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Augustine the Anti-Augustan: the Exempla of the Aeneid in the City of God A Tale
of Two Cities: Homeric Ephyra and Corinthian Identity in the Archaic Age Tenuere
Tamen Arcem Sabini: Tarpeia, Ethnic (Re)Imagination, and the Social War Using
the Past to Undermine the Present: Tracing the Rhetoric of Liberation
throughout Thucydides's History Contesting
the Lessons of the Persian War A
Program of Imperial Recovery: Ammianus and Julian as Students of History Orientalist
Discourse Materialized: The Role of Archaeology in the Construction of Modern
Turkish Identity Augustine the
Anti-Augustan: the Exempla of the Aeneid in the City of God Brian Dunkle, S.J. By the time of Augustine, a tradition
had developed in Christian apologetics of citing exempla from Roman literary history to counter pagan
claims that the traditional gods had consistently blessed the city for right
worship. The tactic was not exclusively Christian; stock exempla were taught in the schools and are found
throughout republican and imperial literature, from the speeches of Cicero to
the satires of Juvenal. Many Christian apologists took Virgil's account of
the major figures in Rome's past in Books 6 and 8 of the Aeneid as the standard history justifying the Augustan
regime, as evidence that Jupiter had indeed granted the Empire imperium
sine fine. Thus, in the first
part of his poem Contra Orationem Symmachi, Prudentius uses Virgil's exempla to attack
Roman claims to divine favor. Prudentius reads the Aeneid as propaganda, which he can counter by revealing
the inconsistencies and vices in the figures of Rome's past. At the same
time, Prudentius employs the exempla to claim divine favor for the Christian
Empire. Prudentius' paean to Theodosius at the end of the first poem shows
God rewarding the emperor's Christian faith with earthly success, as Virgil's
gods had failed to do for Augustus and the rulers of Rome. In the first five books of the City
of God, Augustine also uses
Virgilian exempla to counter claims that the suppression of the traditional
cult led to Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. Augustine shows with methodical
rigor that Rome never knew true prosperity, before or after Christ. Yet,
unlike Prudentius, Augustine never argues that history reveals the Christian
God rewarding an emperor's Christianity with temporal prosperity. This
attitude informs Augustine's discussion of the emperor Theodosius at the end
of DCD Book 5. Although, in
praising Theodosius, Augustine seems to equate Christian faith with political
success, I argue that Augustine's remarks on Theodosius are best understood
in reference to the Aeneid's
attitude toward Augustus. While Augustine does not interpret the epic to be
hostile to the emperor, he does suggest that the facts of history undermine
any imperial pretensions to divine right. In his reluctance to conflate the
divine and temporal cities, Augustine shows that he is not only a careful
historian, but also a strangely "contemporary" reader of Virgil.
Augustine understands Virgil's exempla as ambivalent or even cynical about
imperial claims to divine mandate. A Tale of Two
Cities: Homeric Ephyra and Corinthian Identity in the Archaic Age Jay Fisher Despite her importance in the archaic
age the city of Corinth is remarkably underrepresented in the Homeric poems.
Corinth receives no mention at all in the Odyssey and the Iliad refers to her
twice. Although later tradition identified Corinth with the Ephyra, which
claimed to be the birthplace of Sisyphos and Bellerophon, Homer never
connects the two places together. Whether Ephyra was in fact an old name
for Corinth or an extinct community whose heroic past was reappropriated by
the Corinthians, the existence of two names in the Homeric poems was not the
only problem for such a syncretism in mythic terms as Ephyra was an Aeolian
community and Corinth a Dorian one. A further geographical problem arose from
the location of Bellerophon's exploits in Lycia in addition to several places
with the name Ephyra throughout the Greek mainland. One must wonder how
desirable it was to claim to be the ultimate origin of Trojan and therefore
barbarian heroes at the end of the archaic age. It is the negotiation of
these binary oppositions such as Aeolian and Dorian and East and West that
provide the most promising opportunities to explore Corinth's creation of a
heroic past despite the fragmentary evidence. Pindar's Thirteenth Olympian ode,
written for Xenophon the Corinthian in 464, alludes to a heroic Corinthian
past that includes both Dorians and Aeolians and appears to address some of
the geographical problems generated by the syncretism of Corinth and Ephyra.
Pindar does not supply easy solutions to all the aforementioned
contradictions and one must be careful to evaluate his version of the
Bellerophon myth in light of the recent Persian invasions of Greece.
Nevertheless the ode provides an illustration of how Corinth constructed her
heroic past and present as a member of the Panhellenic community implying how
she did so within her own borders, although written by an outsider. Thus even
at the end of the archaic age Corinth's heroic past was truly a tale of two
cities if not a tale of many cities requiring a negotiation of present and
past, east and west and Homer's Ephyra and Pindar's Corinth forming a complex
tapestry that makes the identity of one polis. Tenuere Tamen
Arcem Sabini: Tarpeia, Ethnic (Re)Imagination, and the Social War Bill Short The mytho-historical tale of Tarpeia,
which recounts the betrayal of the Roman itadel to the Sabines during the war
that occurred as the result of the "Rape of the Sabine Women" by
Romulus, occurs in a number of sources. The story tells how Tarpeia, the
daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, to whom the defense of the mons Saturnius had been entrusted by Romulus, was persuaded to
permit an armed band of Sabines to enter the Capitoline arx. While the
different versions of the story account for Tarpeia's motivation for this
treachery in different ways and offer some variation in the details, a common
element among them is Tarpeia's eventual punishment for her disloyalty, but
at the hands of the very men she has helped: The young Roman maiden is buried
alive by the Sabines under a mound of shields. The story as given in Roman sources is,
in its basic form, aetiological, accounting for Roman topographical
nomenclature, and has been considered for the most part_as in the case of
Livy_unproblematic within the cycle of stories that witness the early contact
between the Romans and Sabines. However, given the divergent tellings of the
story, and from the perspective of the rest of the "Sabine Cycle",
it is possible to problematize the tale as simply 'Roman'. The version of the
myth given by Propertius in Elegies IV, for instance, has been recently understood as strikingly
anti-Augustan. And precisely what permits it to be read as such, and as more
broadly subversive of Romanitas,
is the problem of identity that it offers. Although this problem is partially
bulldozed in the Livian version(s), yet even there the story creates
difficulties for a 'Roman' history: The manner of Tarpeia's death, for
example, grants a military as well as a moral victory to the Sabine invaders.
Moreover, the gender configuration of the story, in which the Roman female
permits access into the walls (a common aetiological metaphor for sexual
intercourse) to a male Sabine, contradicts the male Roman-female Sabine
hierarchy proposed by the "Rape of the Sabine Women" for the
construction of a unified ethnicity. If the raptus Sabinarum imagines the
submission and domination of the Sabine to the Roman through sexual union (in
the blood-line, the male Roman predominates), the Tarpeia myth offers
another, competing vision of their contact: it stresses their difference and
envisions the Sabine empowered over the Roman (in the blood-line, the male
Sabine predominates). Given the possibility for ethnic re-imagining
embedded in it, such a story (not surprisingly perhaps) rather literally
gained some currency in another period of ethnic crisis. Two silver denarii types (Sydenham 699a, 699b) were minted in 89
bce by Lucius Titurius Sabinus for the Marsic confederation during the Social
War. One type shows on the obverse the standard depiction of the personified Italia; the other displays the head of Titius Tatius,
the Sabine general who entered the Capitoline. On the reverse of both coins
is the same image: Tarpeia lies on the ground, her legs covered by a shield.
On each side stands a Sabine soldier with his shield raised, about to exact
punishment for the girl's treachery. The choice of story is not accidental,
of course. Rather, it occurs within in a context of similar re-appropriations
of 'Roman' aitia (Cf.
Alessandro Barchiesi's analysis of the coins depicting the eight confederated
tribes swearing an oath over a sacrificial pig_an originally Italic ritual
reclaimed from Rome) and is used to renegotiate and reconfigure political and
social identities. Recreating a critical moment when assimilation of the
Italian into the Roman did not guarantee Roman hegemony, the coins offer an
alternative outcome: Italian superiority over the Roman, the possibility of
an identity outside a Roman one. Thus, the coins represent an imaginative
reconfiguration of identity that corresponds to the historical military and
political endeavor of the Social War. Using the Past to
Undermine the Present: Tracing the Rhetoric of Liberation throughout
Thucydides's History Aaron Chait This paper examines Thucydides'
presentation of the rhetoric of liberation_political rhetoric designed to
depict one group as the oppressed (the audience) and the other as the
liberators (the speakers). In order to substantiate these claims of
liberation Thucydides' speakers appeal to recent Hellenic history in the
hopes that past acts of liberation, and past acts of courage and resolve,
will legitimate present motives and future actions. The Athenians at the
Debate at Sparta (1.66-88), for example, remind the Spartans that they
liberated Hellas from the Persian threat: they made the ultimate sacrifice by abandoning their
homeland and retreating to their ships, which resulted in the razing of
Athens; they shouldered the
burden at Marathon and Salamis; they contributed the strongest navy and most
gifted general; and they led
the coalition to expel Persia from the Aegean. In short, they liberated
Hellas. And as a result of this alleged venture for the common good (1.73)
the Athenians demand justice. They demand what is due to them_their empire. As Thucydides' narrative progresses we
encounter a second (and eventually third) instance of the rhetoric of
liberation. The Spartans under Brasidas make several speeches before Athenian
allies in northern Hellas_the speech before the Acanthians (4.85-7) being the
only one Thucydides (re)creates_in which they present Athens as the 'enslaver
of Hellas' and themselves as the 'liberators of Hellas'. In a rare admission
of the effectiveness of political rhetoric, Thucydides tells us that the
Acanthians and other poleis in northern Hellas were swayed, at least in part,
by Brasidas' convincing rhetoric (4.88). Thucydides also informs us of
Brasidas' 'excellent reputation' (4.81) throughout the Hellenic world
_evidence, I take it, that Sparta's rhetoric of liberation at least seemed to coincide with her policies. But, after
closely examining Thucydides' artful juxtapositioning of past erga and past logoi with present rhetoric_take, for example,
Sparta's massacre of allegedly soon-to-be-liberated helots (4.80), an episode
which is recounted just prior to the Spartans' speech before the Acanthians
in which they claim to be the 'liberators of Hellas'_we discover a gradual
undermining of the legitimacy of the rhetoric of liberation. The paper is structured as follows.
After situating this discussion of the degeneration of the rhetoric of
liberation in the context of stasis and kin_sis (_1), I
examine, in turn, the three manifestations of rhetoric of liberation in the History, each of which is less legitimate than its
predecessor. First, the Athenians employ the rhetoric of liberation as a
means of justifying their empire (_2). Later, the Spartans claim the role of
'the liberators of Hellas' in their attempt to win over allies in northern
Hellas (_3). Finally, in Sicily, Athens re-deploys this rhetorical tool in an
effort to combat her growing reputation as the 'enslaver of Hellas' by
presenting what Thucydides intends for us to see as a desperate, and
outrageous, argument--namely that Athens has come all the way to Sicily not
to conquer the Sicilians (a motive Thucydides, in fact, goes to great lengths
to substantiate), but rather to liberate them from the threat of Syracusan
tyranny (_4). As the rhetoric of liberation is appropriated, and
re-appropriated, throughout the narrative, Thucydides, by (re)creating a
shared Hellenic past and juxtaposing it with the suspicious rhetoric of the
present, increasingly undermines the legitimacy of the rhetoric of
liberation. Contesting the
Lessons of the Persian War Bernd Steinbock In his extant speeches, Demosthenes
alludes twice to Thebes' medizing during the Persian War. In the Second
Philippic, he asserts that
Philip sided with the Thebans, knowing that they would always betray Greece
for their own benefit (Dem. 6.11-12), whereas in On the Symmories, he claims that the Thebans would never medize
again (Dem. 14.34). Previous scholars have used these passages to illustrate
that orators freely use historical examples, drawing those conclusions which
best suit their purpose at hand (Nouhaud 1982, 182f.). Such an approach,
while focusing on the speaker's rhetorical techniques, entirely ignores the
role of the audience. Yet the orators did not operate within a
socio-political vacuum, but had to take the attitudes of their audience into
account. This paper seeks to contextualize
Demosthenes' allusions to Thebes' medizing within a complex net of
remembrances and beliefs held by the audience and thus to explore the
manifestation and contestation of this shared image of the past within
Athenian public discourse. In the Second Philippic, Demosthenes tried to arouse his audience
against Philip by drawing an analogy between the current situation and
Xerxes' invasion. For this purpose, he utilized the master narrative of the
Persian War, as it was, for instance, promoted in the Athenian funeral
speeches (Loraux 1989, 155-71; Thomas 1989, 196-237; Gehrke 2003). The
assumption of unchanging character, underlying this memorialized Athenian
history, made the contemporary Athenians defenders of Greek liberty, Philip a
greedy barbarian, and the Thebans traitors by nature (Dem. 6.9-12).
Demosthenes thus evoked an event which lay at the heart of Athenian ideology.
Since these shared memories created feelings of identity and belonging, his
analysis was likely to strike an emotional cord with his audience,
infuriating them against Philip, the second Xerxes. In On the Symmories, on the other hand, Demosthenes sought to
dissolve the Athenians' fear of an impending Persian invasion. In an attempt
to rush the Athenians to war, his opponents had invoked the memory of the
Persian Wars and their ancestors' accomplishments (Dem. 14.1, 14.8, 14.41).
Demosthenes tried to challenge this interpretation and to modify the master
narrative of the Persian War, through elaborate arguments and the use of
alternative carriers of social memory. In order to ensure the good will of
his audience, Demosthenes first echoed core values of Athenian ideology,
Athens' high regard for justice and its role as protector of the Greeks (Dem.
14.6.). Concerning the Persians and Thebans, however, Demosthenes dropped
this assumption of a community's unchanging character. Comparing the new
Athenian fleet to the one at Salamis and alluding to the Athenians' resolve
at Marathon, he asserted that the Persians had indeed learned their lesson
from their earlier disasters and would not dare to invade again (Dem.
14.28-30). Similarly, Demosthenes tried to counter the belief that the
Thebans would again be on the Persian side. Acknowledging the difficulty of
saying anything positive about the Thebans, he challenged the predominant stereotype
of the Thebans as proto-typical traitors: The Thebans' are so ashamed about
their collaboration with the Persians that they would do whatever it takes to
redeem themselves (Dem. 14.33). How could Demosthenes know about Theban
repentance, or rather, how could he expect to find any credibility for this
claim within his audience? Several sources confirm that the Thebans indeed
felt the need to excuse their pro-Persian stance (Thuc. 3.62) and tried to
obliterate the memorials of their medizing (Isoc. 14.59, Aesch. 3.116).
Besides, Demosthenes was in a position to learn of the Theban views through
his personal experience as their proxenus. To some extent this was true for
his fellow Athenians as well, since from 383-378 B.C. 300 Theban democrats
lived as refugees in Athens (Xen. Hell. 5.2.31) and both cities fought together against the Spartans
between 378 and 371 B.C. Through these internal and external clues we are
able to assess the ideological and emotional power of Demosthenes' historical
allusions and to re-situate them into the socio-political realm. A Program of
Imperial Recovery: Ammianus and Julian as Students of History Robert Chenault It is commonly asserted that one of
Ammianus Marcellinus' purposes in writing his history was to show to those
ignorant of antiquity (antiquitatum ignari: 31.5.11) that Rome had faced disasters
comparable to or greater than its crushing defeat at Adrianople in AD 378
(31.5.12-7; 31.13.19) but had always survived and recovered (Thompson 1947, 131-2).
Therefore imperial decline could be reversed, if emperors displayed the
requisite energy, virtue, and discipline, as Julian had done (Matthews 1989,
470-2). What is less often noted is the specific importance Ammianus attaches
to knowledge of Roman history as a factor in Julian's singular achievement,
and by extension, as an essential element in a program of imperial recovery. The importance of understanding Roman
history functions in Ammianus' narrative on two levels. First, it is a
conspicuous feature by which Ammianus distinguishes his narrative of Julian
from his accounts of other emperors. This distinction is especially visible
in Ammianus' main historical narratives of Constantius II, Valentinian, and
Valens, as opposed to their obituaries, in which biographical elements
predominate. Although each emperor is compared to various predecessors in the
obituaries (21.16; 30.7-9; 31.14), Julian is favored with such comparisons
during his lifetime; moreover, true exempla, to be distinguished from mere comparisons in
that the former suggest Julian's imitation or emulation of them, are
concentrated in the historical narrative of Julian and scarcely appear in the
accounts of the other emperors. The presence of exempla helps to justify Ammianus' assertion that
Julian's deeds surpassed those of the ancients, and to fulfill his promise to
write about Julian in a style approaching panegyric (16.1.3). If Ammianus' account of Julian is
self-consciously different in quality from those of the other emperors, a
second dimension to the importance of knowing one's Roman history comes into
view: Ammianus has narrated Julian differently because he believed that
Julian's own awareness of history had tangible effects on his actions; hence
historical references play a larger role in Ammianus' account of Julian than,
for example, in that of Valens, a notoriously uneducated man (31.14.5). In
fact, Ammianus states that Julian was well-read in nostrarum externarumque
rerum historiam multiformem
(16.5.7); on more than one occasion, his reading prompted him to emulate
behavior of which he had learned from history (16.1.4; 24.3.2; 24.4.24). At
such moments, the figure of Julian is assimilated to Ammianus' own authorial
persona by a clever conflation of narrative perspective. Although the
collapse of narrative perspective makes it ambiguous whether it is Ammianus
or Julian who possesses this knowledge of the past, Ammianus makes it clear
that moral worth and practical success belong to those who understand
history. Accordingly, knowledge of the past is revealed to be crucial to
understanding how to revive the fortunes of Rome, a hope which had most
nearly come to fruition in the figure of Julian. Orientalist
Discourse Materialized: The Role of Archaeology in the Construction of Modern
Turkish Identity Ufuk Soyoz It is generally believed that the
'classics' and archaeology of Greece and Rome is the least political academic
discipline of humanities. However, Greek archaeology, which originated as the
German academic discipline of Altertumswissenschaft, was embedded in nineteenth-century politics.
Like other disciplines of the humanities, classical archaeology was highly
influenced by the dominant nationalist and Orientalist tendencies of
nineteenth century. Thus classical archaeology has incorporated into the
social and cultural patterns of nineteenth century society and reflected them
back, to define an identity of European, as opposed to the Eastern 'other'.
Although the history of archaeology has a slightly different schema of
development in each Western country, it has mainly served to provide a
powerful support for the connection between the heritages of Europe with that
of Classical past. In England, France and especially in Germany Ancient
Greece became a model for civilization, and these countries defined their
national identities as the inheritor and embodiment of classical
civilization. In this way, the connection with classical past became a
further proof of the superiority of the West over the barbaric East; as such
it presented one more reason for the domination of the East through European
colonization. In this context, it is important to note
that the late Ottoman Empire, as well as modern Turkey, stood in an ambiguous
position. Although the ancient Greek and Roman sites sit in the territories
of the Empire, the Ottomans and Arab nations _unlike the Modern Greece-
received no role in the reconstruction of European ancestors. The exclusion
of the Arab and Ottoman nations from the construction of European past was a
reflection of Orientalist tendencies of the period, which helped to
legitimize the mission of colonization. The exclusion of Ottomans from the
reconstruction of European past found a response within the intellectuals of
Ottoman Empire, who started to employ the cultural vocabulary of Europe,
especially using the archaeology, and started to build an acceptable
'Western' past for the Empire. Archaeology provided the syntax that let the
Ottoman Empire to assume its participation in Europe and thus to speak its
language. The existence of Greek antiquities in the territory of the Ottoman
Empire provided an "entr_e in to the birth of Europe" and the
elites of the Empire hoped to be acknowledged as a seminal site for Europe
rather than being excluded from European heritage. The development of archaeology and
museums was part of a general process of Westernization, which was culminated
in foundation of Turkish Republic in 1923. The archaeology played a more
significant role in definition of new Turkish identity of the Turkish
Republic, which is founded on the model of a 'western' and 'secular'
nation-state. Aside from the development of archaeology as a science, the use
of archaeological references also found expression in the architecture of the
period, especially in the important public buildings of the recently founded
capital of the Republic; in Ankara. In this paper I will present a survey of
the various archaeological references in public buildings of Ankara in early
Republican Period. Then I will present a detailed interpretation of the
Mausoleum of Ataturk, who is the founder of Turkish Republic. The Mausoleum,
which is constructed in the form of a Greek temple, was a monument to the
'western' and 'secular' Turkish identity. |
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