan War is consistently depicted as one between Europe and Asia in absolute
terms (7.223-4; 10.90-1),32 this contrast is balanced by many passages that trace
the Easterners back to the West and vice versa.33 Ilioneus, the Trojan ambassador to
the Latins, derives Aeneas’ ancestry from Dardanus, who comes from Italy, in the
very same speech where he contrasts Europe with Asia. The fact that the Eastern
alien turns out to be a native son deconstructs the opposition. Aeneas’ antagonist
Turnus has Argive lineage: the native son turns out to be an immigrant. These are
merely the most conspicuous instances of Vergil’s systematic presentation of Rome
as an ethnic melting pot.34 If Troy becomes Rome’s inner Orient, it results in a
much more capacious acceptance of the alien than implied by the treatment of
Egypt.
The Aeneid pulls orientalism in two directions. While Egypt projects outward
the monstrosity of civil war, the integration of Troy reinscribes a gentler inner Orient.35 But if the war between Italians and Trojans anticipates Rome’s Social and
Civil Wars, we have to question how well the assimilationist model succeeds. Is the
deconstruction of East and West merely provisional or does difference suppressed
break out eventually as internal conflict? Vergil stages a dialectical relation between
these questions. If the Roman civil wars of the first century ensue from imperial
expansion, then in symbolic terms the originary integration of the Trojan eventu31 Richard F. Thomas, Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition, Cambridge:
Cambridge Philological Society, Supplement 7 (1982), p. 99.
32 For Augustus’ use of Salamis (a battle of Persians versus Athenians) to figure conflict between East
and West in similarly polarized terms, see Barbara Kellum, “Representations and Re-presentations
of the Battle of Actium,” in: Citizens of Discord, p. 187-205; p. 197. His slaughter of crocodiles
nods again to Egypt.
33 For the deconstruction of the orientalist polarities, see Gurval, Actium and Augustus, p. 236-47;
Michèle Lowrie, “Vergil and Founding Violence,” Cardozo Law Review 27, 2005, p. 945-76, especially 971-6; Joseph D. Reed, “Vergil’s Roman,” in: J. Farrell and M. C. J. Putnam (eds.), A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2010, p. 66-79.
34 Schwindt, “Rom und der Osten,” p. 5.
35 For further bibliography on this question, see Donncha O’Rourke, “‘Eastern’ Elegy and ‘Western’
Epic: Reading Orientalism in Propertius 4 and Vergil’s Aeneid,” Dictynna 8 (2011), paragraphs
1-46; paragraph 16.
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
21
ally erupted into a civil war whose theater was the Eastern Mediterranean. The
figure of “the Egyptian within” exposes the civil war that dogs empire. But monstrosity attaches to the inner Orient not in its assimilationist modality, but only
when it attends civil war.
A more intimate Orient
By transferring the trope to identity construction, Propertius shows more clearly
the interiority of “the Egyptian within.” Various Easterners get entangled with the
definition of his self and poetic program, but, far from leaving politics behind, this
turn exposes sexuality and affairs of state as reciprocal discourses. Propertius’ life,
loves, and civil war all fall prey to a struggle that obeys the same logic, where mastery of the other requires that of the self.
As with Horace and Vergil, Propertius’ treatment of Actium shrinks Antony and
spotlights Cleopatra, but the generic reasoning is different: rather than obscuring
the Roman enemy for political expediency, elegy obsesses over gender and privileges sexuality over politics. Poem 3.11 opens with poet’s subjection to womankind. She has dragged him into her jurisdiction (“sub sua iura,” 1) with the legal
sphere as metaphor for the sexual. When Propertius arrives at Antony, the unnamed husband from whom Cleopatra bargains for Rome’s walls as the price of an
obscene marriage (31), the governing topic is which sex is on top. The elegist and
the loser in the civil war are parallel in overturning expected male dominance.36
Augustus erupts in triumph to save the day for Rome (49-50) and to restore Roman
normativity, expressed in a series of traditional exemplary figures who saved Rome
in the face of external enemies, including Carthage and Gaul (59-66). But Propertius has already presented himself as proof of a universal truth, that men are subject
to women (“exemplo … meo,” 8), backed up by a matching series of orientalizing
examples of dominant women: Medea, Penthesilea, Omphale, Semiramis (9-26).
Augustus may have saved Rome like the heroes of old, but Propertius never returns
to himself, never corrects his own relation to the masculinist norm so that the
poem in the end stands unresolved: one paradigmatic figure backed up by exempla
confronts his antithesis, equally backed up by exempla. Augustus may have set the
political order straight, but has had no effect on its analogue the sexual sphere. If
the disorder of Catiline’s soul is an index of political turmoil, then Propertius remains irremediably unchanged by Augustus’ triumph and his poem in its structure
instantiates internal contradiction.37
36 Jasper Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life, London: Duckworth 1985, Chapter 2, “Propertius and
Antony,” p. 32-47. For the generic alignment of elegy with femininity and orientalism over against
masculinist and western epic, see O’Rourke, “‘Eastern’ Elegy and ‘Western’ Epic.”
37 For earlier attempts to resolve the inconsistency, see Gottfried Mader, “Heroism and Hallucination: Cleopatra in Horace C. 1.37 and Propertius 3.11,” Grazer Beiträge 16 (1989), p. 183-201;
p. 189-90; Roy Gibson, “The success and failure of Roman love elegy as an instrument of subver-
22
MICHÈLE LOWRIE
Furthermore, allusions to civil war percolate on or under the poem’s surface in
case the reader has forgotten Actium’s historical context. References to Pompey’s
murder in Egypt, to the Phlegraean plain,38 to Philippi via a pun on Cleopatra’s
Macedonian lineage (“Philippeo sanguine”),39 evoke a series of internecine battles
before Propertius reaches Actium (35-46). Additionally, the Roman Forum Cleopatra dared to try to rule – with language recalling the poet’s subjection to women
(“iura dare,” 46) – is defined by its statues of Marius, restored by Julius Caesar in
honor of his great-uncle by marriage,40 and whose conflict with Sulla tore Rome
apart at the beginning of the century. The reader scanning the Forum will view
these along with the monuments of the lacus Curtius (“monumenta,” 61) and remember that the Julian clan has been entangled in civil war for generations.
Propertius’ sexual paradigm takes internal conflict to a more intimate place in
4.1, where an oriental other literally defines him along with his poetic program.
Both have been affected by civil war. This other has Egyptian resonances, but hybridization gives him a cosmopolitan tone. Propertius stages a dialogic conflict
between his own voice, in which he announces a new poetic program of aetiological poetry celebrating Rome, and the voice of a mysterious and unreliable soothsayer named Horos, who strenuously objects to the proposed shift and tries to limit
Propertius to the more private elegiac topics of his previous books, namely love.41
Horos himself has a complex identity: his name evokes the Egyptian god Horus as
well as the Greek word for hour; his genealogy is a tangled mix of Babylonian and
Greek (4.1.77-9).42 His knowledge of star science and the casting of horoscopes
had strong links in antiquity to both Egypt and Babylon.
This mixed Eastern figure resides as a defining voice within Propertius’ own
poem, but furthermore, it is through Horos that Propertius reveals his own autobiography. His father died when he was young and his estate at Assisi was auctioned
off (4.1.127-30). Although he does not explicitly identify his loss of property with
the land confiscation that afflicted Horace and Vergil, or the proscription plaguing
others, this is the likely cause and he elsewhere attests to losing family to civil war
38
39
40
41
42
sion,” in: G. Urso (ed.), Ordine e sovversione nel mondo greco e romano, Cividale di Friuli: ETS
2009, p. 267-287, stresses similar contradictions throughout Propertius.
Lawrence Jr. Richardson, Propertius, Elegies-IV, Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press 1977, p. 363
takes it of the Campi Phlegraei near Naples where Pompey became sick in 50 BCE, but “Phlegraeos
… tumultus” at Propertius 2.1.39 refers to the battle of the Gods and the Giants, traditionally a
metaphor for civil war. For the identification of Phlegra in Thessaly (the location of Pharsalus) in
addition to Campania among other locales, see H.E. Butler and E.A. Barber, The Elegies of Propertius, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1933, p. 191 and 289.
This suggestion answers the question, “why should Propertius be concerned about the honour of
Philip’s line?,” asked by William A. Camps, Propertius, Elegies III, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press 1966, p.108.
Butler and Barber, The Elegies of Propertius, p. 291 (Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 11).
Michèle Lowrie, “Divided Voices and Imperial Identity in Propertius 4.1 and Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other and Politics of Friendship”, Dictynna 8 (2011), paragraphs 56 at http://dictynna.revues.org/711, offers more detailed treatment of Propertius’ self-definition through Horos’
voice.
Lowrie, “Divided Voices,” paragraph 18.
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
23
at Perusia (1.22).43 As a consequence, Horos continues, Propertius turned from a
public career to poetry (4.1.133-4). Propertius reveals the most detailed aspects of
his life and limits his own poetic ambitions through the voice of this orientalized
other.44 Beyond the disruption of national identity, the political effects of civil disturbance have touched individual lives. The very conditions of life – career options,
status, and citizenship – have all been affected by the craziness in and out of the
Forum (“insano … Foro,” 4.1.134).45 Horos, however, is not demonized. If anything he seems like an irritating but harmless buffoon. Propertius has made his
peace with the course of his life and taken the sting out of internal contradiction.
When Propertius returns to Actium in 4.6, orientalism takes a back seat to Augustus and media aesthetics.46 To the extent that identity remains a concern, Propertius tilts toward integration on the Roman side and away from abject demonization on the Egyptian, though he keeps his eye on gender politics. He acknowledges
Vergilian national identity formations by qualifying the winning side as a hybrid.
The opposing fleet (Antony has completely disappeared) has been damned by
“Teucrian” Quirinus (21): Romulus’ native Italian name joins with an appellation
of the Trojans conventional in the Aeneid. And Augustus’ lineage goes back to Hector (in the Aeneid Ascanius’ uncle, 12.440; here 4.6.38). Propertius nods to the
geographic ideologies with great economy – an Egyptian place name crops up just
once when she flees to the Nile (4.6.63) – but Cleopatra’s sex (22, 57, 65) takes
greater prominence. An effeminate Egypt confronts a Trojan Rome and Propertius
duly celebrates Roman victory, but by now the conventions have become clichés to
be sprinkled on a text whose concerns lie elsewhere.47 Identity politics has become,
at least for the moment, less fraught and imperial integration has settled in.
Civil war and empire
For the Augustan poets, Egypt offers an alienating screen for the internal discord of
the civil war on national and personal levels. Gruen, who isolates the degrading
depictions of Egypt in Roman civil war literature as anomalous in Greco-Roman
discourse, underscores the particular circumstances underlying these stereotypes.
Rather than revealing a consistent Roman attitude toward Egyptians, which was
not univocal, the poems analyzed here reveal the horror in Roman conceptions of
43 Jeri B. DeBrohun, Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press 2003, p. 87; Lowrie, “Divided Voices,” paragraph 31.
44 Catullus’ use of various Eastern lands (Bithynia, Lydia, Libya) in his definition of himself as a participant in Roman imperial expansion lacks the Augustan revilement, hybridity, and paradox that
come with the civil wars; Schwindt, “Rom und der Osten,” 7-9.
45 Vergil also calls the forum “insanum” (G. 2.502): the person who looks not on public disturbance
is immune to other disturbances, specifically those of civil war (“infidos agitans discordia fratres,”
2.496).
46 Michèle Lowrie, Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome, Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press 2009, p. 188-95.
47 Also Mader, “Heroism and Hallucination,” p. 191, 200.
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MICHÈLE LOWRIE
themselves. The other in this discourse may build up a more robust sense of selfpride through contrast, but on a deeper level it reveals fractures within the self. The
political and psychological dimensions of Roman selfhood here analyzed have similar structures: whether we take civil war as a historical fact or a metaphor for psychic conflict, the self in these poems is divided and conflicted.
It is hard, however, to isolate this orientalism from broader, less virulent kinds,
to put a firewall between figurative Egyptians and Trojans. The two blend and justify Western imperialism. The intimate relation between civil war and empire
makes it hard to distinguish internal from external conflict. Romans did not use
the discourse traced here, however, to justify the annexation of Egypt. The imperative of imperialism was self-evident to them. Egypt’s annexation happened during
the civil wars of the first century BCE, but it was already desirable for strategic
reasons, as the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, and the source of cultural capital
such as the obelisks Augustus brought back to Rome.48 The Romans of this period
did not always present Egypt as perverted, monstrous, or subhuman nor did they
present their conquest as a civilizing mission. Although the negative characterization of Egyptians reflects back on themselves, the implication of Roman imperialism in the civil wars nevertheless means that “the Egyptian within” is also handed
down in the literary tradition as a figuration of empire.49 The following sections
examine a closer and a more distant instance of reception.
Egypt versus Babylon
For Lucan, civil war occupies the whole political space. The Republic was already
unsalvageable by the beginning of his poem and his perverse celebration of civil war
as the price of Nero’s advent (1.33-45) makes it commensurate with the Roman
Empire. Lucan ends his poem where Caesar ended his Bellum civile, in Egypt without closure.50 This allows him to return to and amplify the monstrous portrayal of
Cleopatra found in the Augustans.51 He makes the association of the inner Orient
with empire more explicit by contrasting it with figurations of the Republic. This
he shows to have been already divided by splitting its defenders into two heroes,
48 Parker, “India, Egypt and Parthia,” paragraph 11, emphasizes that grain and obelisks, in short economic and symbolic Egyptian commodities, do not play a large role in Roman poetic representation in this period, particularly in comparison with Indian commodities, which are luxury goods.
49 David Quint, “Aeacidae Pyrrhi: Patterns of Myth and History in Aeneid 1-6,” in: Citizens of Discord, p. 133-56: “Rome’s foreign conquests already contain the seeds of, and cannot be separated
from, her internecine strife,” p. 139.
50 Jamie Masters, Poetry and civil war in Lucan’s Bellum civile, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press
1992, Chapter 7, “The Endlessness of the Civil War,” p. 216-59. But see Tim Stover, “Cato and the
Intended Scope of Lucan’s Bellum Civile,” The Classical Quarterly n.s. 58.2 (2008), p. 571-80.
51 Gruen, Rethinking the Other, p. 108. See also Robin Sowerby, “The Augustan Lucan,” Translation
and Literature 14.2 (2005), p. 148-78, who refers to the “moral [anti-Egyptian] clarity that we find
in the representation of the events of Roman history depicted on the shield of Aeneas in Virgil,”
p. 178.
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
25
Pompey and Cato, both of whom ultimately succumb to Caesar, whether inside or
outside the poem. Another oriental city represents a counterfactual way out: if only
the Romans would extend their empire by waging war on Babylon, they would
engage in the proper kind of warfare. Instead, by ending his poem in Egypt, he
inscribes civil war into the Empire it ushers in.
Lucan takes advantage of Cleopatra’s return as “the Egyptian within” to extend
the trope with his typical poetic strategies: hyperbole, multiplication, and splitting.
If the opposition between Caesar and Pompey already signifies civil war, Lucan
reinscribes division on the side that ostensibly defends the Republic by giving it
two leaders, Cato in addition to Pompey. All the women linked to the various leaders figure their politics as a dead end. Cato remarries his former wife Marcia in a
funereal, sexless wedding that exaggerates Stoicism’s sternness and reveals the emotional sterility of a Republic collapsing into civil war (2.326-92). Pompey’s wife
Cornelia may be all love and kisses, but her lack of emotional self-control and
narcissistic self-blame reveal her husband’s failure to live up to Republican virtus
and self-mastery. No mean mediates between these extremes and neither leader can
restore the Republic.
Over against the divided Republic, Cleopatra represents the depravity to which
Caesar has fallen in civil war. She is the disgrace of Egypt, a deathly Fury who augments the Italian rage (“dedecus Aegypti, Latii feralis Erinys;” “Hesperios auxit tantum Cleopatra furores”); she aspires to lead Caesar – inverting the Horatian image –
in an Egyptian (Pharian) triumph; she pollutes Caesar’s bed and later Antony’s; she
brings as much destruction as Helen; she is Egyptian, but also Ptolemaic, therefore
Macedonian (10.59-76). Her Horatian flaws become more extreme and any paradoxical virtue has been wiped out. Her enormity reflects on Caesar, who, by becoming a monarch, has become alien to Rome. Caesar had pursued Pompey to Egypt
and, although the Egyptians may have chopped off his head, they did it to please
Caesar. Rather than reviling them for barbarity, Caesar sheds crocodile tears (“lacrimas non sponte cadentis,” 9.1038) and becomes entangled with Cleopatra.
Lucan several times entertains an alternative universe where civil war could
come to an end or be redirected, only to undercut the gesture in every case. Caesar
claims the chance of seeing the source of the Nile would inspire him to abandon
civil war (“bellum civile relinquam,” 10.191-2). This is the figure of the adynaton
(impossibility), since the source of the Nile was a notorious mystery at the time.
But even were it possible, Caesar would only descend deeper into Egypt. The imagined alternative only further reinforces the inevitability of civil war.
Right after the proem of book 1, Babylon offers a locus for a legitimate and expiating foreign war that would have set things right.52 As with Horace, who wishes
to direct civil war away from Rome and to forge on a new anvil a weapon to be
directed against the Scythians and Arabs (Odes 1.35.33-40), empire appears to be
52 Also 8.225, 299, 426.
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MICHÈLE LOWRIE
the solution (1.10-15). Then, Crassus’ ghost would also be avenged. His death in
Parthia, however, is one among other reasons Lucan alleges for the collapse of the
alliance between Pompey and Caesar (1.99-100). The need to avenge him in the
first place was one of the causes of civil war and reference to his death reinscribes
civil war at the very locus where Babylon appears to offer an alternative. Lucan offers no way out. The Roman Empire and civil war are inextricably linked and
Caesar’s entanglement with Egypt’s queen sets the Empire on corrupt footing.
Translatio figurae
A brief example of the later reception of “the Egyptian within” will show that the
figure has long legs. Balzac leaves Egypt behind in Les Chouans, but not civil war,
which remains bound to empire. Napoleon may lie outside the scope of the plot,
but the novel’s characters always prick up their ears for news of his movements. The
ability of the orientalizing trope to retain the same structure but to bear different
content is the very mark of figuration.
Balzac writes about the civil war in Britanny in 1799. While the Roman poets
updated Cicero’s civil war discourse with an Egyptian lens afforded by Cleopatra’s
involvement at Actium, Balzac updates the civil war discourse of the Roman poets
with more modern aliens. He makes the counter-revolutionary Bretons analogous
to various non-Western European groups, each presented as lacking in humanity.
The peasants of Brittany may follow a handsome nobleman, Montauran, as their
leader, but they themselves wear animal skins and have distorted faces. They resist
Republican progress not out of any rational self-interest, but through an intrinsic
savagery and backwardness. The nobles, however depraved, at least defend their
property and privileges according to a logical rationale. The peasants rather cleave
to an irrational resistance to change. The Chouans are named after the owls whose
calls they use to communicate with one another. But rather than evoking Athena’s
wise bird, these peasants are gripped by animalistic superstition. They fear ghosts
and continually swear by the local saint, Ste. Anne d’Auray.
At the beginning of the novel various characters degrade them with multiple
comparisons: to beasts, to native Americans – Mohicans and Peaux Rouges (918) –
and to the South Africans at the Cape of Good Hope.
Il faisait croire à une absence si complète de toute intelligence, que les officiers le
comparèrent tour à tour, dans cette situation, à un des animaux qui broutaient les gras
pâturages de la vallée, aux sauvages de l’Amérique ou à quelque naturel du cap de
Bonne-Espérance.
Balzac, Les Chouans 917
He gave the impression of such a complete absence of all intelligence that the officers
compared him in that situation in sequence to one of the animals that grazed the rich
pastures of the valley, to the savages of America, or to some native from the Cape of
Good Hope.
THE EGYPTIAN WITHIN: A ROMAN FIGURATION OF CIVIL WAR
27
The fear of being like some other furthermore motivates them. When the Abbé
Gudin preaches, he blesses the Bretons who have died as Christian martyrs and
chastises the living. They risk appearing as “Mahumétisches” (Muhammadans) in
the eyes of the Lord and they will avoid this comparison if they obey the king’s
envoy Montauran rejoin all the good people of Brittany under the banner of the
Christian God (1118-19). Balzac carefully does not endorse these views, but attributes the demonization to others. He underscores the ignorance behind the figuration by having the Abbé garble the standard French “Mahométan” and suggests its
outrageousness when Mlle. de Verneuil, who is eavesdropping, asks her Breton
maid if she really fears being a Mahumétische (1121). These passages taken together suggest that the desire to avoid being like one sort of other, the “Mahumétisches,” might simply make them comparable to another, the Mohicans.
During Rome’s civil wars, the contingency of their recurrent theater made Egypt
available for figuring internal barbarity. The foreign land, however, is transferrable.
By splitting his comparanda into non-European peoples from the New World and
Africa, and a non-European but nevertheless Mediterranean religion, Balzac reveals
the figure as such: it depends on a structure, not a specific alien identity. Any land,
people, or religion conceptualized as other may occupy the role that Egypt plays in
the Roman figuration. Like the Roman poets, Balzac does not so much shore up
French identity with the contrast to the barbarians as reveal the profound internal
divide in France’s heartland that kept fueling the persistent horror of civil war.
Why the trope?
A political science perspective suggests “the Egyptian within” is elite manipulation
to assuage a frightened populace. Murray Edelman, in Politics as Symbolic Action,
argues that political events are “largely creations of the language used to describe
them”; the bewildering political universe that takes place far from the observation
of the masses “needs to be ordered and given meaning.”53 Modern democratic politics entails not solving actual problems, but the elite staging of dramas of problem
solving; the public responds with anxiety at the dangers confronted and acquiesces
to leaders who assuage their anxiety.54 The world of myths is simple: it revolves
around hostile plotters and benevolent leaders. Politicians deploy these myths by
personifying observed, feared, or desired trends into plotters and heroes.55 Cicero’s
demonization of his opponents and self-heroization fits this pattern. Robert Mornstein-Marx brings Edelman’s approach to bear on his analysis of the contio, the
formal address of the people by an orator. The speaker defines an out-group as
different and plotting to commit harmful acts. The frightened are reassured that
53 Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action, Chicago: Markham 1971, p. 65.
54 Robert Mornstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic, Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press 2004, p. 241-2.
55 Edelman, Politics, p. 77.