After the Past. Andrew Feldherr

After the Past - Andrew Feldherr


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alt="inline"/> (Dio 47.49.2=trag. adesp. 374 Nauck=TrGF 1 88 F3)

      Oh shameless virtue, so you were a word after all. I worshipped you as a thing, but you were a slave to chance.

      Because of its putative debunking of the notion of arete, the fragment has been read as a Cynic riposte to the stoic idealization of virtus. Thus Moles (1983a, 778–9) would derive the passage from contemporary pro-Caesarean polemic, condemning Brutus, the expert on virtus, for succumbing at the end to a very “unstoic”44 despair. Yet I think its meaning remains more open. Rather than suggesting that Brutus abandoned his principles just as he abandoned the actual “virtus” that might have led him to avoid suicide, it sympathetically shows him confronting an event that forces him—as many must have done in the course of the civil wars—to consider the basic premises for his actions. Whatever its source or interpretation, however, this version of Brutus’ last words has a threefold relevance for the interpretation of Sallustian virtus. Most importantly, it explicitly highlights the alternatives of a Batstone-style reading of virtus as a mere term of discourse, a logos, and the contrary assertion that virtus possesses some kind of objective reality outside of what people say about it. Second, the prompt to reevaluate virtus comes from an awareness of historical change. Within the quotation, virtus is made slave to the contingency that appears to govern the flow of events, to tyche, and of course it is the fact of a particular historical event, the battle of Philippi, that compels Brutus to doubt the reality of virtus.45 Finally, Brutus’ dramatic disillusionment with a philosophical ideal comes when he is presented with the most direct and terrible manifestation of his own subjection to temporality, the prospect of death.

      But death is equally the passage from events and things back to the words that are spoken about them, to virtus as an attribute dependent on others’ judgment rather than as something to be held, habetur (Cat. 1.4). In Brutus’ case, his own deliberation about the dependence of virtus on fortune shifts to the audience for the historical narrative who must now decide whether Brutus’ act of speaking reveals his cowardice or virtus. Their decision can realize previous political alliances, or they can be emphatically set apart from politics: even an opponent may pity Brutus as a man. The perspective of the Catiline’s opening, with its view of omnis homines, thus merges with the small view of Catiline as an individual in that both exclude the collective judgments of the state, of history as determined by the consensus of a group.

      Notes

      1 1 For Thucydides as a fashionable author in the 50s BCE, see Rawson (1985, 22), with Hornblower (1995, 68). For a balancing recognition of the “Unthucydidean” aspects of Sallust’s self-presentation, see Grethlein (2006b).

      2 2 For the contemporary impact of the gesso casts from Pompeii, see Dwyer (2010). Pages 96–8 describe photography’s role in the popularization of these images, and the quote, from Werge (1868, 427–8), will be found on pp. 97–8.

      3 3 Recent analyses of the scene include Gugel (1970); Batstone (1990, 130–2); Desbordes (1992 = 2006, 269–76); Feldherr (2007); Benferhat (2008); Melchior (2010, 408–13); Grethlein (2013, 301–3).

      4 4 Grethlein (2013, 1–26).

      5 5 See esp. the suggestive discussions by Feeney (2010, 14–16) and Wilcox (1987, 93–104).

      6 6 See Tempest (2017, 213). Beyond the works discussed here, he was also well known as an orator (see Balbo 2013) and even wrote poetry (Plin. Ep. 5.8.5); on his Greek letters, once praised for their style but now generally regarded as fake, see Tempest (2017, 190).

      7 7 Flower (2010, 117–34, esp. 131–2).

      8 8 See the relevant entries in FRHist for the most up-to-date information on the lives and works of Fannius (12) and Antipater (15).

      9 9 Thus Jones (1970) has argued that Cicero couched his Cato as a dialogue, and Tschiedel (1981) considerably plays down the invective in Caesar’s AntiCato (contra Goar 1987, 16–18). See esp. Tschiedel (1981, 13–21) on the “feinsinniges literarisches Spiel” actuated by the exchange of compliments between Cicero and Caesar.

      10 10 Cf. Div. 2.3, where he specifically classes the Cato among his philosophical works, with the discussion of Kumaniecki (1970, 185). Of course, there were important precedents for lives arranged “systematically” as opposed to chronologically (the traditional formal classifications of ancient biography). See esp. Momigliano (1971, 88–9), who both connects this tradition with Greek encomia for generals and points to several Greek lives by Nepos as contemporary Roman examples.

      11 11 contingebat in eo quod plerisque contra solet, ut maiora omnia re quam fama viderentur: id quod non saepe evenit, ut expectatio cognitione, aures ab oculis vincerentur, Mac. Sat. 6.33.

      12 12 Earl (1972, 847–9).

      13 13 Sklenář (1998).

      14 14 But it was not identical to it. See Broughton (1936, 43–4), who usefully discusses the impact that the postmortem idealization of Cato had on the historiography of the conspiracy. He uses Brutus’ Cato to represent this tradition but also shows that his account of the episode contains procedural errors not present in Sallust.

      15 15 This distinction between a view of actions as imitable and repeatable versus as historical events in the past suggests


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