Lucus horridus - Emotional responses to 'northern' holy groves in Lucan and Tacitus (original) (raw)
2022
The intertextual links between Lucan’s and Tacitus’ impressive ekphraseis of certain imagined northern groves have been recognised for a long time and discussed as evidence for the literary connections between different genres in the Late Julio-Claudian and Flavian contexts. Yet a hitherto unexplored aspect of these fascinating and rich passages is the emotional charge that is clearly present in each of them, though subtly manipulated by the writers to serve their more particular points in each context. Holy groves were also a longstanding part of the Roman religion, but during the troubled mid-first century CE, the sacred sites of northern peoples – located at least in the realms of imagination in wooded surroundings – the groves of Gauls (in the case of Lucan) and those among the Germani and Britons (in Tacitus) tend to emerge as compellingly (and perhaps compulsively) elaborated loci horridi. Reading the Lucanic (Bell. civ. 3.399-425) and Tacitean (Germ. 39; Ann. 1.61; 14.30) passages on Gallic and Germanic holy groves and bringing them into conversation not only with other relevant passages by the same authors but also with the modern theories of the ‘history of emotions’, I hope to cast new light on the role that natural loci horridi of the northern ritual space played in shaping Roman collective anxieties. These, I will argue, had much to do with the imperial power’s anxieties about the loyalties of their northern subjects and ostensible allies, as well as about the capacity of certain types of imagined landscapes to symbolise atavistic religion and resistance to Roman domination. ‘Fear’ is certainly one of the emotions evoked by these landscapes, but I hope to show that this blanket category covers a remarkable emotional range in these passages.
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Memories of the Subaltern: 'Ethnicising Religion' in Roman Imperial Literature, c. 100-300
The context of the Roman Empire, in addition to fostering the tradition of writing about the ‘barbarian’ groups outside the empire, proved to be a fertile ground ethnographical or ‘ethnographicising’ accounts about the provincial groups and their past. But why was the religious past of the provincial groups still ‘good to think with’ in the second or third centuries of the empire? What were the primary aims for writers in a wide variety of genres and registers as they referred to the religious practices and antiquities of provincial – essentially subaltern – groups in an ‘ethnicising’ fashion? What difference did the spread of Christianity, with its strong and exclusionary religion-based but occasionally ‘ethnicised’ identity, make? My paper will focus upon the Roman discourse that sought to portray the provincial groups as ‘remembering’ their pre-Roman pasts even in the context of the High and Late Empire. Memory of the past cults and heroes could, on occasion, be portrayed as a holding of grudge towards the Romans, and some uprisings in the provinces seem to have been imagined to have strong religious, even millenarian, motivations. Generally, however, the empire of peoples, regions, and practices was much more useful for rhetorical or knowledge-ordering purposes if its varietas could be maintained – but for this purpose, it was necessary to relegate the provincials to their ‘ethnic’ roles, about which centuries-earlier material could still be circulated. Such a mind-set is essentially colonial, and thus amenable to readings informed by Subaltern Studies, but it can usefully be studied from the point of view of the Greco-Roman tradition of religious ethnography – or perhaps more aptly ‘ethnographicising outgroup religiosities’. This is the particular ‘relocation of religion’ that my paper explores. The portrayal of what provincials ‘remember’ about their past displays even broader linkages when bearing in mind that during the second and third centuries the concept of religious communities as an ethnos became a more widespread notion – partly through the increasing Judeo-Christian influence, as well as the recirculation of originally Hellenistic ideas about ‘barbarian wise men’. Both inside and outside the empire, peoples’ religious practices and antiquities were suspended in a rhetorical state of ahistoricity, while the only religious change imaginable was the inexorable progress of Christianity’s linear time. For the pagan writers, on the other hand, exploration of the religious traditions of their own past or those of the far-away foreign groups’ supposed present (as in the case of the Brahmans) appeared as an attractive, prestige-building option.
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Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature
2021
In this volume, literary scholars and ancient historians from across the globe investigate the creation, manipulation and representation of ancient war landscapes in literature. Landscape can spark armed conflict, dictate its progress and influence the affective experience of its participants. At the same time, warfare transforms landscapes, both physically and in the way in which they are later perceived and experienced. Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature breaks new ground in exploring Greco-Roman literary responses to this complex interrelationship. Drawing on current ideas in cognitive theory, memory studies, ecocriticism and other fields, its individual chapters engage with such questions as: how did the Greeks and Romans represent the effects of war on the natural world? What distinctions did they see between spaces of war and other landscapes? How did they encode different experiences of war in literary representations of landscape? How was memory tied to landscape in wartime or its aftermath? And in what ways did ancient war landscapes shape modern experiences and representations of war? In four sections, contributors explore combatants’ perception and experience of war landscapes, the relationship between war and the natural world, symbolic and actual forms of territorial control in a military context, and war landscapes as spaces of memory. Several contributions focus especially on modern intersections of war, landscape and the classical past.
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