Читать книгу After the Past - Andrew Feldherr - Страница 10

Let me begin with the historical epitomes we know Brutus undertook. Three are attested, of the Gracchan historian Fannius (Cic. Att. 12.5B), of Coelius Antipater’s seven-book monograph on the Second Punic War (Cic. Att. 13.8), and of Polybius. These could easily be construed, like Sallust’s own work, as time off, an escape or alternative to action. Thus, on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, Brutus, when not with Pompey, was sitting in his hot tent preparing a summary of Polybius (Plut. Brut. 4.8). We can also explain the vogue for epitomes by their utility for Romans with limited time, and perhaps irregular access to libraries, thanks to the demands and disruptions of the period. But there are larger ideological and historical factors that explain why these decades saw such a proliferation of epitomes. The first point to make about Brutus’ summaries is that they are described not as a breviary of events but specifically as the epitome of specific literary works. The epitomizer stands in relation to earlier events as the reader to a text, and this can reinforce the sense of separation and temporal distance between the recipient and the history described. Sallust similarly seems to survey all of Roman history when he chooses to “excerpt” the story of Catiline (res gestae populi Romani carptim, Cat. 4.2).

This impression of separation and the new importance of writing as a medium for history make particular sense in light of Harriet Flower’s recent arguments for a reperiodization of the Roman republic.⁷ Key for Flower is the position of Sulla. She demonstrates that Sulla’s new constitution, far from restoring republican institutions and practices, represented a radical break from the past in its attempt to legislate what had previously been matters of custom. And this move away from a politics internally regulated through the shared values of a closed nobility went together with a radical transformation of the physical environment of the city and the loss through civil wars, proscription, and exile of the dramatis personae of political life. If the combination of violence and institutional disruption provoked a desire to assert continuity and connection with the past, the means by which this connection could be established would themselves have to be new. The monumental fabric of Rome that preserved memories of the past had itself been largely remade, and many of the patres whose oral instruction would have given meaning to monuments were dead or in exile. In the inevitable damage to the cultural practices that made Roman history part of a living tradition, texts must have taken on a new role, together with an increased recognition that for the new ruling classes after Sulla history was something more to be made than received. Mary Jaeger uses the phrase “Written Rome” to signal how Livy’s text constructs the city it represents. We are accustomed to viewing this phenomenon in tandem with the Augustan rebuilding of the actual city itself as well as the expansion of the audience who had to see Roman history as their history beyond those who had any direct experience of that city. But Flower shows that the combination of radical change in places, practices, and persons, and the expansion of power to new classes without a share in traditional media of commemoration was a recurring phenomenon in Roman history, and particularly acute in the aftermath of Sulla’s dictatorship. Sallust himself makes Sulla responsible for a new break with the moral traditions of the past, and, as we will discuss more fully in chapter 5, Sulla becomes the center of the chronological pattern that organizes his work. We should recognize that the prominence of Sulla inside the text corresponds to his role in transforming not only Rome itself but the very way in which the representation of the past was transmitted and conceptualized.

There is, of course, another side to this portrayal of Brutus’ rewriting of the past as a mark of distance. Again, this argument has to do with his writing summaries of texts rather than simply condensed accounts of history. Not only did each of these texts describe the pre-Sullan republic, but their authors, Antipater, Fannius, and, thanks to his associations with Scipio, Polybius, were themselves notable presences among the last generations of what Flower calls the republic of the nobiles.⁸ And here the layering of temporal distance becomes important. As Antipater looked back to the events of the Second Punic War, so Brutus looks back to him looking back. From this perspective, the Sullan break seems less absolute, just another temporal distance to be overcome. And, in place of a dramatic change in modes of commemoration that altered the function of written historiography, Brutus’ historical excerpting may configure writing history as the perpetuation of tradition.

The subject of the next of Brutus’ works I want to consider, his Cato, similarly challenged its readers to balance perceptions of continuity and change. Certainly from the distance of the Neronian period, Cato’s death could designate a sweeping break in Roman history, precisely coinciding with the death of libertas itself: neque enim Cato post libertatem uixit nec libertas post Catonem (“for neither did Cato survive freedom nor freedom Cato,” Sen. Constant. 2.3). And if, in the case of the epitomes, an awareness of Brutus’ reproduction of the works of pre-Sullan writers could mark writing itself as a manifestation of continuity between past and present, the treatment of Cato seemed to demand a similar attention to the presence of the narrative, but with an opposite effect. The various portraits of Cato produced sequentially in the year and a half after his death by Cicero, Hirtius, Brutus, and Caesar (not to speak of Fadius Gallus, Cic. Fam. 7.24.2) must have required considerable tact in balancing praise and blame with discretion. Cicero famously called the project a “problem for Archimedes” (Att. 12.4.2), and there has been some scholarly debate about how balanced the contrasting accounts of Cato would have been, and what scope they gave for creating consensus.⁹ Nevertheless, irrespective of their contents, the network through which these rival Catos were circulated may well have emphasized the social bonds connecting the authors in all camps. Atticus, after all, had a hand in distributing Hirtius’ salvo, which began with a copious praise of Cicero (Att. 12.40.1). Caesar’s own elaborate tribute to the stylistic qualities of Cicero’s Cato (Plut. Caes. 3.4; Cic. 39; Plin. HN 7.117), echoed in a letter to the orator himself (Att. 13.46.2), suggests that explicitly embedding the orator’s work in a very contemporary nexus of literary exchange may have been a strategy to neutralize the revolutionary potential of its content as well as to win favor for his own rebuttal of it. In this contest, then, attention to the stable present, strongly demarcated from the civil war past, contrasts with the impression of recreating the past through writing I have imagined for Brutus’ epitomes.

If it is true that the synchronic form of the treatises, their textual presence as objects of polite exchange, stood in tension with their subject matter, where current political rivalries about the state of Rome were activated by and through looking back at the life of Cato, that problematic relationship between present and the past may well have been manifested in other ways in this new literary form. In Cicero’s case, the perspective of looking back at Cato may well have been met by Cato looking forward toward the future from the time of his life. The precise problem with praising Cato, according to Cicero, was that it required “celebrating his foresight of the present circumstances, his struggle to prevent them from occurring, and his suicide lest he see them having come to pass” (nisi haec ornata sint, quod ille ea quae nunc sunt et futura viderit et ne fierent contenderit et ne facta viderit vitam reliquerit, Att. 12.4.2). The traffic in Catos threatens to become dangerous for the author when the reader not only looks back at Cato himself but looks at the present as Cato. Such a double perspective may have been encouraged by the very title of the work which, as Kumaniecki (1970, 172), argues, was not the “Praise of Cato” but simply the “Cato.” After the mortal Cato passes from the scene, Cicero’s work would present itself less as retrospective praise than as a textual avatar of its subject.

Another of Kumaniecki’s observations about the formal properties of Cicero’s treatise suggests further complexities in the relationship between the historical Cato and his representation in words. For he demonstrates that Cicero did not structure his Cato as a traditional Roman funerary oration, following the public career of his subject, but organized it systematically according to the virtuous qualities demonstrated by his life. Such a choice not only pushed against generic boundaries by bringing the work closer to Cicero’s philosophical productions.¹⁰ If Cato’s struggle became to escape from history, not to see the present come in to being (facta), that may well have given special significance to Cicero’s shift from a traditional Roman means of maintaining the political presence of the deceased as political capital for his gens to a more international style of praise focusing on subordinating actions to the virtues they exemplify. Caesar’s response, which began by opposing his own persona as a man of action with Cicero’s as a man of words, although also arranged by topics, may have been to bring Cicero’s Cato back down to earth by offering sordid details from his personal life to demonstrate vices that countered the virtues Cicero had praised. The distinctive importance of such a tension between representation and reality for portraying Cato emerges from a statement Cicero made in his own treatise: “[Cato’s] case reversed what usually happens to most men, for everything about him seems to have been greater in reality than in reputation; not often is expectation surpassed by knowledge and the ears by the eyes.”¹¹

This fragment of Cicero would be echoed in Sallust’s concluding words about Cato: “he preferred to be rather than to seem a good man, and therefore the less he sought glory the more it came to him” (Cat. 54.6). But Cicero’s comment also has an important programmatic aspect, in a sense pitting the real Cato against Cicero’s literary accomplishment: What verbal portrait can match the reality? Such a formulation allows us to perceive the relevance of the flurry of epideictic writing surrounding Cato for Sallust’s work in terms not only of its shared content but also of its own ambiguous literary affiliation. Quintilian reports that the form Sallust chose for the work’s opening, its inclusion of a prologue that has no obvious connection to its subject, was itself an imitation of epideictic practice (Quint. Inst. 3.8.8–9). While some have doubted the specificity of this formal gesture,¹² the contents of the Catiline’s beginning might well have reinforced its evocation of epideictic. For the theme of virtus, which we will later discuss as a philosophical topic, also points to the aspect of historiographical writing that brought it nearest to epideictic oratory, praising and blaming the characters of its protagonists. Indeed, the emphasis on virtus in the Catiline prologue may have particularly evoked the Catonian innovations in panegyric suggested above. While all subjects of laudations would inevitably be praised for their virtues, Cato’s exalted moral reputation, in addition to his stoic leanings, make him a likely embodiment of virtue itself. So Cicero elsewhere attributes his reluctance to tackle a Cato on his fear of “times unfriendly to virtue” (tempora timens inimica virtuti, Orat. 35). Strikingly, when Sallust in his own preface turns to praise the specific literary task he has taken on, writing history, both of the reasons why it is praiseworthy recall Cicero’s comments about the Cato (Cat. 3.2). The difficulty of “matching words to deeds” would be amplified by recalling the unique position of Cato, whose deeds were so much greater than their reputation, and the possibility of a hostile audience’s reaction to excessive praise was what Cicero too had feared.

Cato, then, as this tradition perhaps constructed him, polices the border between history and epideictic from both sides. His virtues seem to transcend what was possible, to require the language of fama, and yet they remain in the realm of fact; the eyes, recalling the autopsy on which the authority of historiography especially depended, win out over hearsay. And perhaps for that reason he seems to wander suddenly into Sallust’s account. Unlike his opponent Caesar, there has been no mention of him in the work before he begins to speak, and that speech itself shows him less as the ideal subject of a work of praise than as the practitioner of vituperation: “Often have I complained about the luxury and avarice of our citizens, and therefore I have made many men my enemies” (saepe de luxuria atque avaritia nostrorum civium questus sum, multosque mortalis ea causa advorsos habeo, Cat. 52.7). This language not only makes Cato amplify the moralizing elements of Sallust’s own history,¹³ it similarly puts him in the position feared by the very author of his praise, Cicero. On this single, “historic” occasion, however, he is not talking about virtue and vice but the condition of the republic. And, as praising him, according to Cicero, demanded emphasizing his later foresight of what Caesar’s victory portended, so in the Catiline his theme is not “whether to live with good or bad morals” but whether “the state, together with us, will become the possession of our enemy.” Again looking back at Cato looking forward must have brought many who knew their Catos to lose the distinction between the distant history of the conspiracy and more recent events, an effect prepared by the disorienting temporal perspectives of Caesar’s speech, where he imagines the audience’s actions in 63 BCE being judged from the perspective of the future. And a different intertext from this tradition would have abetted this impression. We know that Brutus’ Cato had included an account of his role in the punishment of the Catilinarians (Att. 12.21.1) and that, in making Cato’s rather than Cicero’s the decisive voice on that occasion, it must have had more in common with Sallust’s version than Cicero’s.¹⁴ For someone reading Sallust’s Catiline in, say, 41 BCE, the confusion might not have been simply between Cato’s stand against Catiline in the 60s and his stand against Caesar in the 40s, for their attention to the historical reality reported by Sallust would also have received interference from the experience of reading a tract in praise of Cato from after his death.

Other than this erosion of historical specificity, the blurring of the narrated “then” and events approaching “now,” and of reality and its textual representation, what might have been the significance of such superimpositions of epideictic on Sallust’ history? For one thing, it would have redoubled many times over the sense of historical rupture conjured by looking back at the Sullan period. Not only did the Caesarian civil war, thanks in part to the death or exile of so many major political figures like Cato, bring about a similar break, but if the act of commemorating Cato in 45 BCE had emphasized these losses, even that period of epideictic Catos would seem irretrievably distant when Sallust’s Catiline appeared, although only a few short years had passed. Anyone remembering Cicero’s or Brutus’ Cato, or Caesar’s or Hirtius’ Anticato, would likely have been struck by the reflection that not only was their subject dead but so were the authors themselves. This pattern of loss, not only seemingly infinitely repeating in time but moving outward from texts to their authors and readers, figures also a pattern of political fragmentation recalling the dissonant perspectives in the Catiline’s final scene. Cato in Sallust is already a divisive figure, someone whose ethical standards had made him enemies, and this divisiveness comes to involve the authors of the various written Catos. An audience’s view of Cato was colored not only by a sense of their own inadequacies, but by their own interests. Despite Cicero’s friendship with Brutus, he took offense at how his own role in events was diminished in his Cato. Indeed, the posthumous debates over Caesar and Cicero as well as Cato suggest that the perspective of and on the individual, arguably what killed the republic, will be what survives of it. And if the account of Cato’s death in any of those treatises approximated the graphic particularity of Seneca or Plutarch’s later versions (Sen. Prov. 10–12; Plut. Cat. Min. 70–1), the act of reading it must have itself further stoked partisan feelings. There is thus a connection between a narrative that focuses on the individual rather than the state and a tendency to interpret that narrative from the perspective of individual rather than collective interests. But while the literature of praise and blame could thus bear witness to the separation of present from past and advance the partisanship that brought that separation about, it also contained a key to transcending that sense of temporal and civic distance: the behaviors chosen out for praise become repeatable and so no longer limited to a specific historical instance and point to qualities that are independent of time and circumstance.¹⁵

If we hear Sallust’s proclamation of the novitas of the Catilinarian conspiracy as an Alexandrian claim to originality, the sudden reimagination of that event as a new subject, nothing could more strongly mark the deaths of the past years as an ending point. It had until just a few years ago been one of the most retold stories of the recent past. Perhaps by stressing its difference from epideictic, history can step outside this tradition by historicizing it and designating its ending. Perhaps the deaths of all of the protagonists of his story, and of all its narrators, look to a world where history can be seen as history, as the shared story of a collective rather than of competing individual perspectives on individuals. On the other hand, if Cato’s was the death of libertas, and if all these further deaths were similarly hypostasized in a way that confuses, as Thucydides (7.77.7) would have it, the state with the men living in it, what other perspective would exist for looking back at Roman history than that of the individual survivor? And what other use would there be for Roman history than as a lesson about fortune, and especially virtus?

Such a perspective puts the greatest distance between Sallust’s audience and the res gestae populi Romani and stakes it to a fundamental difference between remembering virtutes and remembering events. One ideal of Roman history, allegedly practiced by Cato and occasionally imitated by Sallust, records only deeds and not the men who performed them.¹⁶ And the distinction between obscuring individual men’s deaths within the history of the res publica and imagining that res publica itself as able to die with, even like, a Cato, whose own virtus survives his libertas, helps explain the divergent patterns of time within Sallust’s work. The most successful Roman statesmen could look forward not just to being remembered in history but to defining Roman time, to becoming part of the fasti whether as a triumphator or a consul. Yet, as Sallust will point out in the Jugurtha, winning the sort of honores that put you on the map of Roman time does not provide a sufficient index of virtus. He expresses his scorn for those who believe that “praetorships and consulates are bright and magnifying in and of themselves, and not measured according to the virtus of those who held them.”¹⁷Virtus and the res publica are not only moving on different trajectories, the one getting bigger as the other diminishes, but they operate on their own calendars.¹⁸ As opposed to perceiving the memorials of Roman history as transparent to virtus and predicating it of all those whose names it records, Sallust proposes a conception of virtus that cannot be read simply from monuments, but which, conversely, can live on after the res publica.