Rome's Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil
(2019) Institute of Historical Research (Pathologies of Solitude (Wellcome Trust)), Queen Mary, London — Location: London, UK
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- Abstract
- To some, this talk's title may smack of anachronism: there is a wide range of books and articles, as you will know, that have assigned "the invention of solitude", along with its frequent companions the invention of the individual, the subject, the self, the love of literature, to their particular epoch of choice, whether Augustinian Christianity, St Benedict's monasticism, the Petrarchan renaissance, Montaigne's scepticism, Coleridge's and Goethe's Romanticism, or 19th century bourgeois society. This proliferation of "invention" tales has led to a new field of meta-analysis represented by, for example, Gabrièle Wersinger Taylor's perceptive 2018 article, "L’invention de l’invention : archéologie ou idéologie". Is there, though, a history of solitude, whether framed as a progress of the empowered subject or the alienated individual? as a history of private bedrooms or of silent reading? If so, where to begin? Will such a history be linear, or split in many directions as the winds, driven by political economy, aesthetic ideology, or, in the anthropological terms of Philip Descolla or Viveiros de Castro, of distinct ontologies? Alternatively, might "solitude" represent a topological field, a variety of parts and parcels, upon which authors and institutions draw to form their aggregate identities? If the latter, will this topological field be subject to the dictates of inherited tradition—say, à la Ernst Robert Curtius—or to a broader structuralism that might treat solitude like Frobenius' forms, Aby Warburg's serpents, James Frazer's rites? If in such broadly comparative terms, what of languages—between them, like of solitude vs. solitudo, soledad, saudade, einsamkeit, hitbodedut, and within them, like Greek "erêmos", "autitês", "monôtês"? How, finally, do we reconcile our work as historians, attuned to collective beliefs and practices, with our work as critics, for whom the exceptional or odd or heretical thinker might equally represent an expansion of the horizons of the thinkable? For a classicist speaking of solitude in the Roman world, this is only the beginning of the problem, for it has been a commonplace from antiquity down to 19th century historiography and today, that, for the Romans, society simply is reality. On this view, Roman life is characterized by what the great Roman social historian Ramsay Macmullen termed “publicness” and “verticality”: the only life that counted was one that conspicuously reflected, by steps improved, one’s standing in a rigidly hierarchical class structure. The denial to the Romans of solitude and its various companions—individuality, subjectivity, irrationality—has gone hand in hand, historically, with a denial to them of imaginative literature, especially when compared with Greeks. In the 19th century, classical historiography tended to agree with Hegel (and Horace) that Romans “remained satisfied with a dull, stupid subjectivity” (2004: 308–9). “Latin scholarship,” it has been observed, “has produced no Romans and the Irrational to match E.R. Dodds’ famous lectures” on Greeks and the Irrational (1951)—longstanding resistance to Roman solitude shows why, although a full treatment of this question, for which we do not have the time today, would include the history of resistance to the anthropology of the Romans, in part related to a turning away from the comparatist exuberance of James Frazer in Britain, and, on the continent, from the fascist inclinations of such specialists as Jerôme Carcopino. My own work, and the title of this talk, concerns what I call "the solitary sphere", which I hope to add to the more common "public" and "private" spheres, in Rome res publica and res privata. Broadly speaking, what was public transpired in street and forum, what was private among family and home, and controlled by the paterfamilias; the solitary was what one said to oneself. Architectural complexes like Pompey’s theater and Augustus’ campus Martius allowed an individual citizen in the late first century BCE to inhabit spaces that modelled these grandees’ political, astrological, and mythological portraits; my own work shows how new, grand, and ambitious structures of literature—from Cicero’s letters and organized philosophical project to the oeuvres of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius—invited Romans to do the same within the bounded symbolic worlds imagined by their creators. This talk reviews the major issues of solitude in Roman society and literature, as well as the historiography of writing about solitude in pre-modern societies, before turning to certain case studies, notably drawn from Propertius' elegies. For a fuller presentation of this, see the book that followed, 'The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil' (Oxford University Press, 2021); for more details, see under books/monographs.
- Affiliations
Trinity Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2019). Rome’s Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil. Institute of Historical Research (Pathologies of Solitude (Wellcome Trust)), Queen Mary, London, London, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100979