Un legislatore greco nell’Epitome di Pompeo Trogo: il “Licurgo” di Giustino, «Conference Othering and the other: Performing identity in the Roman Empire» (Online), University of Évora, July 5-16th 2021 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2024
This paper investigates Lycurgus’ representation in imperial literature using a comparative approach, focusing primarily on Plutarch, Pausanias, and Lucian. Pausanias gives a general overview of Lycurgus in his historical introduction to Laconia, following the Herodotean model closely. A general comparison between Plutarch and Pausanias sheds light on some interesting differences between the two accounts. For instance, Pausanias places Lycurgus in the Agiad royal house, following Herodotus, whereas Plutarch prefers the more well-known Euripontid genealogy. Moreover, according to Pausanias, Lycurgus substituted the human sacrifice with the whipping of ephebes, saving some young Spartans from certain death. Though Plutarch greatly stresses Lycurgus’ generosity, he expresses no knowledge of the substitution concerning this deadly ritual. Lucian’s Anαcharsis, on the other hand, represents one of the rare cases in which topical motifs related to Sparta’s ideal representation are criticized and even mocked: this “reversal” humour involves the practices of the agoge and their inventor, Lycurgus. Through a technique repeatedly used by Lucian, Solon is asked a series of questions and listens to objections from the barbarian Anacharsis which often sound comical because they are expressed from an unusual point of view. Lucian and Pausanias, then, offer different perspectives on Lycurgus. The chapter compares their outlooks with the standard, idealized image of Plutarch’s Lycurgus.
Plutarch and Sparta's military characteristics in the Parallel Lives of Lykourgos and Numa
Sparta in Plutarch's Lives, edited by Philip Davies & Judith Mossman, 2023
My paper explores a significant but neglected inconsistency in Plutarch’s presentation of Sparta’s military characteristics within his Parallel Lives of the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos and the early Roman king, Numa. The inconsistency in question involves a striking divergence between how Plutarch presents Spartan society and its military characteristics in the Life of Lykourgos and how he presents them in the Synkrisis comparing Lykourgos’ work with that of Numa. In the Life he presents Sparta’s military features as no more than a subsidiary aspect of the Lykourgan politeia. In contrast, in the Synkrisis he presents the Lykourgan politeia as significantly martial in character. This divergence has been insufficiently appreciated in previous scholarship, despite the long-recognised tendency of Plutarch’s synkriseis to problematise perspectives adopted in the preceding Lives. In my paper, Sections 1 and 2 examine the details of Plutarch’s divergent portrayals of Spartan society and its military characteristics, looking first at the Life of Lykourgos, then at the Synkrisis. Section 3 discusses the reasons for this divergence and how we should assess it in terms of Plutarch’s literary methods, his sources, his intellectual agenda, and historical perceptions of the character of classical Sparta.
LYCURGUS' EXTREME WISDOM: COMPETING VIEWS OF THE LAWGIVER
The Classical Journal, 2023
As part of the ongoing reassessment of Xenophon's philosophical works, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the relationship between Xenophon and Plato, who occasionally criticize one another's works. Although ancient commentators assumed that the two men must have been rivals, a closer look at each one's comments on the other's work reveals that their criticisms were more philosophical than personal. After discussing two examples in which Plato and Xenophon criticize one another's works, in this paper I suggest that an unusual comment made by Xenophon about Lycurgus, the legendary Spartan lawgiver, is an oblique but critical reference to a statement in Plato's Symposium about Lycurgus' wisdom.
The Byzantine Suda provides biographical lemmata for the archaic Greek lawgivers Lycurgus, Zaleucus, Solon, Pittacus, and Dracon. This paper aims to analyze the main features of these entries by focusing on the ways in which the individual nomothetai are characterized and connected to each other and to otherwise men and philosophers (e.g., the Seven Sages). For instance, of the three lemmas dedicated to Solon, Σ 776 Adler defines him as a ‘philosopher, legislator, and demagogue’ and provides essential information on his life, including his relationship with the tyrant Pisistratus, his exile, and his death. Likewise, Zaleucus is described as a ‘Pythagorean philosopher and lawgiver’, who died ‘fighting for his homeland’ (Ζ 12 Adler). As for Lycurgus of Sparta, while the lemma Λ 823 Adler is very concise, Λ 824 Adler provides many details concerning his biography and the constitution he gave to the Spartans, emphasizing the direct relationship between Sparta’s political success and Lycurgus’ personal contribution. The study of these entries from the perspective of ancient biographical networks can lead to a better understanding of the substantial information they report and of their relationship with Plutarch and other parallel sources. https://www.kuleuven.be/lectio/event/lectio-international-conference-2022
Justinian's Laws and Procopius' Wars (Revised Proofs)
Procopius of Caesarea: Literary and Historical Interpretations, 2017
Reinventing Procopius Abstract Competing Histories in the Sixth Century: Procopius and Justinian Justinian’s laws (including both the Corpus Iuris Civilis and the Novels) and Procopius’ writings are two of the most extensive and significant corpora available for the study of the sixth century. Despite their importance, however, the two bodies of work are generally studied separately by scholars with different specialties and research interests. The legal codes are used as a source for earlier Roman law and contemporary administrative reform, while Procopius is primarily used as a source for Justinian’s foreign policy and contemporary reactions to his reign, both positive and negative. Although there have been some discussions of Procopius’ reaction to specific laws in the Secret History, in particular his subversion of Justinian’s carefully cultivated self-representation as the ‘sleepless emperor,’ there has not been any work on Procopius’ responses to the laws in the Wars. Moreover, scholars have yet to come to a consensus on the precise relationship between the Wars and Secret History. The current paper addresses both of these questions by focusing on discussions of the consulship in Justinian’s Novels, the Wars, and the Secret History. The current paper argues that Belisarius’ triumphant entry into Syracuse on 31 December 535, reported at Wars 5.5.17-9, is a carefully coded response to Justinian’s Novel 105, in which the emperor modified the financial responsibilities and rights of consulship. The paper continues to show that the discussion of Novel 105 in the Wars complements, but at no point overlaps with, the explicit discussion of that Novel in the Secret History. Several conclusions are drawn from these facts. First, the Secret History was intended to function as a coherent work and act as a key for decoding and understanding oblique discussions of contemporary events found in the Wars. Second, Procopius was intimately familiar not only with the rhetoric of Justinian’s laws, but also their specifics, and that his depiction of Belisarius was meant to frustrate the narrative of consular decline that Justinian’s legal team articulated in Novel 105. Third, just as Procopius inverted the narrative of the ‘sleepless emperor’ in the Secret History to attack Justinian’s reform program, his discussion of Novel 105 in the Wars inverts the logic of that law to imply that the imperial office, not the consulship, was in decline. The paper concludes in the spirit of the conference’s search for new methodologies for the study of Procopius by opening two new avenues of inquiry: using the Secret History as a key to detect oblique discussions in the Wars and investigating the role of Justinian’s laws in shaping Procopius’ discussions of contemporary events. Specifically, the paper suggests that Justinian’s laws may have played a role in shaping the structure of the Wars, in particular the division of material into chronologically distinct campaigns (for which Appian is the only classical precedent), which form counternarratives to the model of imperial success articulated in Justinian’s provincial reform laws, especially Novel 24.
Any attempt to understand the slave rebellion of Spartacus must contend with the two very different historical traditions which provide the source of all our evidence concerning his revolt: the overtly hostile Senatorial aristocratic tradition which derives from the monumental work of Livy and his sources, the post-Sullan annalists, and the more sympathetic legendary Roman populares and Greek eastern tradition which has come down to us from the fragments of the earlier Histories of Sallust and perhaps the Universal History of Posidonius or his lost appendix to it on the Life of Pompey, as well as the works of the more anti-Roman Greek historians of the early Augustan age. Because of the paucity of the surviving brief literary sources, modern historians have felt compelled to patch together pieces deriving from both these traditions in order to get as complete a picture as possible, particularly for the first years of the war, even though, for the final campaign, those pieces were often mutually contradictory. Because of these inconsistencies, the modern historiography of the war of Spartacus, has come down to various sets of individual choices between the two traditions that different scholars have made. The simplest and most consistent approach for scholars would have been to ignore one version altogether. However, to choose the Livian version would result in what seems to most modern scholars to be a far too distorted account of events, leaving out a number of significant Roman reverses during the final campaign; but choosing the Sallustian version derived from Plutarch and Florus would leave out other important earlier Roman defeats from the previous campaign against the consuls described only in Appian and the Livian epitomists’ versions. Thus, most scholars have made their selections from both traditions. In contrast with their relatively consistent accounts of the campaigns against the consuls, the Livian and Sallustian sources’ versions of Spartacus’s final campaign, fought against Marcus Licinius Crassus, are much more clearly demarcated; indeed they are radically divergent. This is particularly unfortunate, yet probably understandable, because, despite Spartacus’ almost miraculous earlier victories over the armies of the Roman consuls, it is the events of the final campaign against Marcus Crassus, particularly those of the final battle, that provide the best measure of how great a threat he actually posed to Rome. Unfortunately the process of amalgamation of the two traditions has led to a blurring of the lines between them, hiding both the ultimate futility of Spartacus’s challenge to Rome embodied in the Livian tradition and the real potential threat of that challenge which emerges when the Sallustian version is pushed to its limits. In particular, regarding Spartacus, many historians seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that what the Sallustian and eyewitness sources, including Cicero, are telling them is actually true. Thus, the time has now arrived for a reappraisal of the two conflicting historical traditions. Because the accounts of the final phase of the war found within the two traditions are so much at variance in their details and yet internally so self-consistent, each alternative account should be considered in relative isolation, enabling us to see the Livian/Senatorial Spartacus at his minimum historical stature and the Sallustian Spartacus at his maximum. This work presents in detail the source materials for both the Sallustian and the Livian versions of the final campaign of the slave war as well as for the most important military events which led up to it, with extensive commentary. The book provides a carefully argued analysis, comparison and critique of the two patently incompatible accounts of the final campaign of the war of Spartacus that derive from the two historical traditions. Through analysis I rationalize and clarify both accounts, perhaps shedding some new light on the controversies and mysteries surrounding them, to produce two distinct but coherent pictures. I have tried to let the sources from each tradition speak for themselves and, for each point of contradiction, to allow the reader to choose between them. Having confronted each account individually without inclusion of any, or almost any, particularly contradictory elements from the other, except where logic and analysis demand it, allows us to then ask which of these contradictory pictures of events is more likely to be true overall, if not in every detail. Taking into account both Livian and post-Sullan annalist biases and the distortions introduced by Plutarch into the Sallustian version, I have offered critiques of both traditions. In analyzing the two traditions, I have also attempted to introduce some new interpretations and, using our contemporary knowledge of Roman social and military history and Italian geography and demography, offer a contribution to the now ongoing debates about a number of outstanding military, chronological and geographical questions arising out of each tradition. Detailed discussions of these special topics are relegated to approximately two dozen appendices. I believe my analysis provides convincing arguments that, as far as the final campaign is concerned, a large part of the Livian/Senatorial aristocratic version, as passed down to us by Appian, Florus and the Livian epitomists, is, in crucially important ways, an historical fabrication swallowed whole by Livy and nearly so by Appian from their likely sources, the duplicitous patriotic post-Sullan annalists such as Q. Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antius. On the other hand, I argue that certain important aspects of Plutarch’s contradictory account represent deliberate distortions by the great biographer of what his source Sallust actually wrote, in the service of better illustrating the moral lessons he wished to impart and of his own unconscious aristocratic biases. In my conclusion I have also used the results of my analysis to identify the nearly fatal Spartacus war as perhaps the first crucial link in the chain of events which finally brought down the Sulla's Roman Republic some three decades later. See Addendum pg. 11 below. I also use evidence from both traditions to re-evaluate the severity and historical impact of the insurgency carried on in Southern Italy by the survivors of the war over the next decade and to gauge the slave rebellion’s future prospects during that period had Spartacus lived to fight on. This work thus encourages historians to re-examine the literary evidence and the resulting logical arguments critiquing the Livian and the Sallustian derivative traditions as well as those illuminating and supporting the original Sallustian version and to form their own independent judgments about the magnitude of Spartacus’ achievements, his chances of surviving the final Roman offensive, his longer term prospects for success had he done so and whether the five century Roman Empire that followed was inevitable or strongly contingent upon the Romans' good fortune. Addendum pg. 11 Failing to mention the nearly fatal crisis of the late 70's but perhaps thinking of how much difficulty the future monarch Tiberius, at the head of fifteen legions, fully half of the total armed power of Rome, had in finally crushing the great three year Illyrian revolt of 6-9 AD, "the most serious of foreign wars since those with Carthage" (Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 16,1), and of the enduring chagrin of Augustus, the emperor himself, at the subsequent total loss of Varus and his three legions in the Teutoberg Forest in Germany, ending any Roman ambitions of conquest there, Edward J. Watts cautions: “It is, of course, quite possible that an empire of some sort would have emerged from the wreckage of Rome’s republic. But there also might not have been a Roman Empire at all. It is surely just as likely that if the first Roman to try to create a permanent Roman autocracy had been less skilled or less long-lived than Augustus, Rome’s Mediterranean primacy might have ended with the Republic itself. As the dictatorships of Caesar and Sulla both showed, an empire involving all of Rome’s territory was by no means inevitable. Spain had split off from Sulla’s regime. It had almost succeeded in doing the same under Caesar. Syria, too, remained incredibly difficult to control for both Caesar and the triumvirate with figures such as Labienus easily peeling it off from central Roman control. Augustus managed to create a stable Roman autocracy that dominated the entire Mediterranean world. If he had not come along, Rome’s empire may well have fallen apart.” Watts, Edward J., Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, New York, Basic Books, 2018 pg. 279