The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius
In "The Empire of the Self", Christopher Star studies the question of how political reality affects the concepts of body, soul, and self. Star argues that during the early Roman Empire the establishment of autocracy and the development of a universal ideal of individual autonomy were mutually enhancing phenomena. The Stoic ideal of individual empire or complete self-command is a major theme of Seneca's philosophical works. The problematic consequences of this ideal are explored in Seneca's dramatic and satirical works, as well as in the novel of his contemporary, Petronius. Star examines the rhetorical links between these diverse texts. He also demonstrates a significant point of contact between two writers generally thought to be antagonists - the idea that imperial speech structures reveal the self.
MEDEA'S SOL-IPSISM: LANGUAGE, POWER AND IDENTITY IN SENECA'S MEDEA
Recent investigations of Seneca's Medea have found consistently fascinating the way in which Medea progressively flags her realization of enacted identity and selfhood. She self-consciously pierces the fabric of her drama with identifying declarations, colored by especial reference to her name: the announcement Medea superest (‘Medea remains’, 166) and bald statement of fiam (‘I will be’, 171) in response to hearing her own name lead to the supreme utterance of Medea nunc sum (‘now I am Medea’, 910). Medea conjures herself into being with these three identifications, stepping fully into the troubling contours she knows of not only her own mythology, but also her literary history. Medea's dominating focus on her name allows this layered acknowledgement of self, of Medea as both mythological figure and literary fixture. In resultant discussions, the weight given to her name in precipitating this sense of identity within her play has, quite naturally, led to a proportionate emphasis upon who Medea is. In some ways, Medea's notably self-annotative process of becoming ‘Medea’ eclipses other useful interrogative frameworks of her identity: the spotlight on the ‘who’ of Medea comes somewhat at the expense of the ‘what’, or the ‘how’. This is not to say that such categories are not mutually informative or intertwined, for Medea (by Seneca's time) does, in fact, have a defining act: the murder of her children. Who Medea is stems from what she does, the sentiment vividly expressed by Medea nunc sum. In light of these considerations, I would suggest a different perspective from which to conceptualize Medea's identity, one that takes into account the paired aspects of being and doing that together comprise an understanding of character, especially within drama. This perspective departs from a framework dependent on progressive structural characterization, as represented by the trio of passages cited above, and focuses instead on characterization via demonstrated patterns of linguistic tendency, on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. From the beginning, Medea displays measured consistency with her relentless knowledge of self as she transforms these categories of identification and action: as the play develops, her sense of ‘this is who I am’ becomes ‘this is what I do’.
Vergil's Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History
In this important and original new book, Joseph Farrell argues that there is a detailed and extensive program of literary allusion in Vergil's Georgics, moving basically from Hesiod and Aratus in the first book, to Lucretius in the middle two, to Homer in the fourth. This program involves what he calls "analytic" allusion, namely a reconstruction or interpretation of the texts alluded to; and, he contends, the direction of the allusion, moving from Hesiod (and perhaps Alexandrian poetics) toward Homer and heroic epic, helps to clarify the development of Vergil's poetic career, which moves from the Callimacheanism of the Eclogues to the full-fledged epic of the Aeneid. Applying to the Georgics the full range of recent scholarly methodology, Farrell's pathbreaking book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of Vergil, classical literature, and literary allusion.