After the Past. Andrew Feldherr

After the Past - Andrew Feldherr


Скачать книгу
Virtus also follows the exile across spatial boundaries, as is shown by a sententia preserved by Seneca from a late Republican treatise de Virtute (On Virtue) whose author considered it “sufficient that it is permitted for those going into exile to bring their own virtutes with them” (quod licet in exilium euntibus uirtutes suas secum ferre, Sen. Helv. 8.1).

      The author of this recognition that virtutes come in individual travel sizes, independent of the dimensions of space and time that Rome’s political imperium strives to measure and control, was Brutus himself. And this third lost work, de Virtute, represents the last of the three discourses against which I want to read the Catiline, philosophy. For, if the formal aspect of Sallust’s prefaces suggests an engagement with epideictic oratory, the substance of these openings comes from philosophy. And the connection between the two alternatives to history will be obvious. The ethical philosophy Sallust presents in his openings will be true for all people in all times. Also, it proposes a system of value, and a way of describing action, that liberates the individual from the judgment of the state, from the exchange of praise and blame that, far from measuring worth from a position outside history, has been made subject to the historical transformations of the res publica. Of course, Sallust was not the only writer to import the language of philosophy into history, to challenge Aristotle’s claim that history was inevitably less philosophical than poetry because of its intrinsic connection with the specific rather than the general (Poet. 9=1451b). But here too, just because the incorporation of philosophy and history was possible, does not mean it was inevitable or unproblematic.19 In the remainder of this chapter, I will take the approach that Sallust does not so much take over a tradition of generic blending but draws attention to the relationship between the aims of history and philosophy, and in doing so he evokes that contrast with which we began between a point of view of the Roman past located outside of it and of the temporal continuities that continue to control the audience’s understanding of the text and draw them back to the position of those spectators of Catiline’s corpse.

      To begin, it is important to remember that the question of how to conceptualize time is raised for the reader not just through subtle play with generic conventions, such as the retrospective contrast between claims about omnis homines and history’s focus on the increasingly fragmented parts of this whole; indeed, it is central to the argument of the passage. The distinction between what lasts and what passes away quickly structures the human individual. However, as emerges throughout the work, there are some who nevertheless focus their energies on the brief and fleeting glory of wealth and bodily attributes. There are thus those who look at themselves from the perspective of eternity and those who do not.

      Yet the very verb that seems to produce the epiphany of virtue as a materially apprehensible manifestation of the divine, something that is both eternal and that we can hold, also suggests that the biggest claim made by the sentence is both the most contested and the least authorized. Habetur can refer to the process of judgment—virtus is held or considered such.27 The present tense of “is being held” looks as much like a description of an immediate struggle engaging author and audience


Скачать книгу