Resistance and Complicity inDavid Dabydeen's "The Intended

Histos. The On-line Journal of Ancient Historiography 15, 2021

Latomus, 2020

This paper analyses a specific accusation made against men and women of power that appears in several late antique sources. The accusation is that they secretly incited barbarian enemies to invade the Roman empire. This kind of treason is usually attributed to historical figures who sought revenge against domestic enemies, to defeat a usurper, or eliminate a legitimate emperor. The individuals accused of such treacherous 'invitations' are emperors (Constantius II), women of the court or Augustae (Serena, Honoria, Licinia Eudoxia), eunuchs (Hyacinthus, Narses), and public enemies (Rufinus, Stilicho, Bonifatius). These episodes should not, however, be regarded as a literary invention. In fact, they manifest the recurring desire among contemporaries to identify and punish scapegoats. These stories show, above all in the Theodosian age, how diplomatic relations with the barbarians were a delicate matter. These accusations of complicity with the barbarians were a means to demonise internal enemies.

Journal of Roman Studies 102, 2012

2024

In De consulatu Stilichonis, Claudian reworks the war with Gildo into another Second Punic War. He continues this trend in his last two carmina maiora, using the Second Punic War as a framework for the war with Alaric as well. Claudian employs the exemplum of the Second Punic War in order to make an argument about decline and restoration. He draws on the traditional narrative of decline in Roman historiography, which asserts that the Roman Republic declined and fell because, after the fall of Carthage, there was no fear of an enemy to hold Rome back from descending into luxury and avarice and turning on itself in civil war. Claudian utilizes this quintessentially Roman tradition to strengthen his panegyric claim that Rome will be restored by his patron Stilicho. He inverts the formula to argue that, because the Western Empire is beset by usurpers and “barbarians,” the restoration of Roman enemies will lead to a restoration of the glories of the Roman Republic. In doing so, Claudian creates a flexible formula capable of incorporating any crisis into the larger narrative of exemplary Roman history. In chapter 1, I demonstrate how Claudian’s first poem about the war with Gildo deliberately refuses to embrace the Second Punic War narrative an African enemy offers, instead deconstructing the idea of Gildo as a second Hannibal. Chapter 2 explains how Claudian develops his formula of decline and restoration across the three books of De consulatu Stilichonis. The war with Gildo becomes the catalyst for Stilicho’s restoration of the Roman Republic as a new Roman founder. Then, in chapter 3, I examine how Claudian adapts that formula to accommodate the war with Alaric in De bello Getico, arguing that Claudian extrapolates from the more specific rhetoric in Stil. to a broader argument about the moral and renewing qualities that war with a foreign enemy grants to Rome. Finally, I analyze how Claudian’s last panegyric must contend with Alaric’s continued presence as a threat, forcing Claudian to revise and expand the rhetoric of renewing warfare he used in Get.

History of Anthropology Review, 2020

Since its inception, Edward Said’s Orientalism has enjoyed tremendous and well-deserved influence across the humanities and social sciences.[1] While this text has never been without its critics,[2] Said’s underlying assertion that representations of the “other” have been intimately embedded in imperial domination has contributed to a disciplinary commonplace that assumes European imaginings of non-Europeans are inevitably and eternally domineering. It is this overextension (and perhaps simplification) of Said’s thesis that Robert Launay critically addresses in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder.

2009

it is often assumed-particularly in anglophone literary criticism-that roman love elegy is a fundamentally subversive genre. it is hard to deny that the elegists had subversive tendencies, and, at the very least, they do not make much effort to improve their readers morally or to make augustus appear politically attractive. however, the quality of the subversiveness of the love elegists has not been studied very closely, and unwarranted assumptions are often made about the danger or threat they presented to contemporary institutions or modes of behaviour. if we concentrate on Propertius-the most intensively studied of the elegists-it can be argued that his much-vaunted subversiveness is in fact curiously limited. That is to say, he leaves the genre's potential for subversion far from fulfilled or realised. The key question then becomes not 'how subversive was roman love elegy?', but 'why was love elegy not more subversive?' The answer may throw some interesting light on the limits-especially self-imposed limits-set on morally and politically subversive speech in early augustan rome. a sense of the limits of Propertian subversion could be quickly reached by comparing his utterances to some early christian texts, where a genuine and deep-seated hatred of rome is often on view, and where rome's moral values and political systems are rejected, and the city's eventual destruction envisaged. but this would be at the very least unsympathetic to Propertius, * i wish to thank mrs carla canussio and the Fondazione niccolò canussio for their wonderful hospitality in cividale. my thanks also to members of the audience in cividale for helpful criticism, especially gianpiero rosati and ewen bowie. This paper develops some ideas from Gibson 2007 and, in its final section, from Gibson 2009. use of the following published translations is gratefully acknowledged: alciphron (a.r. benneR), archestratus (S.d. olson-a. sens, 2000), Plato (W. Hamilton, 97), Plutarch (r. WateRfield, 999), Propertius (g.P. Goold, 990). 'in short, Propertius speaks for the primacy of love and poetry. Warfare and glory are to be deprecated and dismissed. … conforming to a current fashion, and ostensibly responsive to imperial themes, this poet turns out to be insidious and subversive' (syme 978, 88); 'the augustan elegiac love poets … made elegy the genre of opposing the state, contrasting the private pursuit of love with the public pursuit of civic duties' (neWlands 995, 4); 'choosing to write love elegy was itself a political act, for the stance of the elegist is intrinsically subversive' (davis 2006, 84). 2 archestratus' poem appears also in a version attributed to ennius (where it is titled Hedyphagetica), although this appears to have been an adaptation rather than translation, and a mere eleven lines survive, i.e. not enough to gauge its character. For text and commentary, see olson-sens 2000, 24-245; CouRtney 99, 22-25. Plut. virt. mor. 6,445f on mimnermus frg. West; cf. the superscription in the Palatine Anthology to poem iX 50 (Mimnev rmou. paraiv nesi" ei\ " to; aj nev tw" zh' n).

Banque de données AGON. La dispute: cas, querelles, controverses & création à l’époque moderne

American Journal of Philology, 2008

Brym Mawr Classical Review, 2021

This book demonstrates and analyzes patterns in the response of the Imperial Roman state to local resistance, focusing on decisions made within military and administrative organizations during the Principate. Through a thorough investigation of the offi cial Roman approach towards local revolt, author Gil Gambash answers signifi cant questions that, until now, have produced confl icting explanations in the literature: Was Rome's rule of its empire mostly based on oppressive measures, or on the willing cooperation of local populations? To what extent did Roman decisions and actions indicate a dedication towards stability in the provinces? And to what degree were Roman interests pursued at the risk of provoking local resistance? Examining the motivations and judgment of decision-makers within the military and administrative organizations-from the emperor down to the provincial procurator-this book reconstructs the premises for decisions and ensuing actions that promoted negotiation and cooperation with local populations. A groundbreaking work that, for the fi rst time, provides a centralized view of Roman responses to indigenous revolt, Rome and Provincial Resistance is essential reading for scholars of Roman imperial history.

Chapter 6 will rethink Conrad’s history not in terms of straightforward referentiality but in terms of responsibility, by reading ‘The Duel’ as a story of response to the incessant call of the other. As more and more critics have recently emphasised the eccentricity of the duel between the two officers in Napoleon’s Grand Army, their encounter, far from being banal, involving women from time to time, singularly occurs in a ‘most unsuitable ground’ for a duel. One answers to/for the other’s perpetual call, but he does do so not from ‘the sympathy of mankind’ but, on the contrary, in a fight, laying himself open to a ‘cut’. The duellists’ contest without end gestures toward the realm of the impossible and thereby ineluctably presents an aporia, a hole in the text. The ‘we’ narrator, whom this chapter tries to show deserves more critical attention, implicitly invites readers to draw an analogy between the wounds in the officers’ bodies and the gaps in the body of Conrad’s ‘archive’ of the Napoleonic era, namely, the short story, ‘The Duel’. By way of conclusion, this chapter suggests tentatively linking the textual fissure and a ‘messianic’ opening with the coming of the other to the text: Napoleon and the reader. Such hospitality, a welcome of the other, is what Derrida would think the very condition of ‘history’.

We have surviving from the mid-second century CE two works that narrate the complete history of Rome down to Augustus, Florus in Latin and Appian in Greek. They share some remarkable structural features, notably that for the late Republic, rather than a linear annalistic progression they employ extended separate narratives of, first, the Roman conquests in the century between the Gracchi and Actium and then the civil wars that occurred at the same time. This article examines the distinct rhetorical and narrative techniques that each author uses to rationalize and carry out this procedure, and what implicit comment each makes on the contemporary Antonine situation of internal peace and stable borders. Finally, I suggest that these structures have significant analogies with the "separated-lovers" plot type found in Greek erotic novels, notably Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe. I posit that the tension-and-resolution structure represented by novels presented itself to these two very different historians as a fitting expression of the relationship of the dynamic, plural history of the Republic to the static unity projected by Antonine ideology.