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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) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Alle Rechte, auch die des auszugsweisen Nachdrucks, der fotomechanischen Wiedergabe und der Übersetzung, vorbehalten. Dies betrifft auch die Vervielfältigung und Übertragung einzelner Textabschnitte, Zeichnungen oder Bilder durch alle Verfahren wie Speicherung und Übertragung auf Papier, Transparente, Filme, Bänder, Platten und andere Medien, soweit es nicht §§ 53 und 54 UrhG ausdrücklich gestatten. © 2015 Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn Wilhelm Fink GmbH & Co. Verlags-KG, Jühenplatz 1, D-33098 Paderborn Internet: www.fink.de Einbandgestaltung: Evelyn Ziegler, München Printed in Germany Herstellung: Ferdinand Schöningh GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn ISBN 978-3-7705-5720-2 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. 24 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. 26 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.