Rome and America: Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging 1009249606, 9781009249607

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ROME AND AMERICA

Rome and America provides a timely exploration of the Roman and American founding myths in the cultural imagination. Defying the usual ideological categories, Dean Hammer argues for the exceptional nature of the myths as a journey of Strangers, and also traces the tensions created by the myths in attempts to answer the question of who We are. The wide-ranging chapters reassess Roman antecedents and American expressions of the myth in some unexpected places: early American travelogues, Westerns, bare-knuckle boxing, early American theater, government documents detailing Native American policy, and the writings of Noah Webster, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Eastman. This innovative volume culminates in an interpretation of the current crisis of democracy as a reversion of the community back to Strangers, with suggestions of how the myth can recast a much-needed discussion of identity and belonging. dean hammer is John W. Wetzel Professor of Classics and Professor of Government in the Department of Government at Franklin and Marshall College. He has written extensively on the ancient and modern world. His books include Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (Cambridge, 2014), Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination (2008), The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought (2002), The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory: A Rhetoric of Origins (1998), and, as editor, A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic (2015).

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ROME AND AMERICA Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging

DEAN HAMMER Franklin and Marshall College

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009249607 doi: 10.1017/9781009249621 © Dean Hammer 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Hammer, Dean, 1959– author. title: Rome and America : communities of strangers, spectacles of belonging / Dean Hammer, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania. description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022034146 (print) | lccn 2022034147 (ebook) | isbn 9781009249607 (hardback) | isbn 9781009249614 (paperback) | isbn 9781009249621 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: United States – Civilization – Roman influences. | National characteristics, American. | National characteristics, Roman. | United States – History. | Rome – History. classification: lcc e169.1 .h257 2023 (print) | lcc e169.1 (ebook) | ddc 973–dc23/eng/ 20220726 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034146 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034147 isbn 978-1-009-24960-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To my mom and departed dad

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Contents

List of Figures Preface

page ix xi 1

Introduction

1

Recalling Rome Lived Experience and Narrative Identity The Organization of the Book

3 6 10

Memory, Identity, and Violence: Founding in the Aeneid and The Outlaw Josey Wales

16

Virgil and the Dislocation of Memory Josey and the American Founding Exceptionalism

2 Imagining Purity: The Corrosive Stranger and the Construction of a Genealogy

20 42 55

58

The Stranger Claiming a Past Washington, Du Bois, and the Burden of Memory

62 63 85

3 The Wild Stranger and the Conquest of Space

96

Identity and Space The Samnites Native Americans Charles Eastman, Horace, and the Persistence of Bodily Memory

97 102 109 118

4 Playing Culture: Combat Spectacles and the Acting Body

132

Interpreting the Combat Body Gladiators Boxing Playing the Gladiator in the Early American Theater Arenas of Identity

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134 136 158 173 181

Contents

viii

5 The Experience of Politics and the Crises of Two Republics The Crisis of the Roman Republic The Crisis of American Democracy Final Thoughts

Select Bibliography Index

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185

190 202 239

243 249

Figures

4.1 Mosaic Floor with Combat between Dares and Entellus, page 139 175–200 ce. 4.2 Fragment of a Commemorative Relief Depicting a Standing 141 Secutor against a Retiarius, third century ce. 4.3 Relief Depicting Defeated Gladiator Awaiting Verdict 148 of Spectators, ca. 30 bce. 4.4 Marble Relief from Halicarnassus Commemorating either the 151 Release from Service or the Discharge after a Draw between Two Female Gladiators, Amazon and Achillia, second century ce. 4.5 Gravestone for the Gladiator Saturninus, Smyrna, third 156 century ce. 4.6 Lithograph of Tom Hyer. 167 4.7 The John L. Sullivan-Jake Kilrain Boxing Match at Richburg, 169 Miss. 4.8 The Battle between Crib [Cribb] and Molineaux. 172 4.9 Mr. Edwin Forrest (The American Tragedian,) as Spartacus, 178 The Gladiator.

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Preface

This book reflects the culmination of my work on early American culture, contemporary political thought, and the last two decades of scholarship on, and fascination with, the Romans. In particular, the project grew out of a lot of conversations over the years about the diffierent tensions I saw in Roman politics and culture, tensions that were also being played out in the United States. There have been many participants in these conversations, including presentations at the American Political Science Association, Royal Holloway, University of London, Harvard University, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), as well as lunch conversations at the University of Glasgow with participants at a colloquium on the Roman senate where I began seriously thinking about this project. I have also had the fortune of ongoing support (with very helpful comments) from my dearest colleague, Kerry Whiteside, and a former student and friend, Michael Kicey. Others have commented on different parts of the manuscript, including Daniel Kapust, Grant Nelsestuen, Michèle Lowrie, and two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press. Kimberly Brandolisio did a superb job of patiently reading, editing, and providing suggestions for the first run of this manuscript. I would be remiss not to thank everyone working with Cambridge University Press for their excellent work. I also want to thank my American Political Culture class for reading and reacting to the manuscript. This book is a continuation of these conversations that is meant to engage specialists, students, and the general public. All ancient abbreviations follow The Oxford Classical Dictionary. I have minimized other abbreviations to make the work accessible to nonspecialists. The final chapter is a substantially modified version of “The Roman Republic and the Crisis of American Democracy: Echoes of the Past,” Polis 37 (Jan. 2020): 95–122. My thanks for permission from Brill to use it.

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Introduction

This Roman polish, and this smooth behaviour, That render man thus tractable and tame? Are they not only to disguise our passions, To set our looks at variance with our thoughts, To check the starts and sallies of the soul, And break off all its commerce with the tongue; In short, to change us into other creatures, Than what our nature and the gods designed us?

(Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, i, 4, 40–47)

What have we been changed into? Amid Rome’s civil war, the Numidian general, Syphax, questions the effects of Romanization endorsed by Numa, the prince of Numidia and ally of Cato the Younger in the fight against Caesar. This question is unsettling in part because answering it begins to undermine an assumption about the past upon which the question rests. The more one pushes the question, the more one realizes that there is no absolute beginning point, no from, but only ongoing experiences and memories that almost imperceptibly connect to identities. Yet cultures attempt to answer the question of identity definitively. Cultures naturalize, lending normativity to beliefs and actions that form identity. And cultures narrativize, giving constancy to identity over time. The assumptions that underlie these narratives – the symbolic resources that a culture draws on – rest in the background as something already familiar within which one remembers, makes sense of experiences, and forms expectations. To ask about these assumptions unsettles, laying bare the anxieties that underlie the question, “Who are We?” We answer the question for America through familiar European categories that grow out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. The space itself appears as an empty state of nature in which a new history (absent a feudal past) can begin. Belonging 1

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2

Introduction

appears as a formal feature of the integrated nation-state (notably, citizenship) that is comprised of constitutional rights and sustained by market interactions. And the future is envisioned as a narrative of progress of reason, science, wealth, and rights. Early American social actors and observers defined it this way; scholars analyze America in these terms. I provide a different lens for viewing the question of identity, one that originates in the dissonance of origins and appears in its premodern form in Rome. My argument is organized around a shared Roman and American founding legend that is neither located in a constitutional moment nor organized around a people united by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or land. Rather, the founding myth is defined by journeys of Strangers dislocated from their own histories and homes who come to a Strange land inhabited by Strangers. The defining symbol of these foundation myths, the Stranger, continually surfaces in different guises in Roman and American cultural attempts to answer the question, “Who are We?” The myths point to the promise of a new age, unbounded by space or time, and unencumbered by traditional categories of belonging. It is a powerful myth because it allows for continual incorporation and expansion. But the unboundedness is the basis of, at once, hegemonic swagger and also the vulnerability that arises from the permeability and unsettledness of identity. The founding experience, replayed in subsequent immigrant journeys, is one of traumatic dislocation and loss. There is not law but violent wildness. A We is not borne of deliberation but shaped through the conquest of land and people, a wild space transformed to a place through the sheer physicality of labor. The boundaries of belonging are not defined by formal categories of citizenship but by the construction of two types of dangerous Strangers among a community of Strangers: the corrosive Stranger who brings their own history and the wild Stranger who threatens to return the community back into wildness. The marks of the Stranger – the fissures of race, status, and class – are mapped onto the bodies of gladiators and boxers, as though civilization can be affirmed by safely confining the violence to the arena. But efforts to cleanse the founding identity of its rusticity and violence and replace it with ideals of cultivation and progress are continually frustrated by these spectacles that valorize the Strangeness of these rugged bodies as founding bodies. Ultimately, American democracy, like the Roman Republic, is confronted with a crisis of a government of Strangers, in which consensus is shirked and dissensus celebrated. Far from securing identity, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity, leaving unresolved the answer to the question, “Who are We?”

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Recalling Rome

3

Recalling Rome The Romans have been part of the narrative of the United States since its break with England: the styling of a constitutional system after the Republic; the self-conscious adoption of neo-Roman architecture that provided a sense of gravitas for a new nation; coinage that bore the symbol of the freed Roman slave; and the phrases, Novus ordo seclorum and E pluribus unum, both appearing on the great seal of the United States and both adaptations of Virgil. Roman images resonated in the political language, as well: Joseph Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” and was a favorite of George Washington’s; the antiFederalists invoked Brutus and Cato in defense of liberty; and Jean-Antoine Houdon and John Trumble depicted George Washington as Cincinnatus, called from his farm to lead the nation and then returning to his modest farm when order was restored. This Roman past would be sustained by a classical curriculum and popular references that lasted into the twentieth century.1 The recollections of Rome were never univocal. From the beginning, Rome was as much a model as a warning. Historiographies and political tracts extending to the current day both prophesied and lamented an American empire. For some contemporary writers, the lesson of Rome translates into an embrace of American triumphalism, an extension of pax Romana to an age of pax Americana and the spread of freedom.2 For example, Rome looms in the backdrop of Niall Ferguson’s romanticized defense of empire, in which he both suggests that expansion was built into America’s beginnings and laments the seeming lack of “an overtly imperial ethos” among the rising elite.3 In a speech to the neoconservative Heritage Foundation, J. Rufus Fears embraces the American invasion of Iraq as the “burden” to spread freedom.4 Recalling Edward Gibbon, Fears compares the promise of an American empire to “the one period in the history of the 1

2

3 4

See D. Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), chapt. 1; C. Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); C. J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); C. J. Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); C. J. Richard, Why We’re all Romans: The Roman Contribution to the Western World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); M. Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). See C. Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine: In American Foreign Policy, a New Motto; Don’t Ask, Tell,” Time, March 5, 2001, though critical of aspirations for empire; R. Debray, Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004). N. Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 34, 204. J. R. Fears, “The Lessons of the Roman Empire for America Today,” Heritage Lecture 917, Dec. 19, 2005.

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Introduction

human race when mankind was happiest,” the second century ce, with the following characteristics: civil servants educated to govern “with justice and with individual freedom”; a small and efficient bureaucracy that minimized Caligula and Nero’s influence to “a small blip on the scale of imperial progress and the guarantee of individual rights”; an expansive free market economy; an efficient military; “social mobility”; and the rule of law.5 The lesson of Rome, particularly as both Rome and the United States faced exhaustion in their ventures into the Middle East, is that “there is no drawing back” from the path to empire.6 In a reversal of Ronald Syme’s dark portrayal of Augustus, Fears exalts Augustus as “perhaps the shrewdest statesman ever to live”; describes Rome as bringing forth “a series of leaders with few equals in history”; and celebrates the notion of a powerful “commander in chief,” the imperator who “governs the world.”7 In comparison, Robert Merry sounds almost restrained in drawing out America’s similarity to Rome as a carefully calibrated “equilibrium of power” that has steadily expanded its “democratic promise,” but one in which the “fundaments of the system” must be carefully nurtured.8 What those fundaments are – liberty? agrarianism? slavery? segregation? gender oppression? – and what they share with Rome is never explained. For others, Rome serves as a dire warning of decline. Some identify the similar disparities in wealth and opportunities, which led to a “social and economic restructuring” of Roman society in the third century ce (shortly after Fears’ happiest days), that threaten to undermine “a formerly robust commercial world” and replace it with an oligarchy of wealth.9 The United States is also seen as resembling, or risking resembling, Rome in the loss of traditional values with participation in the global orgy of wealth;10 as a state “overwhelmed by immigrants”;11 in an impending economic collapse arising from government assistance programs, a new version of bread and circuses;12 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

Fears, “Lessons.” Fears, “Lessons.” It is worth noting that Victor Davis Hanson draws a similar lesson from Thucydides. See “A Voice from the Past: General Thucydides Speaks about the War,” National Review Online, Feb. 19, 2003. Fears, “Lessons.” R. Merry, “Rome and America: A Shared Fate?” National Interest, July 4, 2014. K. Roberts, “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire?” Forbes, May 25, 2011. V. D. Hanson, “Why Did Rome Fall – And Why Does It Matter Now,” Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers, Feb. 14, 2010. C. Scaliger, “Western Roman Empire: Overwhelmed by Immigrants,” New American, Oct. 6, 2015; also V. D. Hanson, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (New York: Encounter Books, 2007). S. Travis, “Rand Paul Compares U.S. Economy to the Fall of Roman Empire,” Political Ticker blog, CNN, July 2, 2010, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/02/rand-paul-compares-u-s-econ omy-to-fall-of-roman-empire/.

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Recalling Rome

5

and as succumbing to a mass consumerism that gives the façade of unity despite the “vast disconnect between the elites and the people.”13 In a popular book that asked the question, “Are we Rome?”, Cullen Murphy points to the overreach and haughty attitude of the United States toward the rest of the world that ultimately threatens America’s own democracy.14 Are we Rome? The short answer is no.15 The question, however, raises a more fundamental issue of how one says something meaningful not just about the past but also about a contemporary relationship to a temporally distant and disconnected past. As Paul Ricoeur writes in Time and Narrative, to the extent that the past leaves a “trace” (in a document, for example, or a monument), it is seen as “stand[ing] for” this past.16 But what is the status of these traces to the viewer? The question, “Are we Rome?”, suggests one type of answer, one that overcomes temporal distance and strangeness by seeing the past as “intelligible” by it “persisting in the present.”17 We abstract the past from experience, understanding it by way of particular institutions, social structures, or ideologies, for example, or identifying transhistorical uniformities in which recognizable aspects of the past are repeated in the present (and are the basis of predictions of the future). What we lose is the Romans’ experience of themselves as they tried to make sense of who they were. But more than that, we lose a sense of how those experiences might have something to say about the Americans’ experience of themselves. I identify a different trace, one that accounts for how individuals recognize themselves in time. What I mean by this is that individuals within communities do not experience themselves as abstractions; rather, individuals situate and recognize themselves by way of culturally mediated, incomplete, and open-ended perspectives that bring together “the 13 14

15

16

17

V. D. Hanson, “The Glue Holding America Together,” National Review, June 27, 2013. C. Murphy, Are we Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007); also C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). See, for example, V. Smil, Why America Is Not a New Rome (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); P. Burton, “Pax Romana/Pax Americana: Perceptions of Rome in American Political Culture, 2000–2010,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 18 (2011): 66–104. The ancient world figures into an entirely different scholarly conversation, one that looks to Sparta or Athens as a model for recovering or reforming American democracy. Prominent in this conversation are the works of Josiah Ober and Paul Cartledge. See J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) and P. Cartledge, Democracy: A Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3.143; also J. W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–97, for a critique of treating experience as transparently disclosing reality and difference. Ricoeur, Time, 3.144.

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Introduction

expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the present.”18 Who we are and what we value are answered, in part, by some imagined narrative relationship of the past to the present and future.19 But the narrative, itself, is a response to different experiences of vulnerability; a search for some reassurance of who I am in my relationship to others. We do not often think of the obnoxiously confident, imperial cultures of Rome or the United States as consumed by anxieties about identity, let alone notions of vulnerability. But beginning with and growing out of a shared founding myth, the Roman experience provides a different lens to view America’s own struggle with identity. This struggle continually recalls the dislocation of both those who immigrated and those who were here, the attempts to overcome the humiliation of origins, the centrality of violent conquest over humans and nature in affirming identity, the spectacle of the physicality of rugged and wild (rather than reasoning and civilized) bodies, and the inability to resolve the anxieties of a nation comprised of Strangers.

Lived Experience and Narrative Identity I provide here a brief account of how I am approaching questions of identity. Narratives of identity emerge from (and in turn revise) the cultural understandings that form what in phenomenology is called a lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Lebenswelt is originally employed by Edmund Husserl to refer to the pregiven (vergegeben) or self-evident world of objects that is the basis for shared human experience. The world of perceived bodies is immediate to the senses and makes possible theoretical and scientific abstractions. I do not follow Husserl in his view of the pregiven as an a priori essence of the perceived world. More helpful is Jürgen Habermas’ extension of the concept (of which there are hints in Husserl) to the background context of human interaction that allows for shared understandings, cultural meanings, and stabilized patterns of action.20 18 19

20

Ricoeur, Time, 3.207. Ricoeur, Time, 3.246–47; also A. Schütz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 75, on “configuration of meanings”; also H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 183–88, on enacted stories. See E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), though the lifeworld is more primal than interpreted by Merleau-Ponty, Schütz, and Habermas; M. MerleauPonty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, C. Lefort (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968); A. Schütz and T. Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, 2 vols. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Schütz, Phenomenology, 77;

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Lived Experience and Narrative Identity

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Habermas defines the lifeworld “as represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns.”21 I find his revision of the operation of the lifeworld helpful. Where Husserl begins with the conscious ego whose isolated experience of the given structures of the lifeworld makes possible social experience (as I recognize that other egos also experience the lifeworld), Habermas sees more mutuality as individuals make sense of situations, and make sense of themselves, through communication within the understandings made possible by the cultural givens of the lifeworld.22 Stated more simply, the self arises as a social experience. The shared cultural understandings that operate in the background of human action allow one to imagine oneself as part of something more.23 As Habermas writes, “Every new situation appears in a lifeworld composed of a cultural stock of knowledge that is ‘always already’ familiar.”24 A lifeworld exists as a simultaneous aspect of a cultural and individual identity that is constitutive of the references by which interpretation and common understanding are possible.25 Individuals always move “within the horizon of their lifeworld.”26 Yet the interpretations of both cultural and individual identities are not identical; they are familiar and yet vast in their “incalculable web of presuppositions,” aspects of them “changing from situation to situation, set into relief at any given time against a background of indeterminacy.”27 These interpretations are the We by which individuals imagine solidarity, convey familiarity, and communicate understanding. I depart from Habermas in a fundamental way, however. Habermas argues for the orientation of individuals within the lifeworld by normative ideals of communicative competence that aim at mutual understanding

21 22

23 24 25 26 27

J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). On Husserl, see D. Carr, “Husserl’s Problematic Concept of the Life-World,” American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970): 331–39. Habermas, Theory, 2.124. Habermas, Theory, 2.126. I agree with those who argue for greater permeability in how systems can structure lifeworlds. See T. McCarthy, “Complexity and Democracy: Or the Seducements of Systems Theory,” in A. Honneth and H. Joas (eds.), Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and response by Habermas, “A Reply,” in Honneth and Joas (eds.), Communicative Action, 250–60; also Habermas, Theory, 2.150, 153–97. Habermas, Theory, 2.40, 45; also J. Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 205–18. Habermas, Theory, 2.125; J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 298. Habermas, Theory, 2.125–26; also Ricoeur, Time, 3.256. Habermas, Theory, 2.126, italics in original. Habermas, Theory, 2.132; also Ricoeur, Time, 3.248; Schütz, Phenomenology, 73–74.

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Introduction

and the emancipation of these understandings from distortion and repression. My focus is on communicative dissonance: the irresolvable anxieties, tensions, and contradictions in one’s understanding of oneself as a We.28 In fact, I am closer to Augustine in the sense that an aspect of our finitude lies in our mutual vulnerability and incomprehensibility, which creates a distance within the self and between the self and others.29 We encounter each other as embodied beings. That encounter occurs through a complex process of identification and disidentification in which we interpret and make judgments and comparisons about particular markers of identity that draw from both individual and cultural narratives of identity: an accent, vocabulary, mannerism, gait, posture, hair, skin color and complexion, clothing, etc. But these processes are not uniform. Comparisons are complicated by who sees and who is seen, and how they are compared. Different experiences, fragmented memories, misperceptions, and uncertain projections all enter into these comparisons. Nor are these processes static and unreflective. Instead, in these encounters there is a mutuality of “two bodies at once seeing, seen, visible and unseen, as well as touching, touched, touchable and untouchable.”30 The body on display perceives the judgments of others and can respond in ways that range from adopting to adapting to resisting. Moreover, the observing body is also aware of being on display and judged. That individual may seek to have affirmed the boundaries of individual or cultural identity or bear different memories that interrupt narratives of sameness and difference: experiences of loss, sacrifice, or violence that unsettle identity and render the observing body permeable. To return to the Roman and American contexts, I argue that their shared founding narratives are premised on dislocated identities that underlie efforts by individuals to define, resist, and transform the boundaries of belonging. In exploring these questions of identity, I navigate between two views. On the one hand, I treat the Romans on their own terms, exploring some of the tensions in the Roman understanding of themselves. This stands in contrast with two approaches. One approach, which is often referred to as neo-Romanism, looks at the Romans by way of an early modern 28

29 30

Habermas employs a psychoanalytic framework as an example of the possibility of being liberated from distorted communication in Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,” 205– 18. On the aim of consensus, see, for example, Habermas, Theory, 2.134, 150. Ricoeur, Time, 1.27–28; influential in my thinking about Augustine is his De magistro; also Aug. Conf. 11.29. B. Hutchens, “Constitutive Inter-Corporeity: An Outline of the Phenomenology of the Fight,” Phenomenological Inquiry 32 (2008): 146–47. See Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 142–45.

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interpretation employed against monarchical authority. The limitation of this view is that it flattens out the range of ideas, concerns, and conflicts that arose in Rome’s conception of itself. We understand the Romans, instead, by way of a civic republican, transatlantic tradition, distilled through the ages, that is reduced to notions of virtue, liberty, and law. The second approach, prominent in cultural studies, views the Roman past by way of its cultural appropriation (and distortion) in the present. This approach invariably yields fascinating results, but we end up with a present without a past. On the other hand, I depart from versions of relativism and historicism that resist the view of the past as “usable” to the present.31 In part, the Roman past plays a part in framing the present. As Mary Beard writes, “Roman debates have given us a template and a language that continue to define the way we understand our own world and think about ourselves.”32 I agree with Beard, though I hope to complicate the picture of how both Rome and the United States thought about themselves. The lens the Romans provide is not just a matter of inheritance. They reveal a struggle with the dissonance of their own self-narratives that do not resolve themselves as a theme but as complicated questions and representations that point in contradictory directions. The questions they asked, the debates they engaged in, the ways in which they framed fundamental questions of identity are not only part of our own vocabulary but also reveal some of our own assumptions about the organization of community life and how to represent those assumptions to ourselves. These assumptions are not immediately accessible. “Lifeworld knowledge,” as Habermas notes, “conveys the feeling of absolute certainty only because we do not know about it.”33 In this interaction with the Roman past, we are in some sense occupying a different perspective in our relationship to our lifeworld, like Syphax (in Addison’s play) to Roman culture. We are comparing the incomparable, to recall Marcel Detienne, in order to bring this cultural imagination into relief, to open up the “prejudgmental power” of the lifeworld to interpretation.34 The result is not a historical lesson but 31

32 33 34

J. G. A. Pocock, “Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative,” in J. Dryzek, B. Honig, and A. Phillips (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 169: “If anything like the former canonical histories is restored, it will probably be the work of political theorists desirous of a usable past, rather than of historians not interested in supplying them with one.” M. Beard, “Why Ancient Rome Matters to the Modern World,” Guardian, Oct. 2, 2015; also Malamud, Ancient Rome, for a history of this Roman connection. Habermas, Theory, 2.135. M. Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable, trans. J. Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Habermas, Theory, 2.133.

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Introduction

something more perplexing, and one that requires that we rethink how we even understand the American founding. We place that founding in a constitutional moment that gave American expression to Roman ideas of checks and balances, liberty, and, for the most hopeful, virtue. I locate the founding not in a historical moment but in a mythology reenacted in the cultural imagination. In that narrative, which America shares with Rome, the community is continually reconstituted by ongoing refoundings of Strangers who are dislocated from their own place and past. Where foundings are usually placed in service to securing an identity, whether of a people bound by ethnicity, language, religion, or land, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity. The declaration “This is who We are” becomes for the Romans and Americans a more unsettling, searching question of vulnerability, “Who are We?”, since We are continually comprised of Theys. The attempts to answer the question, and the disruption to these answers that arise from the founding itself, lead us far afield from the categories we are used to employing. Questions of who We are cannot be answered by recourse to claims that We are a constitutional republic or that identities melt into belonging as citizens of a nation-state. Rather, attempts to answer who We are dissolves into a dissonance about our origins. Like Rome, America is comprised of Strangers who came to an already inhabited land. Like Rome, America is without a history and distrusts the Stranger who retains one. Like Rome, the absence of history makes possible a new age of civilization, but it is an age rooted in violent conquest over nature and other people. Like Rome, American elites struggle to temper their rugged, rustic origins against their sophisticated counterparts, Greece and England. Like Rome, American elites fail. Whatever the promise of a new age meant, it is challenged by the popular embrace of the spectacle of the violent, rugged body that recalls the founding. And like Rome, American democracy faces its own dissolution as people divide into Strangers to each other.

The Organization of the Book The founding myths of both Rome and the United States introduce a cultural dissonance about questions of identity, memory, and belonging. In using this phrase, I am drawing from the psychological notion of cognitive dissonance, first conceptualized by Leon Festinger, that posits that individuals seek to resolve the tensions that arise from holding inconsistent or contradictory beliefs. I explore different attempts to resolve

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this dissonance. But that dissonance cannot be resolved precisely because the contradictory elements form a core aspect of identity. In Chapter 1, I explore the founding myths of Rome and the United States unconventionally by way of Virgil and the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales. I place Josey next to the Aeneid to provide a reading of the American founding that departs from attempts to trace its origins to either the Puritans or to the colonists assembled in Philadelphia. The myths provide a particular structure and array of images that connect where we come from with who we are. They are premised on a community of Strangers – a rabble – who are dislocated from their own place and past, rather than a collectivity bound together, as in other foundings, by ethnicity, land, history, language, genealogy, or religion. I read the myths as traumatic experiences of disparate bodies, most of all (but not exclusively) as threats to male bodies, dislocated from both place and time, who enter an already inhabited space with a past but must construct a community without a past. The permeable boundaries of identity are extraordinarily powerful as a mechanism for both incorporation and expansion, serving as a point of pride in each community’s conception of itself. But the myth haunts these communities with a simple question: If everyone can potentially be Us, then who are We? Answering this is tied to a corollary question: Who are They? The question betrays a deeper dissonance that lies at the core of what it means to imagine oneself as a We that is comprised entirely of Theys. The myths themselves attempt to answer both questions. I explore how, within these stories, commonality is organized not by an idea that somehow transcends these lowly origins but by loss. The disparate Strangers find a common past in the shared experience of dislocation, expressed in moments of collective mourning. And they plot a common future in two bodily dispositions: labor, which manifests itself as a violent conquest and control of wild nature; and personal trust, as an ability to make and keep a promise. In this mix of Strangers, a type of Stranger – the individual who is proximate but somehow threatening to this newly imagined commonality – emerges as the body marked in two ways: as the body tied to some other past; or as a wild body, outside the narrative of civilization, that cannot be trusted. Rome and the United States continually reenact their own founding stories, blurring boundaries of genealogy and geography, and then having to re-sort and differentiate who is and who is not really one of us. All communities have to do this just by the nature of settlement, migration, expansion, and interaction. But what makes the Roman and American cases so interesting is that their identities are premised paradoxically on this

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Introduction

permeability: on the incorporation of new groups both as its space expands and as new groups enter. I explore how the dissonance of these founding images – the humiliation of lowly origins, the vulnerability to violation and loss, and the strangeness of one’s surroundings – plays out in Roman and American culture. We see the construction of different versions of the Stranger as a mechanism for purifying the founding and securing the boundaries of belonging by seeking to forget or exclude the lowly origins. But the untidiness of the myth continually resurfaces as memories persist, and as the wild body is valorized and incorporated into the founding body. In Chapter 2, I focus on the relationship of identity to time and the construction of the corrosive Stranger. Rome and the United States face questions of how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, situates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? Both Rome and the United States provide a formal answer to this question of identity: individuals are integrated as juridical beings with a particular legal status into a civitas or state. That is, a national identity is presumably conferred by state membership, a resolution attributed to the rise of the modern nation-state, but also one that shares features with Rome. The founding narratives are seen as contributing to formal belonging: the myths shape a notion of belonging by identifying a shared journey and destiny that are premised on a dislocation from the past, thus preparing individuals to be citizens. But there is no such tidy synthesis of formal membership and national identity. Where the possibility of a new history rests on a dislocation from the old, so the threat to this identity arises from the persistence of memory; specifically, an ascribed continuation of one’s connection to a past that is seen as challenging how the new community locates itself in time. I suggest that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to the connected questions, Who are We and Who are They? The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity but is used to construct an imagined purity that both gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at two critical moments in the construction of a national identity: the consolidation of Roman control over Italy, and the decades following the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. In both cases, it is not an issue of state power; rather, it is anxiety about the incorporation of a mix of people with their own histories that underlies the efforts to craft a genealogy of national identity by Cato

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the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans, and Noah Webster, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the United States. In Chapter 3, I turn to a second dimension of identity, that of one’s relationship to space. The Roman and American founding identities are built around mythic journeys: Aeneas’ flight, the migration to America, the errand into the wilderness, and the settlement of the frontier, all of which imagine space as unbounded, at points inconceivable, and potentially dangerous. I read a Roman and American conception of space, and perceived threats to that space, against their founding narratives. These narratives introduce unsettled conceptions of abstract space and familiar place in two ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that is not potentially converted into a place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that space. I explore the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The reality – the differences within Samnite and Native American communities, the various attitudes toward incorporation, or the mobility of certain elites who prosper or find their way into positions of power – is less important in this discussion than how the groups are imagined. What I want to point to is how different the Samnite and the Native American are from the corrosive Stranger, yet how both play a part in the construction of identity. The corrosive Strangers – the Greeks, Italians, and Gauls – remain a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they are cast as a Stranger to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant are cast similarly in the United States. The Samnites and Native Americans, as the wild Stranger, are frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just conquest but the unifying and securing of a familiar space. But bodies are not so easily frozen, and boundaries not so easily obeyed. Resisting these definitions of the wild Stranger is the persistence of bodily memory, which I explore by way of Charles Eastman and Horace. In the previous chapters, I explore several elite efforts to valorize a particular version of a Roman or American identity. But controlling the definition of the Stranger is not so easy. The founding narratives contain within them a vast array of assumptions, images, myths, and symbols that are not just ambiguous at points, but may actually be in tension with each other. For every Cicero, there is a Cato the Elder or Marius who celebrated Roman rusticity. For every Webster, there is a Daniel Boone who could live and fight in the wilderness. Moreover, individuals are not just situated within a culture, embodying the enactment, internalization, and naturalization of

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Introduction

imposed meanings, but are living bodies who respond to, modify, and resist the valorization of these meanings. The valorization could reference the dominant values of the culture; for example, the claims of privilege by patricians or nobiles of Rome who inherited their authority. The valorization could be modifications of the dominant values, as we see with the selfconscious styling of Cicero as a new man making a claim for his own earned authority. Or the valorization could arise from a resistance to, or recasting of, the taboos and laws against which value is defined. We got a hint of this with Charles Eastman, whose own bodily memory leads him to reassess the judgment of his Native American beliefs and practices as taboo. The Stranger – the individual who is present within, but defined as a threat to, the culture – comes to valorize some of the Strangeness. In Chapter 4, I look at the combat spectacles of professional gladiators (auctorati) and American bare-knuckle fighting in the early nineteenth century as an instance of how the taboo body comes to be valorized, upsetting the boundaries of identity. Both bodies were banned: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. And both bodies were condemned by the elite as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. These excluded bodies resisted their exclusion, not by rebelling against the network of power but by blurring the boundaries of dominated and free as they valorized the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal. In the final chapter, I look at the crises of the Roman and American republics. There is a fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of the slow demise of the Roman Republic: Why does the system collapse when, as many scholars have noted, there is nothing that suggests that there was ever an intention by anyone to overthrow the Republic? There have been two primary approaches to addressing this paradox. The predominant view identifies particular objective conditions that are seen as causing or determining political outcomes. In the case of Rome, scholars have largely focused on the structural inability of its institutions to address the issues caused by imperial expansion. From this perspective, the resolution to the paradox of how the Republic falls without anyone intending for it to happen is that conditions overwhelm any decisions that could be made. A second approach, one developed largely in response to the first, sees politics as a contingent affair dominated by influential individuals. From this perspective, the Republic collapses because of miscalculations by a few

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powerful individuals who either subvert the norms or outright break the laws that once checked political ambition. Although these approaches differ fundamentally in their assertions about whether political institutions are overwhelmed by larger structural issues or by bad actors, they similarly view politics as an arena of interest. I argue for a broader understanding of politics as an arena of identity. Politics is the realm in which the community puts into practice what it imagines as its future. In the final decades of the Roman Republic, political institutions were less-and-less able to project the community into the future. This change was not attributable to the emergence of a set of issues that the institutions were structurally incapable of addressing. Nor was it a function of individuals making contingent decisions. What changed is that political participants came to see each other as Strangers who did not share a common sense of either the past or the future. This had implications for politics. Driven by mutual incomprehension and distrust, individuals altered norms of action to disable institutions, making possible the search for alternative actors and forms of action that bypassed these institutions. In the corrosion of public institutions, in the cowardice and opportunism of political actors, and in the elevation of violence, we see played out in Rome and now in American politics the collision of Strangers who do not imagine the same future. This work continues the recent revitalization of ancient Rome, which we have seen in everything from scholarly reassessments of Roman contributions to rhetoric and political thought to a popular fascination with Rome to cultural studies that explore contemporary appropriations of the Roman past. The book is about Roman and American identity. It is about how a shared founding myth of a dislocating journey of Strangers leaves unresolved the question of what defines a We, a question that does not go away even as both cultures emerge as hegemonic. The reach of these cultures – their ability to expand and incorporate – exposes, however paradoxically, a sense of the vulnerability and permeability of their identities. I end with a brief note on how these aspects of vulnerability and permeability (notions articulated prominently in feminist scholarship) can foster a different ethic of recognition and belonging.

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chapter 1

Memory, Identity, and Violence Founding in the Aeneid and The Outlaw Josey Wales

Aeneas drank in this reminder of his savage grief. Ablaze with rage, awful in anger, he cried, “Should I let you slip away, wearing what you tore from one I loved?”

(Virg. Aen. 12.945–48)

You’ll see a race arise from their mixed blood.

(Virg. Aen. 12.838)1

The American Western film The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is a story of homelessness. It also reenacts an American myth of founding. Josey Wales is forced from his home when it is burned to the ground by Union guerillas. He joins a renegade Confederate band to avenge the rape and murder of his wife and the murder of his son. In the aftermath of the Civil War, he is without a place. He is neither Northern nor Southern, refusing to surrender to the Union soldiers who execute the men who turn themselves in. Instead, he travels west, pursued by bounty hunters and regulators sent by the senator who wants to “clean up” the country. In his journey, he picks up other outcasts. Lone Watie is an aging Cherokee who lost his wife and two sons on the Trail of Tears. Little Moonlight is a Navajo woman who had been captured by the Cheyenne and raped by an Arapaho. (She shares with Josey physical marks of their pasts: Josey’s face is slashed with a sword by the Union captain as Josey attempts to stop the Union soldiers from the attack on his home and family; Little Moonlight is marked by the Cheyenne with a cut nose to signify her as defiled.) Jamie is a nearsighted wannabe sharpshooter who grows up without a mother. And there is a family with aristocratic pretensions and sectional loyalties (with an “odd” daughter) who are pursuing an illusion of a waiting paradise promised by their son. They are rescued by Josey as they 1

Translations are from Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. S. Bartsch (New York: Modern Library, 2021).

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are captured to be sold (to Ten Bears, the chief who Josey will make peace with at the end). When the group is joined by Watie’s dog, Josey comments: “I suppose that mangy red-boned hound’s got no place to go either. He might as well ride with us. Hell, everybody else is.” They establish a homestead in an abandoned property, after Josey first makes a compact in blood with Ten Bears and the Indigenous Comanches.2 The story recalls Virgil’s narrative of founding and raises some of the same tensions. In the Aeneid, Aeneas is forced to flee his fallen Troy as a fugitive to find a new home. Like in Josey Wales, Aeneas’ band is “a grieving throng” (Aen. 2.798) on a journey without a clear destination, driven by different motivations and conflicting loyalties, carrying almost unbearable memories of loss and violation. I place these stories next to each other, not because they are comparable in their literary significance, but to provide an alternate reading of the American founding that departs from attempts to trace its origins to either the Puritans or to the colonists assembled in Philadelphia. Founding myths are ultimately about identities. They tell a story of who a people are – and who one is as a member of that group – by connecting how they began with what they have become. Those who have emphasized the Puritan origins of American founding trace an ongoing religious spirit that wends its way through American culture: a providential “errand into the wilderness,” according to Perry Miller’s important discussion, a nagging sense of backsliding that Sacvan Bercovitch refers to as the “American jeremiad,” or a new Zion.3 In these readings, the question of identity is connected to the redemptive promise of an eternal God. No doubt a Puritan providentialism is a part of an American, especially an early American, discourse, put in service to revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig ideas.4 There is even a proposed seal of the

2

3

4

The movie is an adaptation of a book by F. Carter, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (Gantt, AL: Whipporwhill, 1973), republished as Gone to Texas (New York: Delacorte, 1975). Carter had adopted a Cherokee identity. It was discovered later that he was a former Klansman, Asa Earl Carter. After some disagreement about the direction of the film, Clint Eastwood would both star in and direct the movie. See the seminal works by P. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956); P. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); P. Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); A. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). D. Hammer, The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory: A Rhetoric of Origins (New York: P. Lang, 1998).

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Memory, Identity, and Violence

United States that depicts Moses leading the Israelites through the desert; a draft, it should be noted, that was rejected. Against this view are those who associate America’s founding with the men of Philadelphia who declared their independence and then, with the end of the revolution, set to drafting a constitution imbued with either liberal or civic republican ideals.5 Hannah Arendt provides one of the strongest statements of this claim when she writes that “the act of foundation is identical with the framing of a constitution.”6 Interested in positing the distinctiveness of the American act of foundation (in contrast with other modern revolutions), Arendt traces its inspiration to Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the final decade before his death in 19 bce. Arendt characterizes the Aeneid as one of the two foundation legends (the other being the Hebrew legend) “with which [the men of the Revolution] were fully acquainted.”7 But in her Virgilian reading of the founding, Arendt makes several interpretive moves. The backdrop of Arendt’s reading is her concern with the emergence of the social question – of how to liberate people from want and misery – that both unleashes the terror of other modern revolutions and is ultimately destructive to politics as a realm of action free from want.8 She limits the violence of both Virgilian and American origins, suggesting that Aeneas’ war “was necessary in order to undo the war against Troy,” just as the revolutionaries restricted violence to constituting a public realm of its own for the “‘public happiness’ of its citizens.”9 She differentiates the want associated with the experience of mass immigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the “dream” of freedom associated with the American Revolution.10 And she sees in Aeneas’ actions “Virgil’s demonstration of Rome’s famous clementia,” thus freeing future generations from the memory of violence.11 Each of these claims are as incomplete in their depiction of the Aeneid as they are of the American founding. 5

6 8 10

See L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, 1955); B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); B. Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003); G. S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1969); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); J. P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 7 H. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 125. Arendt, On Revolution, 205. 9 Arendt, On Revolution, 69. Arendt, On Revolution, 209, 133. Arendt, On Revolution, 139. 11 Arendt, On Revolution, 210.

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In introducing her discussion of Athenian myths of autochthony, Nicole Loraux writes, “For a good ending, one needs a good beginning.”12 Arendt provides a good beginning. In fact, her argument is built completely around the revolutionary generation’s discovery of action as the human miracle of beginning or creating anew. I follow Arendt in identifying the Virgilian aspects of the American founding. I depart from her by suggesting that Virgil alerts us to a structure of founding that does not appear to be a good beginning. It is different from a Hebrew myth of an ethnically pure people returning to their land, a Puritan myth of a new Eden, or a constitutional myth of a deliberative founding. There is, instead, a seeming embrace of the dislocating experience of wandering that separates a people from who they were and where they were before. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the founding myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American in two related ways. First, there is a frailty to an identity rooted in the experience of dislocation. Whatever is the promise of a new history, there are always remnants of the old that inhere in the violence of origins, whether in the humiliating violence one has suffered or in the violence that has been done to others. There is a second issue of identity. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They. We see in these founding narratives an attempt to resolve this issue, but it is one that rests on a complex, and ultimately irresolvable, relationship to memory. What ultimately differentiates Us from Them is a sense of a persistence of the past. We dislocate from the past and rebuild, which is seen as creating a common past, a shared ethos of labor that is necessary for both the conquest and then the civilizing of wildness, and a recognition of the centrality of keeping a promise as the organizing principle of community life. They are viewed as having another history, one that resists this rebuilding, and thus possesses neither the attachments nor the dispositions 12

N. Loraux, Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 13.

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Memory, Identity, and Violence

nor the trust upon which the future of the community is based. But what marks Our memory and organizes Our narrative identity is, paradoxically, the vulnerability that arises from the trauma of Our origins: the humiliation of dislocation and the sense that We can be thrown back into the violent wildness that We once conquered. The Aeneid and Josey provide a starting point for understanding this relationship between memory and identity that is embedded in a founding experience and plays out in a larger cultural discourse.

Virgil and the Dislocation of Memory We often refer generally to foundings, but they are, in fact, shorthand for an amalgam of different questions: What does it mean to begin something? How does that beginning relate to something that comes before? What is involved in creating or establishing a territory? How is the space conceived? What is the relationship of subsequent generations to the founding? Who is it that founds something?13 Since these myths are always being interpreted, recollections of foundings tell of aspirations, of how a community imagines itself. Foundings are also about memory: how a community chooses to remember itself, what it carries forward with that memory, and what it tries to forget. Aspects of these founding myths get variously emphasized and deemphasized as communities measure their future against their past. But there is always anxiety that arises from the incompleteness of origins: There is never a pure beginning, never a moment of finality, never a complete explanation of why this way and not another way.14 As Detienne notes, in asking about beginnings one must be prepared for quite different configurations, some foundings tied to cosmologies, others to mortal acts, some conceived as continuities, others to ruptures, “lay[ing] bare the strangeness of the founding gestures and initial beginnings.”15 The distinctiveness of different foundings would seem to mitigate against comparison, but Detienne adds that what are comparable are “the thought 13 14

15

See Detienne, Comparing, 28–30. Most importantly, see C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36; W. Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, P. Demetz (ed.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 295; G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 46; Arendt, The Human Condition, 176–781, 246–47; M. Lowrie, “Foundation and Closure,” in F. Grewing (ed.), The Door Ajar: False Closure in Greek and Roman Literature and Art (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013), 83–102. Detienne, Comparing, 29.

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Virgil and the Dislocation of Memory

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mechanisms that can be observed at work” that give coherence to configurations associated with founding.16 In this chapter, I explore these thought mechanisms to bring into relief the relationship between memory, identity, and violence that persists in the Roman and American cultural imagination. In exploring the relationship between memory and identity in the Aeneid, scholars have frequently read the trajectory of the epic as one of forgetting the past, usually with some moment of transition from past to future in the epic.17 Aeneas is seen as necessarily, if somewhat reluctantly, shedding his personal memories and embracing his duty to something much larger, whether to a Stoic cosmology or the Roman state.18 Glenn Most argues that the Trojan people, condensed in the character of Aeneas, “must forget the past in order to remember the future.”19 Rutledge sees Aeneas as a tool of destiny who, “although he doesn’t really know it, is leaving behind more and more with each passing moment the unhappy past.”20 Miller identifies the point at which the Trojan women burn the ships and then Aeneas decides to leave the women on Sicily as “the final acts of shedding the Trojan past” before Aeneas’ “otherworldly vision of the Roman future.”21 Pöschl regards the middle third of the epic as “the hero’s emancipation from 16 17

18

19 20

21

Detienne, Comparing, 31. On the development of the founding legend, see E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6–51. For a discussion of the social and cultural influences on Virgil, see R. Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). See, for example, C. M. Bowra, “Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal,” Greece & Rome 3 (1933): 11–13; B. Otis, Virgil, a Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 305–7; M. A. Di Cesare, The Altar and the City: A Reading of Vergil’s Aeneid (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 236–39; H. Bacon, “The Aeneid as a Drama of Election,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 (1986): 305–34; F. Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and C. Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 460. G. W. Most, “Memory and Forgetting in the Aeneid,” Vergilius 47 (2001): 162. H. C. Rutledge, “The Opening of Aeneid 6,” Classical Journal 67 (1971): 112; also E. Henry, The Vigour of Prophecy: A Study of Virgil’s Aeneid (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), 180: by assimilating himself to the “vigour of prophecy,” Aeneas “learns to respond to revelation without understanding it”; Di Cesare, Altar, 216: “But Aeneas’s destiny has left no room for human connections.” P. A. Miller, “The Minotaur Within: Fire, the Labyrinth, and Strategies of Containment in Aeneid 5 and 6,” Classical Philology 90 (1995): 239. Also R. D. Williams, “The Sixth Book of the Aeneid,” Greece & Rome 11 (1964): 48–63; P. Holt, “Aeneid V: Past and Future,” Classical Journal 75 (1979): 110–11, 114–15; R. R. Macdonald, The Burial-Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 31: Book 6 marks “the undoing of a private past and the creation of a public future”; M. Gale, “Poetry and the Backward Glance in Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 133 (2003): 340: Book 6 marks Aeneas choosing between “personal ties and public duties” and between emotion and

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Memory, Identity, and Violence

the burden of the past.”22 Connecting the Aeneid to “a program of Augustan propaganda that seeks to suppress and rewrite Rome’s political memory,”23 Quint argues that the end of Book 6 and Book 12 suggests that the need for the survivors of the Trojan war and later of the poem’s Italian wars – and for the survivors of Rome’s own civil wars – to forget the tragic memories of their past is as deep-seated as life itself, part of the basic processes of the psyche. Both a fresh start in Italy under Aeneas and the national revival fostered by Augustus require the same collective act of oblivion that the souls undergo in order to be reborn.24

Quint associates Augustus’ call for clementia with the amnesia that the souls undergo in the Underworld. It should be noted that forgiveness is not the same as forgetting: forgiveness is a particular response to how one acts in the face of memory.25 But there is a larger issue. This sense of Aeneas’ forgetting depersonalizes and dehumanizes Aeneas and conceptualizes memory as though it exists out there, as comprised by ideologies or determined by structures that operate on, but are separate from, the individual.26 I think Arendt is correct when she notes the fallacy of modern thinking when it describes a realm of human action “not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle.”27 We see this gap between the Aeneid viewed as spectacle and the Aeneid understood as experience: Aeneas is supposed to forget but is reminded of the loss of Pallas at the end; Rome is supposed to forget but the Aeneid both recalls

22 23 24 25 26

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reason; R. A. Smith, The Primacy of Vision in Virgil’s Aeneid (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 82: by Book 6, Aeneas “has already begun to leave his past behind.” V. Pöschl, The Art of Vergil: Image and Symbol in the Aeneid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 37. D. Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 55. Quint, Epic, 64; also Rutledge, “The Opening of Aeneid 6,” 112, and Most, “Memory,” 163, who use this language of rebirth. Quint, Epic, 78. Notably, I depart conceptually from M. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), who divorces social memory from individual memory. Scholars who read memory in the Aeneid as operating on Aeneas include D. Hershkowitz, “The Aeneid in Aeneid 3,” Vergilius 37 (1991): 76: Aeneas as “a tool of Roman destiny”; Quint, Epic, 52: Virgil “dramatizes the psychological basis of the workings of politics and political ideology”; 64: “collective act of oblivion”; 83: Aeneas as “the instrument of his historical destiny”; 93: “victim of his epic destiny”; E.-A. Scarth, Mnemotechnics and Virgil: The Art of Memory and Remembering (Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008), 5: memories not connected to experience; H.-P. Stahl, Poetry Underpinning Power: Vergil’s Aeneid – The Epic for Emperor Augustus: A Recovery Study (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2015): work of propaganda. A. M. Seider, Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid: Creating the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), provides a more nuanced discussion of memory in the Aeneid. Arendt, On Revolution, 52.

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this past and references the bloody civil war in Rome’s own recent memory (8.678–713: civil war; 8.679: strife; 8.695: slaughter; 8.702: discord; 8.703: bloody scourge; 8.709: carnage). In fact, there is something almost inhuman, or at least deeply pathological, about an individual or a community existing without a past. I am not discounting the role of ideology in organizing memory, but ideologies are powerful and also indeterminant, precisely because they operate within human consciousness. Remembering, as Ricoeur notes, is “the return to awakened consciousness of an event recognized as having occurred before the moment when consciousness declares having experienced, perceived, learned it.”28 In his Lingua Latina, Varro suggests a set of etymological connections to memory: “Meminisse ‘to remember,’ from memoria ‘memory,’ when there is again a motion toward that which remansit ‘has remained’ in the mens ‘mind’: and this may have been said from manere ‘to remain,’ as though manimoria” (Varro, Ling. Lat. 6.49).29 Memory may encompass both a recollection of a past event and the anticipation of how something will be remembered in the future (e.g., Aen. 1.203; 12.439–40). That does not mean that all memory is direct and personal or that memory accords with some objective reality. We inhabit a social world filled with artifacts of memory – stories, monuments, customs, and traditions – that we adopt as our own as we identify with particular social groups. As Ricoeur notes, “It is only by analogy, and in relation to individual consciousness and its memory, that collective memory is held to be a collection of traces left by the events that have affected the course of history of the groups concerned.”30 This return of memory to consciousness is important in two ways: It guides us to explore the experience of memory, and it helps us understand the ways in which collective memory plays such an important role in personal identity, particularly when confronted by someone who poses a threat to that memory. Virgil is engaged in the poetic act of remembering. When Virgil enjoins the Muse to remind him of the causes (Musa, mihi causas memora) (1.8), the act of remembering is one of renewing (2.3) and making present (and painful) the past (2.12). As Seider notes in his perceptive discussion of memory in the Aeneid, “The Aeneid’s vocabulary of memory characterizes 28

29 30

P. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 58. On ideologies, see P. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, G. H. Taylor (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Translations are from Varro, On the Latin Language, trans. R. Kent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). Ricoeur, Memory, 119.

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remembering as a mental process that makes present something that would otherwise be absent.”31 For the ancients, reliving an experience is critical to the poetic task. Quintilian draws on examples from the Aeneid to illustrate how enargeia (or illustratio or evidentia) refers to the quality of visual images: “[This quality] makes us seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it. Emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself” (Quint. Inst. or. 6.2.32; also 8.3.61–72; [Cic.] Rhet. ad Her. 4.68: events that appear “enacted” and “pass vividly before the eyes”).32 But this act of remembering bears a complicated relationship to identity. By the time Virgil says, in referring to Euryalus and Nisus – two brothers who die on the battlefield in a moment of sacrifice by Nisus – “If my song has any power, / no day will steal you from time’s memory” (si quid mea carmina possunt, \ nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo), his poetry has already foregrounded the dislocating effects of the memory of this past (9.446–47).33 Earlier in the epic, Virgil points to the inadequacy of words: “Who could describe the death and devastation / of that night, what tears could match our anguish?” (2.361–62). Instead of words, the retelling of the “anguish” of the final days of Troy is organized around the sensual immediacy of bodily experiences (2.298). In his recollection, Aeneas makes the past present. He climbs to the rooftop, straining his ears: “the noise / grew louder, war’s full horror closed on us” (2.301). He has a vision of a desecrated Hektor (2.270–80). He wanders the streets, viewing the piles of corpses scattered everywhere (2.364). Priam’s house is thrown into confusion, “moans mix with sobbing and confusion” (2.486). Priam’s final words express the horror of having to look at his son’s slaughter (2.539). The experiences grow increasingly unintelligible: unrecognizable streets, the former king as now a “nameless corpse” (2.558), and Aeneas’ futile embrace of the ghost of his wife, lost and killed in the flight from Troy (2.793). The “rage and fury” (2.316) can only find expression in violence; the urge to rush without a plan into battle (2.314–17; also 2.353–54). The experience of memory is of disorienting chaos and staggering loss that dislocates the Trojans from their identities, both in their connection to 31 32

33

Seider, Memory, 7. Fordyce notes the use of the present indicative of memimi “by which a speaker vividly pictures in his mind’s eye an event which he has witnessed and makes it live again.” C. J. Fordyce and J. D. Christie, P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos, Libri VII-VIII (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the University of Glasgow, 1977), 106. See Aen. 1.619; 7.205; 8.157. Smith, Primacy, 6, draws on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to show how Virgil “creates characters whose vision motivates an active response to their surroundings.” A version of this verse, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” is included on the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.

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a place and in their relationship to time (most importantly, to a genealogy). There is no return. Memory, in this case, does not offer a past except for one of discontinuity. There is only the realization that we were Trojans, but no more (2.325). As if to emphasize the impossibility of return, Virgil has Aeneas retrace his steps through the fallen city (2.750; also 2.753–54), looted and in flames, to look for his wife (2.758–59). But it is a return in which there is no longer a home. “I never saw my wife again,” Aeneas laments (2.740). What remains are the smoking ruins of Troy (10.45–46). To add to the impossibility of hanging onto this past, the remaining treasures of Troy that are stowed on Orontes’ ship are almost immediately scattered in the waves in a violent storm (1.119). Nor will the city be re-membered somewhere else, put back together or recalled as it once was. To make that point, Virgil describes the early imitations of Troy: Pergamum in Crete, in which the people rejoice in the familiarity of the name until the exiles are driven on by the pestilence that sweeps the city (3.132–34); a city that Aeneas names Ilium in Sicily for those exhausted from the journey (5.755–58); and a small replica of Troy in Buthrotum built by Helenus, son of Priam (3.335–36, 349–51; also, Ov. Met. 13.705–24; 14.82–90, 157–58 on the journey). The unsuitableness of the little Troys marks an important redefinition of community, away from romanticized versions of the past. The connection to the past is disrupted not just spatially by an inability to return to or even imitate a place but also temporally by a break in continuity with one’s ancestors. A once organized community becomes a band of “new companions who’d poured in: women, men, / and soldiers, a grieving throng escaping Troy” (2.797–98). They are not Roman, unless we count the distant genealogy to Dardanus, though Dardanus’ origin is itself ambiguous (3.167–68; 7.206–8).34 In fact, they are not even all Trojans. They pick up stragglers, such as Achaemenides, who had fought with Odysseus and been left on the land of the Cyclops (3.588–715; also Ov. Met. 14.220). And they are themselves seen as strangers (externi) (7.98), as King Latinus describes them, who conquer, rape, and ultimately mix with other Italians (6.635–36, 760–80). Juno refers to the Latins (as opposed to the Trojans) as indiginae (Indigenous, 12.823; also 7.255–56: Aeneas as externus) and ensures in her final negotiation with Jupiter that it will be the Trojans who will lose their identity as Trojans assimilate to Latin virtus (12.827). There remain 34

See J. D. Reed, Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 10–13; Y. Syed, Vergil’s Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 212–14.

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remnants of different national identities in the names alone: Asiatic names (Asius, two Assaraci, and Thymbris: 10:123–24); Oriental names that identify as Trojan (Tyres [10.463] and Orontes [1.113; 1.220; 6.334]); the giving of Capys’ name to Capua; and the etymologies of different Roman clan names (Memmii from Mnestheus, Sergii from Sergestus, and Cluentii from Cloanthus [5.115–123]).35 And the further they travel from Troy, the more alien becomes their customary dress of embroidered robes of purple (compare to Dido’s clothing: 4.137–39) and their habits (or at least the characterization of their habits) of “laziness” (9.614–15). The penates, the household gods, which are brought from Troy, take on what Jenkyns characterizes as a “Roman flavour.”36 By the end, Jupiter accedes to Juno’s request that Troy will remain fallen (12.826–28), punctuating the break in any continuity of memory or identity. The Experience of Wandering and the Boundaries of Identity There is no return. To that extent, Quint is correct. But there is also no forgetting. By anyone. Virgil’s world is comprised of other exiles and wanderers who variously intersect with Aeneas’ band – Dido, Camilla, Mezentius, lost members of Odysseus’ crew, King Evander (8.333), and Saturn (8.319–20), whose land marks Aeneas’ destination. There are continual references by Virgil to the lasting experiences of wandering, which are emphasized by the use of erro (see 1.333; 3.200, 204, 393, 690; 6.329: wandering souls; also 1.384: peragro). For Dido, who must flee from her tyrannical brother Pygmalion (1.335–71), the rupture leaves the mark of loneliness and unresolved loss (4.434) that makes her susceptible to unrelieved longing (4.1–5, 17–33, 467–68). Camilla is a liminal character at the margins of society, brought up in lonely exile in the wilderness, no city willing to accept her tyrannical father (11.539–84). Euryalus’ mother laments her son’s death in a “strange land” (terra ignota) (9.485, my translation), asking: “Where can I go? What place has your severed / mangled corpse?” (9.490–91). There is no forgetting. But there is nothing either redemptive or satisfying about this past. Aeneas remembers the pain and misery (1.9, 12). Diomedes (recalling the tragedy of the Greek return) refuses to fight with the Latins, saying, “I take no pleasure in recalling these old sufferings” (11.280). The crafted images of the Trojan War on the Temple of Juno in Carthage are ultimately inanis (empty), unable to undo 35

See Reed, Gaze, 4–7.

36

Jenkyns, Experience, 427.

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(and in fact heighten memories of) the violence suffered by the Trojans (1.462–64, 494).37 I have sought thus far to point to a more complicated relationship between memory and identity than captured in notions of either forgetting or renewing. Identity is organized around a narrative that connects past with future, yet I have suggested that in Virgil’s founding narrative there is a fundamental break in, and sense of loss surrounding, a connection to past space and time. There is no common history, if by that we mean a shared genealogy or ethnic history. There is no place; rather, the Trojans are “scattered through the world” (1.602). And so the question that arises in this narrative construction of an identity is this: If neither a connection to space nor time defines a We, then who are We? The answer is fundamentally different from either the Athenian or Jewish myths. The Athenians depicted themselves as a pure people with a continuous line of descent;38 the Israelites as a chosen people who, though they wander, are bound by ethnicity, purified in the desert, and then return to their land. To make clear his departure from Athenian myths of autochthony, Livy seems almost to delight in the impurity of Rome’s origins, commenting on how founders of cities “pretend that the earth had raised up sons to them” (1.8.5). In fact, it is Turnus who describes the arrival of Aeneas’ band as destroying Latin purity (stirpem admisceri Phrygiam) (Aen. 7.579). After Aeneas are Romulus and Remus, Rome’s founders, depicted as orphans suckling on a wolf, the Stranger raised by what becomes an image associated in iconography with Rome. There is nothing clear about what makes a Roman a Roman. I think J. D. Reed is correct in noting the indeterminacy of the boundaries of Roman identity when he observes, 37

38

Different interpretations of pictura inanis are made by M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 217 n6: highlights the contrast between an immediate emotional response and deeper contemplation by the reader; S. Bartsch, “Ars and the Man: The Politics of Art in Virgil’s Aeneid,” Classical Philology 93 (1998): 338: invites viewer participation in making own meaning; A. Barchiesi, “Representations of Suffering and Interpretations in the Aeneid,” in P. R. Hardie (ed.), Virgil: Critical Assessments of Classical Authors (London: Routledge, 1999), 336: Inanis could refer to the “lost reality of the wars” or the false reassurance Aeneas takes from the images; Syed, Vergil’s, 68: draws attention to how interpretation can give order to emptiness of art; Seider, Memory, 84–86: comfort Aeneas draws is unfounded. Hdt. 7.161; Eurip. Ion. 29–30, 589–592, 999–1000; Lyc. Leok. 100; Aristoph. Vesp. 1075–1080; Thuc. 1.2.5, 2.36.1; Lysias, Epitaph. 17; Isoc. Paneg. 24; Demosth. Epitaph. 4. There is also the parody of speech in Pl. Menex. 237d–238a, 245d, but Plato develops his own myth of autochthonous origins in Rep. 414e. Adding complexity to this notion of pure origins, see E. S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 223–52, and I. Malkin, “Foreign Founders: Greeks and Hebrews,” in Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 20–40, on founding stories.

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“Roman identity – always reducible to some other nationality, depending on where the poet draws the boundary between nations – emerges as a synthesis (in a dialectical sense) of other national identities (analogous to the dialogue conducted by the Aeneid with its literary forerunners); there is no essence, no absolute center, no origin that exclusively authorizes Romanness.”39 Reed ultimately locates identity in the power of the gaze, though the gaze is left undefined. I do not necessarily disagree with this, but I want to identify how the founding experiences – how these traumatic memories – organize and complicate this gaze. The contours of a Roman identity are brought more clearly into relief around the experiences shaped by these narratives of wandering. Identity does not lie in forgetting the trauma but in organizing a common history around it. What begins to emerge, if not a common history of a people, is a common experience. The Romans see themselves as connected, however paradoxically, through the dislocating effects of wandering and violence. It is in the context of this dislocating violence that both a history and a space are created. At the level of plot, Aeneas seeks shelter. At the level of culture, these founding narratives also provide shelter by creating “symbolic systems immanent in action” by which one becomes integrated into a common world.40 The ways in which one understands one’s own actions as part of this narrative are related to a common memory of wandering in which the boundaries of identity are organized around the conquest of wildness and the promise of a future that stands as the alternative to violence. Violence and wandering remain inextricably linked, both organizing and threatening identity. Labor, Violence, and the Conquest of Wildness Virgil’s world is one saturated in violence. The seeming embrace of violence in these stories and their larger cultural resonances are the subject of scholarly criticism. David Ross, joining a number of other scholars, suggests that Virgil, in depicting the savagery of Troy (and Rome’s) past, concludes that the heroic ideal ends in brutality, bloodiness, and pointlessness.41 So too, A. J. Boyle argues that the quest for fame, including 39

40 41

Reed, Gaze, 2. See also Syed, Vergil’s, 194–223; G. A. Nelsestuen, “Numunus Remulus, Ascanius, and Cato’s Origines: The Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Aeneid 9,” Vergilius 62 (2016): 79–97. See also A. Richlin, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), on the traces of foreign tribes and tongues that linger in early Roman comedy. Ricoeur, Memory, 82. D. Ross, “The Fall of Troy: Between Tradition and Genre,” in W. Clausen, P. E. Knox, and C. Foss (eds.), Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1998), 231–51.

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Aeneas’ own actions, are “portrayed in terms of futile, violent heroism.”42 In a similar vein, Sharon James observes how condere brackets the Aeneid, suggesting that the use of condere at the end of the epic to describe the violent burial of a sword into the chest of another is at odds with earlier uses of condere “which do not include violent acts.”43 James sees these usages as not only revealing “the violence and fury beneath the founding of Rome,”44 but also questioning “the morality of the founding of Rome” since it involves the loss of Italians in the name of founding.45 I shift how we read this violence, away from measuring it against some larger moral structure or order to approaching it as an experience. Wandering is portrayed in these legends as occurring in a landscape defined most of all by undifferentiated violence that threatens to consume everything. In this regard, violence appears as necessary for survival. But violence is not simply an instrument; it serves as a force of differentiation that defines a group both by its memory of, and its juxtaposition to, wildness. We associate a type of violence with founding; namely, the killing of others. But the violence that Virgil associates with founding extends well beyond that, inextricably connected to the condition and disposition of labor. Labor takes on a particular meaning in the Roman context, and one that resonates with an American conception of labor. As Virgil develops most extensively in the Georgics, labor is the plight of humans after the fall from the Golden Age that pits humans against nature (e.g., G. 1.125–75).46 The act of founding is an act of labor. When Virgil announces in the 42 43

44 46

A. J. Boyle, “The Meaning of the Aeneid: A Critical Inquiry – Part I Empire and the Individual, An Examination of the Aeneid’s Major Theme,” Ramus 1 (1972): 75. S. L. James, “Establishing Rome with the Sword: Condere in the Aeneid,” The American Journal of Philology 116 (1995): 624. See also J. W. Hunt, Forms of Glory: Structure and Sense in Virgil’s Aeneid (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 5, and R. J. Hexter, “Sidonian Dido,” in R. J. Hexter and D. L. Selden (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 359: one builds by hiding. See 12.950: buries sword in Turnus’ breast; 9.443: sword plunged; 9.348: sword plunged; 10.387: buried in chest; 10.816: drive in sword; 12.893: buried in earth and compare to 1.5: found a city; 1.33: found the Roman race; 1.522: found a new city; 7.61: grove founded by Saturn; 8.357: fort Janus built. James, “Establishing,” 624. 45 James, “Establishing,” 623. See D. Hammer, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 389–403, for a discussion of Virgil’s texts and scholarship. Labor figures prominently in Lucretius, as well. Otis, Virgil, 161, sees an initial contrast in the Georgics between the violent exertion of labor against nature that evolves into a “real co-operation between nature and man” that Otis sees as the promise of a new Golden Age of Augustus. Otis, Virgil, 215–16, identifies a parallel trajectory in the Aeneid. Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic, 32, associates labor with the qualities of the “toiling and suffering ideal monarch” who progresses ethically through these labors. P. McGushin, “Virgil and the Spirit of Endurance,” The American Journal of Philology 85 (1964): 235, associates it with Stoicism: “the parallels between Aeneas and Hercules lay in its portrayal of the ideal of Stoic virtues – an ideal applied to all who undertook the task of building and guiding Rome.” Tom Geue reads Virgil’s Georgics as celebrating a world where the elite can enjoy leisure

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opening of the Aeneid, “To found the Roman race required such great effort” (Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem) (1.33), he is connecting the founding of a gens – of a people organized by some identity – with the exertion of labor. The association of identity with labor is made immediately clear in the opening verse when the exiled (profugus) band (1.2) must face the toils (labores) (1.10) of the violence of land and sea and war in order to build (condere) a city (1.3–5, 33). The brave labor of the Trojans as they endure the Achaian onslaught as long as possible (2.703) marks the thrownness of Troy into inhospitable nature (e.g., 1.597–99). Aeneas connects his wandering to the vicissitudes of nature when he asks Venus: “What skies are these, where on earth have we washed up? / Tell us. We don’t know this place or people. / We wander [erramus], and [are] driven by the winds and tides” (1.331–33, trans. modified). In the journey across “the endless risks on land and sea” (10.57), we see the fury of nature as the wandering band encounters initially the scattering of the Trojan crew and treasure into the sea (1.113–19), the volcanoes spewing flames to the stars (3.574), the fury that destroys some of Aeneas’ ships (5.680–99), the plague that drives the people from Pergamum (3.137–39), and a storm that destroys trees and crops (12.453–54: likened to Aeneas’ conquest). It is worth noting the lost struggle against nature in Aeneas’ recounting of the attempt to found Pergamum: “I [was] giving laws and homes, suddenly / from some foul tract of sky a plague arrived / to rot our flesh, our trees, our crops: a time of dying” (3.137–39). As Dido asks Aeneas, whose band is already exhausted and destitute from their labors (1.597–99), “What force brings you to these arid coasts?” (1.616). We can, perhaps, understand this encounter with nature against a larger arc of destiny.47 But read as an experience, the Aeneid conveys the uncertainty of being caught between a lost past and an unresolved future. Even as Aeneas talks of Troy rising again, “he feigns hope on his face, and clamps down his deep pain” (1.208–9). As the fleeing Trojans begin to build their fleet, again we hear the uncertainty: “unsure where / the Fates would take us, where we’d settle. Others joined us” (3.6–8). Aeneas asks: “Who will lead us? Where to settle? / Inspire us, Father, and provide us with a sign” (3.88–89). And along the journey, in the midst of a storm, a sense of

47

while others perform labor. See T. Geue, “Soft Hands, Hard Power: Sponging Off the Empire of Leisure (Virgil, Georgics 4),” Journal of Roman Studies 108 (2018): 1–26. Reed, Gaze, 147, notes that although Jupiter says he has not set limits to Roman rule (1.278–79), “they might set limits for themselves.” Also, K. Galinsky, Classical and Modern Interactions: Postmodern Architecture, Multiculturalism, Decline, and Other Issues (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 86–87, on the reliance of all things ultimately on human responsibility in the Aeneid.

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confusion and unknowing continues: “hidden in the woods, / we rode out monstrous terrors. We couldn’t see / what made the sounds” (3.583–85). Aeneas’ encounters with nature serve as the prelude to the wildness out of which they will carve their space. But there are, in fact, competing notions of space. There is the empty wilderness. Romulus and Remus are suckled by a wolf in the wild (2.274–75; 8.630–33). For Livy, too, Romulus is born in a “wild and uninhabited region,” populating the empty expanse with criminals (Livy 1.4.6). King Evander shows Aeneas the “spacious grove” (Aen. 8.342) that Romulus would populate, the future Capitol now “rough then with thorny thickets” (8.348), and the cattle grazing where the Forum would be (8.359–61). But there is also a notion of space as occupied by others. The area Rome would encompass is a land already settled by Saturn’s people (after their own exile) (8.314–15, 319) who are in turn displaced by Italians arriving from the south (8.328). Juno pointedly refers to the Latins (as opposed to the Trojans) as indiginae (12.823). And the Fury Allecto (in the guise of a priestess of Juno) goads Turnus, asking him if he plans to give up and “yield [his] scepter to the Dardan settlers” (7.422). The contradictory conceptions of space are reconciled in the Roman imagination by lending to these displaced (or soon to be displaced) people the threatening attributes of nature, thereby beginning to establish the boundaries of identity against that which (like nature) is defined as inhospitable, treacherous, and capricious. Virgil portrays Saturn’s people as initially an “unruly race” (8.321) who, after the Golden Age of Saturn’s rule in which he establishes law and provides for unbroken peace, slip back into a people “made for war, greedy for gain” (8.327). The area is seen as occupied by rustics (8.349). When they arrive on Italian shores, Aeneas’ band must do battle with these wild forces. As Anchises says to Aeneas, “In Latium there’ll be a harsh / and rustic race for you to crush” (5.730–31). Both Messapus (12.289) and Turnus (12.582) are untrustworthy, breaking the agreement with the Trojans and eager for battle (12.242–43). Among the fiercest of the warriors, Camilla is not only the daughter of a monstrous tyrant (11.539), a characterization for the Romans of violent lawlessness, but also is raised in “brush and bristling lairs” where she is nursed “on a wild mare’s fresh milk” (11.569–72). She takes on the attributes of nature: horrenda (11.507); aspera: (11.664); inimicus (11.685); territus (11.699); and is compared to a falcon killing its prey (11.721–24). The earlier descriptions of the conquest of nature blur into images of warfare, further emphasizing the association of wild nature and wild foes. For example, Ascanius “let arrows fly in war” where before “he’d only

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scared / the skittish wild beasts,” and now “his strong hand killed / Numanus Remulus, now Turnus’ kin” (9.590–94). Like in the description of huddling from the storm (3.583–84), in the shower of javelins Aeneas, furious, kept under cover – as when clouds fling down a fierce hailstorm; every farmer, every plowman scatters from the fields, the traveler finds shelter under riverbanks or the arch of some high cliff while rain batters the earth; but they resume their day when the sun returns. So, lashed by spears all round, Aeneas waited out the thunderhead of war. (10.802–809)

The experience of the founding journey is defined by its immersion and participation in violent wildness that not only carries the risk of annihilation but also leaves its mark on those who survive. That mark is a common memory of violation that serves as the foundation of a shared history. There are gestures throughout the Aeneid in which people are connected through the trauma of violence and loss. Aeneas appeals to his companions, “o socii,” defining their commonality by recalling their shared suffering in their journey to Latium (1.198–207). Dido expresses her own connection to other wanderers, saying to Aeneas, Fortune once harassed me with labores like your own. At last, the fates let me settle in this land. Knowing pain, I can learn to help [succurrere] the pain of others. (1.627–30)

In receiving Pyrrhus’ spoils as a symbolic gesture towards Rome’s ultimate conquest of Epirus,48 Aeneas foretells how Hesperia and Epirus, who “share our founder, Dardanus, / and our sad past,” will make “a single Troy in spirit” (quibus idem Dardanus auctor | atque idem casus, unam faciemus utramque | Troiam animis) (3.503–5; also 2.709–10: “we’ll share one danger, / or one escape”). Not least of this mourning arises with the death of Pallas, who is Aeneas’ companion and Evander’s son. The grief of Aeneas is joined by the women who “set the grieving town afire with cries” (11.147). In this memory of loss, the Teucrians, Tuscans, and Arcadians all mourn together (11.92–93). There is also the recollection (which is set in the 48

P. R. Hardie, Augustan Poetry and the Irrational (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 65; D. Quint, Virgil`s Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 135–38.

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future for Aeneas) of the sorrow of the Roman people with the untimely death of Augustus’ son, Marcellus, “unhappy boy” (miserande puer) (6.882). Aeneas sees the future mourning for heroes on the Campus Martius (6.872–74). And Evander joins with Aeneas in his remembrance of Anchises (8.115–16). The longest and most developed scene of mourning occurs in the memorial games for Aeneas’ father, Anchises. Much has been written on this scene.49 Its role is significant in forging a collective memory as it connects a fragmented past to a vision of a national (in contrast with an ethnic) Rome. The community of mourning is defined neither by ethnicity nor by place. The games are organized amid the journey (in fact, a journey nearly abandoned), held in Sicily, and include Trojans, Sicilians, and Greeks (5.293–301).50 Mourning is projected as a collective memory of loss. The mourning for Aeneas’ father is sworn as a yearly rite that will always be “bitter” but also a day of “honor” (5.49–50). Moreover, from these games Virgil constructs a genealogy that links a series of Trojan competitors to future Roman families (though the choice of families, as is frequently noted, is odd). Virgil connects in one instance Acestes’ arrow (which bursts into flames) to Segesta’s aid for Rome in the First Punic War (5.522–24). He also suggests the transmission of a tradition of equestrian display as they are revived by Ascanius, taught to the Alban youth, and restored in the ludus Troiae by Sulla and then Augustus (5.596–602).51 There are other connections of past and future, including descriptions of the vast and treacherous sea (5.146–47) that relate Aeneas’ own perils with the vast spectacles of the games (5.288–89) and ultimately to Caesar’s naumachia and Octavian’s celebration of naval victory at the Actian games. As Holt notes, a memorial to the Trojan past is revealed as “part of the Roman future.”52 Whatever may be Octavian’s goal of plotting 49

50 51

Different arguments have been made about the place of the games in the Aeneid and in Rome, ranging from Virgil’s emulation of Homer to the functional role of the games as a form of entertainment, as stylized violence to control aggression, and as reflecting Augustus’ interest in the games. See W. H. Willis, “Athletic Contests in the Epic,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 72 (1941): 404–7; R. D. Williams, P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos liber tertius: Edited with a Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), ix–xiii; Otis, Virgil, 41–61; H. A. Harris, “The Games in Aeneid V,” Proceedings of the Virgil Society 8 (1968–69): 14–26; W. A. Camps, An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 100–2; Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic, 222–48; N. Crowther, “Greek Games in Republican Rome,” L’Antiquité Classique 52 (1983): 271; W. S. Anderson, The Art of the Aeneid (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989). On the complex etymologies and blurring of national identities through the names of warriors in the Aeneid, see the nuanced discussion in Reed, Gaze, 5, 129–47. See Holt, “Aeneid V,” 116–17. 52 Holt, “Aeneid V,” 121.

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a future that requires forgetting the past decades of fierce rivalries, civil war, and unremitting violence, as some scholars have argued,53 it is not Virgil’s. The memory of loss – a collective memory that every Roman has, Virgil included, extending from the remnants of the Social War to the civil war – gives rise to collective mourning. Labor and the Construction of Place Set against dislocating wildness, the Roman founding valorizes a second type of labor: not just the struggle against wildness but the civilizing of wildness. The former is seen as a day-to-day, unrelenting battle for survival; the latter as acts of fabrication by which, in the language of Hannah Arendt, “human artifice” is shaped from nature.54 This artifice, which includes buildings, monuments, art, laws, and institutions, contains elements of violence and subjugation because it involves extracting from, struggling against (as the scene from Pergamum should remind us), and reshaping nature. The farmer, for example, an image of the citizen central to both the Roman and American imagination, must carve out the soil, clear trees, root out weeds, and battle disease and intruders (Virg. G. 1.147– 75). Not surprisingly, then, Virgil mingles agricultural and military images (e.g, G. 1.160: arma). The act of building, like the struggle against wildness, emerges as a component of conquest. By way of labor, as Venus reminds Jupiter of his promise, the Romans would come “to rule the land and sea” (qui mare, qui terras omnis dicione tenerent) (Aen. 1.236). In fact, there is a fascination in Roman (and American culture) with building as an expression of power over nature: not just the construction of a massive infrastructure of roads and aqueducts but also the actual relocating of nature for naumachiae and beast hunts.55 The construction of artifice introduces memory to the timelessness of nature. One need only compare the artifacts of both the past and future that Aeneas encounters with the featureless landscape of the North that Virgil describes in the Georgics. In the North, the people live beneath the ground in caves, leaving the surface untouched so that “far and wide earth lies shapeless under mounds of snow and piles of ice” (G. 3.354–55; also 3.377). Humans similarly leave no mark on the Libyan landscape, where 53 54 55

J. E. G. Zetzel, “Romane Memento: Justice and Judgment in Aeneid 6,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 (1989): 282–84; Quint, Epic, 53–65; Gale, “Poetry,” 341. Arendt, The Human Condition, 173. See D. Hammer, “Roman Spectacle Entertainments and the Technology of Reality,” Arethusa 42 (2010): 63–86.

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herdsmen roam on a vast, featureless plain with no shelter (G. 3.341–43). The power of Aeneas’ visit to the Underworld, even if the specifics are not remembered when he reemerges, is that he sees a Rome that is built. Anchises “fired [Aeneas’] spirit with a love of future glory” (Aen. 6.889– 90) by showing him images of “Italians / who wait for us, splendid souls who’ll take our name” (6.757–58), the towns and buildings that will give names to the nameless earth (6.775–78, 784),56 the sowing of seeds in the soil (6.844), and the extent of Roman rule (6.781–83) that rivals Hercules’ labors (6.801).57 In the Aeneid, there is the initial wonder (from mirror) at the sight of Carthage’s citadel that was once “mere huts” (1.421), the ports and roads cut out of the land (1.422), stones cut from the land and rolled, refashioned as walls (1.423–24), harbors dug (1.427), cliffs hewn (1.428–29), and the carved depictions of the Trojan war on Dido’s temple (1.455). The sight of Carthage anticipates Rome’s founding on empty lands (1.264, 277; 8.347–48, 360–61), with continual references to the physical exertion applied to nature that precedes Rome’s formation: the effort by Aeneas to restore Pergamum by his own hand (4.344); the work on the walls of Pergamum (3.132: molior); the boundaries of Segesta marked with a plough (5.755–56); Lavinium marked by toiling in the soil (7.157–59; also 1.258–59); and then the prophecies of the walls of Alba Longa (1.271).58 There is also the exertion (opera) of cutting and piling trees for Misenus’ altar (6.176– 84); the building of a memorial hung from a fashioned oak (11.5, 16); and the shaping of the scepter by the craftsman’s hand (artificis manus) (12.210). The importance of fabrication plays itself out in two ways in this founding imagination. On the one hand, founding is not the singular act of a lawgiver or a “once-for-all affair”59 but is an ongoing process of building, rebuilding, and caring for what has been passed down by subsequent generations.60 As Cicero writes, founding occurs over “a longer 56

57

58 59 60

On the assertion of “discursive control” in naming a previously “unmarked and unseparated space,” thus transforming it into a place, see D. Spencer and D. H. J. Larmour, “Introduction—Roma, recepta: A Topography of the Imagination,” in D. Spencer and D. H. J. Larmour (eds.), The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11. On connections of Hercules to Aeneas and Augustus, see McGushin, “Virgil,” 232–34; M. C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); G. K. Galinsky, “The Hercules-Cacus Episode in Aeneid VIII,” The American Journal of Philology 87 (1966): 18–51. See 6.781–805, 8.200–4. Cicero refers to Rome’s authority as extending across the territory Hercules marked at the end of his labors (Balb. 39). Compare to Deut. 6.7 on the promise that the Israelites will enter a city already built. M. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147. See Hammer, Roman Political Thought, 177–92; also Arendt, On Revolution, 202–5.

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period of several centuries and many ages of men” (Rep. 2.2). What is revealed to Aeneas in the Underworld is, in essence, a moving image of Rome’s founding that does not end with Aeneas, nor Romulus, but extends to the current day to include, following Katherine Toll’s observation, the ongoing “public project to forge a national character.”61 On the other hand, and related, founding requires continual acts of renewal, or that which is built can slip away. In the continual juxtaposition of a wild and fabricated world, the Aeneid expresses both the wonder at what has been built and the ongoing reminder of its impermanence (e.g., 2.363, 556–57; 3.1–2; 6.857–59; 8.355–58; 9.144–45), a vision Virgil articulates in the Georgics when he states that all things “speed towards the worse and slipping away fall back” (G. 1.199–200). Thus, Virgil recounts the plague that renders useless all human arts (G. 3.378–565). Carthage will be leveled. Rome’s founding recalls another founding that will be displaced. Anchises prophesies the war with “the Laurentians and Latinus’ / town, the hardships [laborem] to avoid, those to endure [labores]” (Aen. 6.891–92). Labor not only shapes nature but is seen as shaping individuals by instilling particular, and in many ways, competing dispositions (as Rome would discover in the rise of military dynasts). The image is at once the soldier and the farmer, both of whom must display endurance, frugality, and self-discipline against wildness. At its best, these dispositions connect Roman notions of virtus and pietas – of laboring for the res publica – and stand in stark contrast to the laxness and self-interest associated with luxury.62 In the trials of wandering, the Phrygian luxury of the Trojans is replaced by a people who “live off little” and “tame the earth with hoes” (9.607–8) until the Trojans can be subsumed into Italian manliness (12.827). Trust and the Bonds of Community We are tracing the contours of a Roman identity built on a narrative that connects past, present, and future. The memory of wandering – whether a direct or culturally relived experience – creates a common past associated paradoxically with a break in continuity from a history that precedes that wandering. This past is also seen as forging a shared disposition of labor by which a refuge can be carved from wildness. That is, a space is built. In this 61 62

K. Toll, “The Aeneid as an Epic of National Identity: Italiam Laeto Socii Clamore Salutant,” Helios 18 (1991): 5. I differ from McGushin, “Virgil,” in seeing this discipline as necessarily Stoic.

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violent conquest of wildness, not only is the built space given some endurance in time but the boundaries of identity – of who belongs and does not belong – are given visual form: Walls, fences, roads, buildings, cultivated fields, and monuments separate civilized from uncivilized, as well as provide visual markers by which people recognize and identify with the community. But against this backdrop of violence there also emerges another type of organization, one that tames the wildness of humans. That is the principle of agreement that rests on fides (the keeping of a promise), which emerges as an (perhaps the) organizing principle of politics. The Iliad ends on a promise. But the promises that emerge from the Aeneid are different in important ways. Achilles agrees to a twelve-day truce to allow for Hektor’s funeral. But everyone knows that at the end of those twelve days the war will resume and the Achaians will sack Troy. The agreements in the Aeneid are both more national and enduring, becoming a core aspect of identity by creating bonds between people who are seen as sharing a common purpose (recall Cicero’s definition of a res publica) and common future, and differentiating those who share an agreement from those who remain outside the agreement. From the shock of nations clashing “so violently,” Virgil interjects at one point, there is the possibility of “eternal peace” (12.503–4). Recognizing the horror of potentially boundless violence, leaders tame the passions and soothe the rage of their people (1.57, 153), reestablishing limits of allowable actions and engaging in the cooperative task of rebuilding. Stated slightly differently, violence forges a common plight; treaties and agreements form a common future. There is a continual refrain of this act of settlement by compacts (11.109, 190–91, 212–15). King Latinus appeals to the Latins, “Let’s fix fair terms and summon them to share our rule” (11.322). The final acts of Latinus and Aeneas join human fabrication – the promise of a treaty, symbolized in the artifact of the scepter – with prayers to the gods who sanction treaties (12.191–92, 200), thus giving cosmological significance to this human act. What becomes Rome is not Troy; it is a city of strangers, foreigners, conquered peoples, rivals, and diverse traditions (12.823–29, 834–35). Certainly, the Trojans establish their lineages. But what is celebrated in the end is a race arising from mixed blood (12.838) who become a “mingled peoples joined by a pact [foedera]” (4.112; also 6.760–80). The narrative of Roman identity is neither one of purity nor of pluralism; it is one of incorporation, assimilation, and acculturation, a myth that served imperial ends since no one was beyond Rome’s global reach. One sees in Roman politics not just an elaborate array of formalized agreements by which other states were variously included as Roman, but

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a sense that these agreements operate by way of a more personal trust (fides) that serves as a bond of Romanness. As Arendt writes in talking about the Romans, the power of law exists not as a boundary handed down by the lawgiver that defines the space of politics but as a “perpetual bond” (dauernde Bindung) forged in speech and argument, in which people continually bind themselves together (note 6.612–13 on punishments for treason and breaking allegiances).63 Roman agreements were not just signed accords; they were speech acts in which leaders swore their allegiances.64 Aeneas expresses the personal basis of trust when he says to King Evander: “Believing this, I refused to send you envoys / or make some crafty overture. I risk my life, / and approach your door as supplicant” (8.143–45). Conversely, Turnus, the head of the Rutilians who leads the resistance to Roman settlement, not only refuses an agreement for peace but also an agreement about how to settle the conflict man-to-man. As Aeneas says to the Latins, “he and I should have crossed swords” rather than implicating everyone else in the violence (11.117). One can get some sense of the binding role of trust in the Roman cultural imagination when Cicero portrays Verres, the former governor of Sicily, as a pirate (I Ver. 1.3; II Ver. 1.89–90, 122; 4.21, 23; 5.64; also Sest. 15–16: Clodius as a violator of agreements, 46: Clodius, Gabinius, and Piso). Pirates were very much on the Roman mind, menacing Rome by disrupting grain shipments that gave rise to food riots. Dangerous, yes, but they are also the antithesis of Romanness, portrayed (as the enemies of the Trojans in Virgil will be portrayed) as uncivilized, untrustworthy, and roaming and looting rather than settling and cultivating. Numanus, for example, delights in banditry (Aen. 9.613). But Verres poses a threat to the very fabric of the res publica by 63 64

H. Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, U. Ludz (ed.) (Munich: Piper, 1993), 109. Among the different types of treaties were what can be identified as maiestas treaties in which rulers of conquered territories were obligated to recognize and preserve the maiestas populi Romani (maiestatem populi Romani conservanto) (Cic. Balb. 35; 38). See H. G. Gundel, “Der Begriff Maiestas im politischen Denken der römischen Republick,” Historia 12 (1963): 289–94; M. Reinhold, “The Declaration of War against Cleopatra,” Classical Journal 77 (1981): 98, 100; N. Lewis and M. Reinhold, Roman Civilization: Selected Readings, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Y. Thomas, “L’institution de la Majesté,” Revue de synthèse 112 (1991): 331–86. See Lex Gabinia Calpurnia de Insula Delo RS 22.18–19 = M. H. Crawford, Roman Statutes, 2 vols. (London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1996); Livy 38.11.2. Other maiestas treaties include with Gades in 206 and renewed in 78 bce (Cic. Balb. 35), the Aetolians in 189 bce (Livy 38.11.2; Polyb. 21.32), Rhodes in 165/4 bce and renewed in 51 bce ( R. A. Bauman, Lawyers and Politics in the Early Roman Empire: A Study of Relations between the Roman Jurists and the Emperors from Augustus to Hadrian [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989], 220–22), possibly Cnidus in 28 bce ( E. Täubler, Imperium Romanum: Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des römischen Reichs, vol. 1 [Leipzig: Teubner, 1913], 451), though fragmentary and Täubler’s reconstruction is disputed, and Mitylene in 25 bce (IGR 4.33, also fragmentary).

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violating the trust that binds citizens together. In executing and then displaying a citizen, Verres threatens the foundation of citizenship. Note how in Cicero’s rhetoric, a notion of wandering is joined with finding shelter in Rome: Poor men of humble birth sail across the seas to shores they have never seen before, where they find themselves among strangers, and cannot always have with them acquaintances to vouch for them. Yet such trust have they in the single fact of their citizenship that they count on being safe, not only where they find our magistrates, who are restrained by the fear of law and public opinion, and not only among their own countrymen, to whom they are bound by the ties of a common language and civic rights and much else beside: no, wherever they find themselves, they feel confident that this one fact will be their defence. Take away this confidence, take away this defence from Roman citizens; lay it down that to cry “I am a Roman citizen” shall help no man at all; make it possible for governors and other persons to inflict upon a man who declares himself a Roman citizen any cruel penalty they choose, on the plea that they do not know who the man is; do this, accept that plea, and forthwith you exclude Roman citizens from all our provinces, from all foreign kingdoms and republics, from every region of that great world to which Romans, above all other men, have always had free access until now. (II Ver. 5.167–68)65

In this execution of a Roman citizen without a trial, Verres violated foundational norms: “[You] declared war upon the whole principle of the rights of the Roman citizen body. You were the enemy, I say again, not of that individual man, but of the common liberties of us all” (II Ver. 5.169). The alternative to agreement, as it is for Virgil, is violence. In Cicero’s picture of the origin of states where “men roamed, scattered and dispersed over the country,” the alternative to the “treasonableness of human nature” and a “life of savagery” is the creation of law (Sest. 91–2).66 The choice, as Cicero notes, is between ius and vis (Sest. 92; also II Ver. 1.82). “If we would have violence abolished, law must prevail, that is the administration of justice, on which law wholly depends; if we dislike the administration of justice, or if there is none, force must rule” (Cic. Sest. 92). Agreements do not erase violence. They do not undo the past. Lurking in the Roman (and American) imagination is the memory of one’s 65 66

Translations are from Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). Translations are from Cicero, Pro Sestio, trans. R. Gardner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

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humiliating origins: of defeat, impoverishment, and homelessness. I place Aeneas’ last act of killing a defenseless Turnus in this context. Scholars have struggled with this ending, owing in large part to the interpretive lens through which they read the Aeneid. Arendt ignores it. Others have gone through great effort to give moral justification to Aeneas’ final act.67 Most frequently, scholars have seen the act as a failure either of Aeneas or of a broader Roman ideology, often read in the context of Aeneas’ moniker as pius. For Boyle, the ideology of the Roman empire is based on the “manifestation of pietas” as a sense of both duty and compassion (pity), an ideology that degenerates in the end as Aeneas succumbs to furor.68 Burnell would expect the Roman audience “to condemn it.”69 For Johnson, both Aeneas and Turnus are victims “of a kind of mechanical malevolence” and a “mindless, evil design.”70 For Putnam, pius Aeneas is continuously implicated in personal, “self-serving” actions of violence motivated by anger (as in his killing of Lausus while he protects his father).71 As Putnam suggests, “Our respect is undermined for Aeneas who is brutalized by an inability to respond sympathetically to his own supposedly characteristic virtue in the operations of others.”72 Aeneas’ act is “the final impietas,” a failure to recognize and be compassionate toward the fulfillment of filial duty by others.73 Glenn Most places the ending in the context of the Augustan propaganda promoting his clementia, arguing that Aeneas appears “inferior to Augustus” and that if Augustus wants to surpass Aeneas, he must do so by carrying out the “reconciliation and peace cherished by the Romans and fostered by his own propaganda.”74 Hardie draws a parallel from Orestes to Aeneas and then to Octavian that is linked 67

68 69 70

71 72 73

See especially H.-P. Stahl, “The Death of Turnus: Augustan Vergil and the Political Rival,” in K. Raaflaub and M. Toher (eds.), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 174–211; Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic; K. Galinsky, “The Anger of Aeneas,” American Journal of Philology 109 (1988): 321–48; K. Galinsky, “How to be Philosophical about the End of the Aeneid,” Illinois Classical Studies 19 (1994): 191–201; and response by R. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 288–93. Boyle, “Meaning,” 64, 73; also W. R. Johnson, “Aeneas and the Ironies of Pietas,” Classical Journal 60 (1965): 363. P. Burnell, “The Death of Turnus and Roman Morality,” Greece & Rome 34 (1987): 198. W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 133; also Di Cesare, Altar, 236: “He must reject the appeal to pietas, to his own fatherhood, to his very humanity, and slay the last individualist in the poem.” M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 136. Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid, 136; also M. C. J. Putnam, The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid, 162. 74 Most, “Memory,” 168.

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to Octavian’s acts of vengeance in civil war and to the “ritual vendettas performed by Rome against its enemies,” but under the impulse of irrational furor.75 The reader sees Octavian and his enemies, like Orestes, as “tragic characters whose actions are directed by higher divine forces through the inspiration of madness.”76 But the question needs reformulating. The question is not how Aeneas lives up to, or fails to live up to, some ideal or how, in Hardie’s argument, the act of violence is governed by some external force, but how the experience of the founding story connects to this act of violence. The answer lies in the tension between memory and forgetting that is at the heart of the founding story.77 Forgetting comes into conflict with what Ricoeur refers to as the “persistence of traces.”78 There is a narrative trajectory to the creation of a new history, but simultaneously a memory of the trauma of wandering and the violence (including the violence inflicted upon others) by which a new history is forged. The scenes leading up to the final killing are laden with memory. Virgil announces, Calliope, I pray you and your sisters: inspire me to sing of all the carnage there, the deaths dispensed by Turnus, the killers and the victims. Unroll with me the length and breadth of war. (9.525–29)

In fact, Aeneas remembers all too well. He sees the belt of Pallas on Turnus (12.942–46), a “reminder [monumentum] of his savage / grief” that makes him “ablaze with rage, awful in anger” (12.946–47). It is a moment of fury, but one that seeks to expunge the past: not just the vulnerable helplessness that attends the loss of Pallas but also the memory of what Turnus represents; namely, a return to violence in the name of purity. In this case, violence is the artifact that arises when there is too much memory and thus reveals the untidy relationship between memory and forgetfulness: Violence is a reaction and thus recalls, but it also seeks to obliterate, to never be reminded again of the trace that is left behind. Virgil’s founding story is not a story of forgetting. Nor is it placed in service to an ideal. It locates a Roman identity in the experience of 75 77

78

Hardie, Augustan, 71. 76 Hardie, Augustan, 72. Seider, Memory, 161, is correct in suggesting, “In Aeneas’ final deed, the weight of all the different memories that press upon him is so great that the boundaries between past and future and individual and society fade away.” Where Seider sees it as “a choice between past and future,” or between individual grief and collective need, I see the persistence of memory as itself a tension that both serves as a collective past and threatens to sink the community in that past. Ricoeur, Memory, 427.

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dislocation and loss by Strangers who find commonality in collective mourning, in a violent struggle to survive, in the toil required to create a place in this violent space, and ultimately in the ability to imagine a future through bonds of trust. But it is also a story of vulnerability. The experience of wandering reveals that whatever is done can be undone: Places can be displaced; trust can be broken; and human beings can be thrown back into violent wildness.

Josey and the American Founding In Federalist No. 2, John Jay provides a vision of America as “one connected country” with “one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”79 If Jay provides a tidy story of American origins then Jean de Crèvecoeur, at almost the exact same time, notes a different type of America in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Through the character of a fictional farmer writing to an English gentleman, Crèvecoeur describes “this great American asylum” where “the poor of Europe have by some means met together.” Far from there being a shared genealogy, “two thirds of them had no country.” As Crèvecoeur continues, noting the disrupted connection to a past, “Can a wretch, who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country?”80 The conflicting images of founding provided by Jay and Crèvecoeur mirror Cicero’s own attempt to clean up “Romulus’ cesspool” (Att. 2.1.8) by refashioning Romulus as a virtuous statesman (Rep. 2.17–19). But Cicero was slightly less successful than Jay. If Crèvecoeur’s characterization is meant to be a somewhat sober (rather than romantic) depiction of America’s lowly origins, it is one that is ultimately embraced in America’s founding imagination, like Virgil’s is in Rome. What connected 79

80

See also B. Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, & c (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1755), 224, on his concerns with the peopling of the colonies by “blacks and tawneys.” Writing as J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1968), 49; also J. Hall, Letters from the West: Containing Sketches of Scenery, Manners, and Customs (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 315: “go like exiles from the land.”

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the revolutionaries to Virgil and the Romans, as Arendt notes, was not tradition but “their own experiences.”81 And so we see invocations of Virgil. Isaiah Thomas, who founded the American Antiquarian Society, commissioned a membership certificate that portrays Columbus as he is besieged by a storm with the phrase from the Aeneid olim meminisse juvabit (One day it will be pleasing to remember) (1.203).82 The phrases E pluribus unum and Novus ordo saeclorum both appear on the great seal of the United States and both are adaptations of Virgil. The passages together provide the narrative outline of the American founding: a disparate band of wanderers who, bound together, create a new history. The story Virgil tells, like the one Crèvecoeur describes, is retold in Josey: a band of outcasts who are separated from their own past. I read Josey through this Virgilian lens, not to suggest some literary influence but to foreground a relationship between memory, identity, and violence that is less tidy than suggested by Arendt, but perhaps no less exceptional. A Western may be an odd place to look, and there is no shortage of scholarly critiques of the genre, characterized variously as unhistorical, adolescent, violent, nostalgic, misogynistic, masculinist, racist, and imperialist.83 One could make similar characterizations of the Aeneid. But one could also follow André Bazin in his pathbreaking discussion of the Western by noting its epic elements: the superhuman quality of its heroes; the “legendary magnitude” of the feats; and the vastness of the landscape that “constantly bring[s] to mind the conflict between man and nature.”84 My interest here is neither to defend the Western as a genre nor to identify its shortcomings but to explore its enactment of a myth of American origins.85 81 82 83

84 85

Arendt, On Revolution, 197. I thank Aaron Seider for bringing this to my attention. See A. M. Seider, “Allure without Allusion: Quoting a Virgilian Epitaph in a 9/11 Memorial,” Interfaces 38 (2016–17): 181–82. For example, J. G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 211: adolescent, referring to the dime novel; R. Etulain, “Origins of the Western,” Journal of Popular Culture 5 (1972): 802: nostalgic; J. P. Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): masculinist. A. Bazin, “The Western or the American Film par excellence,” in H. Gray (ed.), What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 147. Bazin, “The Western,” 142, argues that the “western was born of an encounter between a mythology and a means of expression,” namely, the cinema. There are several discussions that explore the ways in which Westerns play out particular cultural questions, including W. Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), in his structural analysis ; M. Winkler, “Classical Mythology and the Western Film,” Comparative Literature Studies 22 (1985): 516–40, which relates classical heroic mythologies to American hero myths; R. B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), which explores the contributions of the western to political thought; M. L. Bandy and K. Stoehr, Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the

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I use “mythic” to refer to a set of narratives that, as Slotkin argues, “dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture” that “recapitulates that people’s experience in their land, rehearses their visions of that experience in its relation to their gods and cosmos, and reduces both experience and vision to a paradigm.”86 Josey is not a singular work, nor are the plots of Westerns reducible to a singular reaction to a contemporary context (though they are shaped by those contexts). They speak to a set of attitudes, experiences, and beliefs that I will make reference to in this discussion and that extend back to the seventeenth century; are articulated in travel and adventure narratives of the eighteenth century; replicated in Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories of the mid-nineteenth century; condensed in legends learned in grade school (Paul Bunyan, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and Annie Oakley); inscribed on the Statue of Liberty; and, perhaps most tellingly, critiqued by nativists on the one side, and the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Miller on the other. I am focusing on one aspect of this myth that has been largely neglected; namely, how it plays out the relationship between memory and identity. I use the term “enactment” to foreground how Josey, like other Westerns, portrays these origins, not as historical documents but as experiences that are, in turn, experienced by the audience. Like in the Aeneid, there is a sensual immediacy to these experiences that taps into deeply held beliefs about, and perceived threats to, individual and community identity. Josey is plowing, pushing through the rocky soil when he detects a change in the rhythms of nature: the silence, but for the sound of birds in the field, contrasted with the unheard pounding hooves of the soldiers’ horses, and then the sight of rising smoke. As he runs toward the house, the chaotic scene becomes more present: the gunshots, the sight of his house in flames, the cries of his wife as she is taken by the soldiers, the attempt to get to his crying son in the burning house when Josey is slashed by Captain Terrill’s sword, and knocked unconscious as his house collapses. There is no narrator; the scenes unfold as they are experienced. First is the experience of memory: the compressed scenes of mourning, vengeance, and betrayal that drive Josey’s turn westward and then a journey stretched in time across the stark landscape of the plains and desert.

86

American Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), which contains an extended discussion of Josey. R. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 6.

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Aeneas’ band is Josey’s. They are strangers with a mix of names and ethnicities who are guided by different motives but who must similarly shed aspects of their pasts: the pursuit of vengeance by Josey; the animosities between Cherokee and Cheyenne; romanticized images of the west as a “paradise” by the Kansas family and as an arena of the autonomous gunslinger by Jamie; and the aristocratic pretensions and sectional chauvinism (the pride of being a Jayhawker) of the Kansas family. Everyone bears the memory of loss: Josey loses his family and home; Lone Watie, too, loses his home, his wife, and two sons on the Trail of Tears; Little Moonlight is both raped and cast out of her tribe; Jamie loses his mother and ultimately his life; and all the belongings of the Kansas family are strewn about the desert, like the scattering of Trojan treasures in the sea. In fact, the sense of loss is not just a prehistory of the characters who then create something new; the loss looms as an ongoing artifact of America’s own beginnings that are encountered in the journey: the extermination of the Indians, the ravages of civil war, the already corrupt political systems, and economic dislocation. Watie first appears in the garb of civilization: a stovepipe hat and frock coat, reflecting his own membership in one of the Five Civilized Tribes (as Watie references the name given to them by the government) that he associates with the empty words of broken promises and meaningless phrases. Watie recalls the headline after their meeting with the secretary of the interior and the president: “Indians Vow to Endeavor to Persevere.” Dotting the landscape are largely abandoned towns, the residue of the boom and bust of the silver rush. The memories of betrayal, violation, and loss foreclose recourse to a longing for the past by both the characters and the audience. When told by Ten Bears that he is free to go, Josey answers: “I reckon not. Got nowhere to go.” One sees played out in the American myth of founding a similar relationship of memory, violence, and identity to the Roman founding. Violent wildness defines a common experience of rupture against which two values emerge that form the contours of the community: a shared disposition of labor as the taming of wildness; and the giving of promises, premised on personal trust, as the alternative to that violence. Labor and Wildness In Federalist No. 3, John Jay credits Providence with a people bound by a common ancestry and united by a common purpose. There is no doubt that America (like Rome) viewed themselves as chosen. The Pilgrims and

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Puritans of the seventeenth century, the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, and the Second Great Awakening of the following century, as well as the invocations of American exceptionalism in contemporary political rhetoric, all speak to the cultural endurance of a belief in God’s “wonder-working providence.”87 The poetry during the revolutionary and constitutional era, such as Joel Barlow’s The Columbiad (1807), resounds with urgency in constructing just such a mythology. But while this notion of destiny overlays, it never erases completely, the experience of wandering. Bradford’s providential description of a “desert wilderness,” or Winthrop’s invocation of a “city upon a hill,” does little to quell the day-to-day question of how one even survives in an environment in which there is so little control.88 The search for signs of God’s intervention stands in stark contrast to the fear of being abandoned. So in Josey, the physical weight of Josey’s suffering body pulls the cross that marks the grave of his family to the ground, signaling his own exile from his Eden and the beginning of his journey into an expansive and violent universe. Josey pulls his charred pistol from the ruins to practice shooting. He gives up the plow in the pursuit of vengeance, joining a Confederate band “to set things right.” When the people who were most imbued with a sense of destiny are captured and led by a rope behind the wagon, Josey speaks to the leveling quality of wandering, commenting: “Those poor pilgrims from Kansas. They don’t look too proud now, do they?” Josey’s remark speaks to a particular view of human thrownness in nature that dates to the earliest settlements and shares a great deal with Virgil. There is, in American culture, an embrace of nature’s innocence: a timeless and harmonious realm of flourishing beings, whether the Golden Age or Eden. The notion is perhaps most fully articulated in the nineteenth-century transcendental thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. But the land of milk and honey – as characterized by the Puritans in an attempt to lend theological meaning to the imposing wilderness – gives way to a second view of wildness, one encountered after

87 88

The phrase is from E. Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Scions Saviour in New-England (1654). W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, S. E. Morison (ed.) (New York: Knopf, 1952), 63; A. Heimert and A. Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 91. On the development of the Puritan conception of the wilderness, see A. Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” The New England Quarterly 26 (1953): 361–82.

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the Fall, that places humans at odds with nature.89 John Van Dyke, writing in 1901, opens his classic discussion of the desert: After the making of Eden came a serpent, and after the gorgeous furnishing of the world, a human being. Why the existence of the destroyers? What monstrous folly, think you, ever led Nature to create her one great enemy – man!90

Nature appears not just as alien, inhospitable, and incomprehensible, but also presents itself to the American mind through a pure physicality that tears away the façade of one’s past as it makes death a stark, ever-present, and imminent possibility. Bradford’s description of the journey of the Mayflower conveys this sense of being overwhelmed by nature: from the journey over the “vast and furious ocean” to the “cruel and fierce storms” to the “calamity” of disease that killed half the settlers in the first three months.91 And they were only a stone’s throw from the ocean. There are still the mountains, and then the plains, and then higher mountains with still vast deserts that await. If we want to understand how Josey’s journey follows the footsteps of the American imagination, we cannot do much better than to return to Van Dyke’s account of his own journey into the desert. “It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies. And at every step there is the suggestion of the fierce, the defiant, the defensive.” The Western hero knows it as “a land of illusions” in which the “desert’s secrets of life and growth and death are not to be read at a glance.”92 Always present is not just death but “annihilation”: the shifting sands as “they overwhelm, they bury, they destroy”; the “savage” and “unceasing” struggle to exist; giant lakes that are choked of their water; and the wearing away of “the traces of human activity.”93 At one point Van Dyke notes the footprint of a desert deer preserved in stone, asking: “What has become of the once carefully guarded footprints of the Sargons, the Pharaohs and the Caesars? With what contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival of the least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his shield!” There is in nature no “concord” or “brotherhood”; it is “stern, harsh, and at first 89

90 91 93

I depart from A. J. Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 75, who views Westerns as “(re)invent[ing] the original American moment, the instant when desire, perhaps guiltless still, reconceives the Garden and invests the idea (and thus the place and its impending occupation) with the power to reinstate the prelapsarian order.” There are certainly aspects of this image that variously reappear, but I do not think it characterizes the genre. J. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), vii. Bradford, Plymouth, 61, 77. 92 Van Dyke, Desert, 26, 2, 174. Van Dyke, Desert, 51, 27–28, 50–51, 9.

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repellent,” but also majestic as one comes to terms with “the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation!”94 It is precisely these dual conceptions of nature that underlie the competing images of the Indian in American mythology: as a romanticized image of a people who exist in harmony with nature95 and as untrustworthy and capricious savages who at every point pose a threat to America’s founding.96 Bradford describes “a hideous and desolate wilderness, fall [sic] of wild beasts and wild men.”97 In “The Adventures of Daniel Boon [sic],” which appears as an appendix in Filson’s history of Kentucky, the Boone tale serves as a condensation of colonial beliefs, experiences, and visions of the migration into wildness. It is a narrative of how “lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful land; this region, so favourably distinguished by nature, now becomes the habitation of civilization.”98 Boone leaves his family with unclear motives, at first idealizing the wilderness and then plunging into its darkness, is captured by Indians, and ultimately left by himself. He returns to the east to convince others to follow him to Kentucky (where he is again held captive and then adopted by, and becomes friendly with, the Shawnee). The trials of Boone’s settlement parallel Bradford’s experience of the hardships of war, famine, and severe cold. But in American mythology, he encapsulates the biography of the multitude of American founders: a hunter, explorer, and settler. Josey replays this journey and, in turn, reaffirms a set of values that appear as imposed by nature, not as natural laws, but as arising from the existential threat of immediate annihilation. Death comes quickly and unexpectedly. Thus – and here we can as easily read Virgil’s Georgics – there must be constant vigilance, an ability to read the landscape and 94 95

96

97 98

Van Dyke, Desert, 7, 26–27. Early contributions include J. Smith’s The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (1630). There is a resurgence of these more romanticized images of Native Americans and nature in the nineteenth century. For example, see G. Catlin, Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, 2 vols. (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842), 1.23–24; H. Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855); and M. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). We see this ambivalence, for example, in Smith’s 1764 account, W. Smith, Bouquet’s Expedition against the Ohio Indians in 1764, M. West (ed.) (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017). For scholarship, see Chapter 3. Bradford, Plymouth, 62. J. Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1793), 34; also Hall, Letters, 165. See Hall, Letters, 252–59, and Slotkin, Regeneration, 278–312, on Boone.

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anticipate danger, a ruggedness and self-denial of immediate or frivolous bodily pleasures, a patient endurance, and ultimately the ability to kill when faced with imminent danger. Boundaries get blurred: Daniel Boone is adopted by Indians.99 Thomas Morton, in The New English Canaan (1637), imagines the Indians as the “scattred [sic] Trojans” who through their union with Christians can create a new Canaan (in contrast to the hypocrisy of the Puritans).100 Both Little Moonlight and Ten Bears describe Josey as a warrior. As Prats notes, “The Western simply takes it for granted that its hero can be as Indian as the Indian himself and at times even more Indian than the Indian.”101 But boundaries are blurred toward the civilizing gesture, as well. The enemies that Josey encounters take on the attributes of nature, though those enemies extend well beyond the Indigenous tribes. They are the Northern commanders who lie about the terms of the surrender, shooting the Confederate soldiers while they pledge their loyalty to the Union; the profiteers who capture and sell people; the predators, whether as rapists or bounty hunters, such as Captain Terrill, who is described as a “looter and a pillager”; and the barbarous hillbillies. In a striking moment, when the hillbillies think they have captured Josey for the bounty, Josey (aided by Jamie’s deception) kills one while Jamie kills the other. Jamie asks if they should be buried. Josey spits tobacco on the head of one of the dead men, then says: “To hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat, same as the worms.” They are no different than nature. What stands out in Josey is that this danger of the Other is not confined to a specific group but can be ascribed easily to other groups. One need only think of James Dickey’s Deliverance, a novel about four friends who take a canoe trip in the Georgia wilderness to see how, in the American imagination, a journey into nature’s innocence ends with an encounter with the Other, in this case hill folk who rape and who place a demand on individuals to act decisively to kill. Community As a response to the violent encounter with wildness, the boundaries of community begin to take on definition. I say community to emphasize a point of difference from discussions that see the Western as a celebration of an empty aesthetic of violence and autonomous manhood, not to disagree 99 100 101

Hall, Letters, 255. T. Morton, The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton (Boston: Printed for the Society, 1883), 126. Prats, Invisible, 13.

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that manhood is very much at the center of this myth but to suggest that there is something more. In particular, the experience of violence plays a role in the formation of identity through a communalized memory of both survival and loss. The initial response to the murder of his wife and son expresses Josey’s isolation: a lonely scene of mourning. But from the rapidity of the early scenes in which Josey carries out his vengeance – with others but not connected to them (and betrayed by one of them) – the scenes slow down so that violence punctuates the human bonds that develop. There is an interesting inversion of the pious labor of Aeneas carrying his father on his back in the journey when Josey carries his surrogate son, the nearsighted gunslinger Jamie, who is wounded and will ultimately die. His statement to Jamie that he is not going to carry him across kingdom-come comes at a moment when it is clear that Josey would do precisely that. In mourning for Jamie, Josey laments, “The boy was brought up in . . . a time of blood and dying,” hoping he will get a better burial by the Union soldiers. When Little Moonlight is left behind as Josey and Watie escape a violent encounter in a town, Josey mentions he kind of liked her, then adds, “Whenever I get to liking someone, they ain’t around long.” She rejoins them, bringing with her new supplies. Even the dog gets into the act, growling as a bounty hunter approaches Rose’s saloon. In the meeting between Josey and Ten Bears, we see an expression of the shared memory of loss that joins them. Neither Josey nor Ten Bears have any place else left where they can go, both dispossessed of the land they once held. As Josey says to Ten Bears: “Dyin’ ain’t so hard for men like you and me. It’s livin’ that’s hard, when all you’ve ever cared about’s been butchered and raped.” And in the defense of the homestead, as Terrill thinks he has Josey alone, the guns point from the windows of the home, and with Watie’s statement, “Not quite alone,” the group joins in the fight to survive. Slotkin is correct when he notes: “In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who . . . tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness – the rogues, adventurers, and landboomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness.”102 Slotkin reads this violence as regenerative, as restoring something much more “purified.”103 102 103

Slotkin, Regeneration, 4. See the classic discussion of the frontier in the American imagination by F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996). R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 14. Also, Slotkin, Gunfighter, 14: In the “regression” to a more primitive, violent state, the hero emerges with a “new consciousness through which he will transform the world.”

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A notion of purity overstates the deep ambivalence that arises in these encounters with wildness, though. Something more is forged in the violence and hardships of the journey; namely, as we see with Virgil, an ethos of labor by which people in their fallen state are able both to continue the journey and, ultimately, to carve a homestead out of nature. This response to the environment is gendered. As Gilmore argues: “Manhood ideologies are adaptations to social environments, not simply autonomous mental projections or psychic fantasies writ large. The harsher the environment and the scarcer the resources, the more manhood is stressed as inspiration and goal.”104 The “real” man, Gilmore continues, is expected to tame nature in order to recreate and bolster the basic kinship units of their society; that is, to reinvent and perpetuate the social order by will, to create something of value from nothing. Manhood is a kind of male procreation; its heroic quality lies in its self-direction and discipline, its absolute self-reliance – in a word, its agential autonomy.105

I would modify, if only slightly, the characterization of autonomy, if by that we mean something like self-sufficient independence. Watie’s declaration as Terrill approaches is the culmination of how Josey challenges the romanticized, autonomous hero. Josey is debilitated by the loss of his family. He depends on Jamie to save his life. He repeats, but does not affirm, Jamie’s invocations that we “whooped” them. He finds himself drawn back to Laura Lee. And regardless of Josey’s initial aim, he not only takes on stragglers but also becomes invested in their collective survival. Josey’s response to a bodily violation begins as an assertion of autonomy; it culminates in his role in reinventing a social order. It is not by accident that Josey is a farmer (the archetype of both the Roman and American citizen). And he instills in others self-discipline and patience that allows them to avoid massacre. When they finally arrive at the promised Eden, now broken down and overrun by nature, he joins in the scenes of menial work – plowing, pounding in fence posts, repairing buildings – by which Josey’s band crafts a future. I think it is this transformation that largely explains how the social question that concerns Arendt (a notion that politics must answer to human misery) is moderated in the American imagination. Crèvecoeur speaks to this sublimation of want to labor when he describes Americans as initially a people of “sore affliction or pinching penury” who are regenerated by the prospect of 104 105

D. D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 224. Gilmore, Manhood, 223.

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labor’s reward. They are “the people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory” who are “all animated with the spirit of an industry” and who through hard labor can “change, in a few years, that hithertobarbarous country into a fine, fertile, well-regulated, district.”106 Labor takes on a transcendent quality: not just a necessity (which is how Arendt understands it) but as an activity that is sensual, immediate, and purposeful. Tompkins is absolutely correct in noting, In short, hard work is transformed here from the necessity one wants to escape into the most desirable of human endeavors: action that totally saturates the present moment, totally absorbs the body and mind, and directs one’s life to the service of an unquestioned goal. What the reader and the hero feel at the end of the episode is a sense of hard-won achievement.107

In his Letters from the West (1828), Hall makes a similar observation: “In repelling the hostile incursions which threatened to destroy their infant settlements, they acquired confidence in their courage, and many of their youth imbibed a military spirit, which rendered their former avocations insipid.”108 Josey learns to shoot. So, in fact, does the entire group as it holds off the attack of the regulators. Just as there is a dual conception of violent wildness – of nature and of people – so the possibility of community rests not simply on conquest but also on a notion of agreement. It is by way of agreement that the boundaries of inside and outside, civilized (or more accurately, civility) and uncivilized are most clearly articulated. Rife with division, the Plymouth settlers form the Mayflower Compact to create the rules of self-governance. Winthrop defines the Puritan community by way of a covenant spoken on the Lady Arbella. The Declaration of Independence emerges as a signed promise to each other. And when Aeneas says that Turnus should have settled their conflict in person, his words could as easily be Josey’s. Josey goes by himself to meet Ten Bears, both of whom bring with them a radical distrust of promises (appearing in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Josey Wales signals a much greater distrust of government than the Aeneid). Josey distinguishes between the empty compacts made by governments (as does Watie earlier) and the promise of an individual with integrity. As Josey states: “Governments don’t live together; people live together. With governments you don’t always get a fair word or a fair fight. Well, I’ve come here to give you either one, or get either one from you.” The choice is 106

Crèvecoeur, Letters, 47, 49, 57.

107

Tompkins, West, 12.

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108

Hall, Letters, 240.

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between “words of life” and “words of death,” the corollary to the peace and violence that structures the Aeneid. Ten Bears responds: These things you say we will have, we already have. josey wales: That’s true. I ain’t promising you nothin’ extra. I’m just giving you life and you’re giving me life. And I’m saying that men can live together without butchering one another. ten bears: It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carry the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life . . . or death. It shall be life.

This is not the carefully cultivated image of the deliberative assembly of colonists, crowded around a desk, forming institutions. The founding is outdoors, necessitated by the landscape they inhabit, in which what is real is the presence of other bodies. The agreement is sealed between the two of them in the blood they share in clasping hands.109 It is, interestingly, a sense of plain speaking and personal trust that Aeneas sees lacking in Turnus and is the message he brings to King Evander. There is a striking replay of the Turnus scene toward the end of Josey Wales. Josey chases a wounded Terrill by his homestead. When he catches up with him, Terrill is now standing. Josey advances toward him, firing the pistols he knows are empty as Terrill backs up. Josey glances down at Terrill’s belt, which holds the sword used to slash his face, his mind flashing back to the violence that opens the movie. Terrill grabs for his sword, which Josey then uses to kill him. Terrill attempts to do what Turnus would have done if given a chance; namely, to continue the violence regardless of agreement. But Josey’s response is motivated less by any calculation and more by the burden of too much memory and a desire in the accumulated rage to extinguish those memories. There is an interesting and unexplained look on Josey’s face when the sword goes through Terrill, as though jolted in that moment into a sudden awareness of a different type of future. Earlier in the movie as Josey is leaving to meet Ten Bears (and Watie says to the others that he will not be coming back), Laura Lee runs out of the house, saying to Josey, “Grandma says it’s our home. It is all of ours,” and then asks: “Why don’t you stay with us? Be our 109

There is an interesting discussion of counterfeit and genuine speech in D. L. McNaron, “From Dollars to Iron: The Currency of Clint Eastwood’s Westerns,” in J. L. McMahon and B. S. Csaki (eds.), The Philosophy of the Western (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 160–61.

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partner.” Referring to the haunting specter of the bounty hunters and regulators, she adds: “They won’t miss you. Maybe they’ll forget you.” But there is no forgetting, at least not yet. The memories of his violent loss flood back at that moment of stabbing Terrill, leaving Josey isolated once again. The violence is not redemptive; it is not liberating; nor is it any more heroic than is Aeneas’ act. Like in the Aeneid, the violence registers as a moment of dissonance that accompanies the founding: the promise of a new identity that is inextricably linked to a memory of dislocation and loss. But the execution of Terrill sets the stage for a different understanding of this past in his encounter with Fletcher. At the end of the movie, Josey enters the Lost Lady Saloon, where Texas Rangers are asking about Josey. One of the men in the bar states that he saw Josey killed by five men in Mexico. Fletcher – who originally enlisted Josey to “set things right” by going after the Union soldiers, then (paid by Union troops) tries to convince Josey to surrender with the other men (which leads to the mass execution of the other Southern soldiers), and then (reluctantly) joins the posse going after Josey – emerges from the shadows and addresses Josey indirectly as “Mr. Wilson,” the name his friends called him to protect his identity. Fletcher says he does not believe that “no five pistoleros could kill Josey Wales.” He thinks he is still alive and will go down to Mexico to look for him. “And then?” asks Josey. Fletcher says he will give him the first move. “I owe him that,” he says, and then adds, noticing the blood dripping onto Josey’s boot, that he will “try to tell him the war is over.” Josey pauses and responds, “I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damn war.” The issue is not forgiveness or clementia (which Arendt seems to suggest in her reading of the Aeneid); it is who can be trusted. The killing of Terrill signals the end to Josey’s war, making possible an implicit agreement with Fletcher, once again made face-toface, to leave behind the past even though it remains with both of them. But it also makes possible Josey’s return to “our home,” and it is likely (though left ambiguous in the final scene) that he does.110 The founding experience reshapes the person. Crèvecoeur asks about the character of this “new man,”111 a phrase that interestingly parallels the rise of the novus homo in the Roman Republic: those who, like Cicero and Sallust, emerge from the periphery of class and region, shedding aspects of their history to become members of the Roman elite. Not surprisingly, the 110

111

See R. Gentry, “Director Clint Eastwood: Attention to Detail and Involvement for the Audience,” in R. E. Kapsis and K. Coblentz (eds.), Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 45–46. Crèvecoeur, Letters, 51.

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American ideal is more egalitarian but relies similarly on new histories that are dislocated from, but never completely erase, the old. The new man and new history are not cleansed of the old but are shaped by and share the memories of dislocation and loss. We end with what Crèvecoeur describes as the “strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country,” of those who are “melted into a new race of men.”112 So, too, in his Letters from the West, Hall describes his own reason to journey west to encounter “a people, coming from various nations, and differing in language, politics, and religion, sitting down quietly together, erecting states, forming constitutions, and enacting laws.”113 Josey’s waiting home is not an Eden but a homestead of Strangers who bear common memories of loss. Nor is it assured of any more permanence than any human artifice encountered on the journey. The founding, forged by labor amid wildness, is haunted continually by the threat of its own annihilation.

Exceptionalism I suggested earlier that notions of destiny overlay, but do not replace, the experience of wandering. In saying this, I postponed a discussion of exceptionalism, which is often seen as growing out of a community’s privileged relationship to providence. In the meantime, squaring the founding myth with some larger providential design has become more complicated, even as those strands wend their way through both histories. A notion of design does not fit the different iterations of the founding narratives we have seen. The wanderers are not destined as a people since there is nothing that defines a people before the journey nor is there anything that excludes potentially anyone from being included. The journey is not to a destined land since the land, like the people, is both undefined and unbounded. Moreover, the foundings are defined more by an impending sense of their own dissolution than confidence in being chosen. That is, any sense of exceptionalism cannot be located in the terror, the sense of loss, the humiliation, or the drudgery that defines the narrative experiences of founding. Rome and America are not Israel. We can better locate the source of this exceptionalism in a particular relationship of the founding to history rather than to providence. More specifically, 112 113

Crèvecoeur, Letters, 51–52. Hall, Letters, 8; also Hall, Letters, 9: “the refuge of thousands, who have fled from poverty, from tyranny, and from fanaticism.”

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exceptionalism emerges from the founding experience of wanderers dislocated from past and place. Since there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, or even where these communities are located, there is no limit in time or space to who is included or how far the community can extend.114 That is why Rome could imagine itself as encompassing all the land under the stars; there was nothing in the founding imagination limiting expansion. Virgil puts in the mouth of Jupiter that Rome will have “no boundaries of time or space” (1.278); the whole world will be transformed to be governed at Rome’s feet (7.100–1; also 7.258; Cic. Sest. 67, on Pompey). Stated slightly differently, it is precisely the absence of history that allows for a new history, one that underlies Rome’s exceptionalism. In his prophecy of Rome’s future, Anchises states, Others, I believe, will beat out bronze that seems to breathe and chisel living faces out of marble. They’ll excel in pleading lawsuits, and they’ll trace the heavens’ paths and chart the rising stars. You, Roman, remember your own arts: to rule the world with law, impose your ways on peace, grant the conquered clemency, and crush the proud in war. (6.847–53)

Evoked in this statement is a sense shared by both Rome and America of a break with the intellectual traditions of Greece (for the Romans) and Europe (for the Americans). Crèvecoeur makes the telling comment that in the American dictionary one will find few words that denote nobility.115 There is, instead, an emphasis on the doer: the farmer and the statesmen, in particular, who are all defined by labor. One hears these resonances of exceptionalism for much the same reason in the American embrace of manifest destiny. In one of its earliest articulations, John O’Sullivan writes that “our national birth was the beginning of a new history” precisely because its people have both “derived their origin from many other nations” and yet have “little connection with the past history” of any other nation.116 The nation inaugurates “a new heaven and new earth” because it is unbounded by “space and time.”117 It is the “formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates 114 115 116 117

See also A. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 244–316, on Roman exceptionalism. Crèvecoeur, Letters, 47. J. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” The United States Democratic Review 6 (1839): 426. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” 429, 427.

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us from the past and connects us with the future only,” that, like for Rome, defines America’s exceptionalism and destiny. Gore Vidal once referred to America as the United States of Amnesia.118 Although the phrase has aspects of truth, it does not quite capture the tension I am exploring here. The United States, like Rome, struggles with the place of memory, not just by selectively forgetting and remembering (every culture does that), but by seeing a new history as made possible by a rupture from the old. It is a particular type of memory of the past, one constructed around notions of wandering that are seen as forging a particular type of citizen. On the one hand, these founding ideals are powerful in shaping how the communities can be imagined as thriving by the continual incorporation and assimilation of people. On the other hand, there is palpable anxiety about identity that arises from this founding ideal: If everyone can be Us, then who are We? In the next chapter, I take up this question, exploring how memory – and, in particular, the problem of too much memory – surfaces in a larger cultural discourse about the boundaries of identity. 118

G. Vidal, Imperial American: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 7.

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chapter 2

Imagining Purity The Corrosive Stranger and the Construction of a Genealogy

Don’t command the Latins on their native soil to change their name to Teucrians, becoming Trojans, or to change their clothes and speech.

(Virg. Aen. 12.823–25)

Rome and the United States continually reenact their own founding stories, blurring boundaries of genealogy and geography and then having to re-sort and differentiate who is and who is not really one of them. All communities have to do this just by the nature of settlement, migration, expansion, and interaction. But what makes the Roman and American cases so interesting is that their identities are, paradoxically, premised on this permeability: on the incorporation of new groups both as its space expands and as new groups enter. As the author (thought to be Quintus Cicero) of the Handbook on Electioneering reminds Cicero about what to think about as he approaches the Forum in his quest for a consulship, “‘Roma est,’ civitas ex nationum conventu constituta” ([Q. Cicero] Comm. pet. 54; This is Rome, a civitas constituted out of a joining of nationes). Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. echoes that sentiment, proclaiming Americans to be “the Romans of the modern world – the great assimilating people.”1 But this permeability also gives rise to anxieties about what it means to be Roman or American, even if (or maybe especially because) both notions are ill-defined. Neither culture is unitary or static. There might be, as Ralph Haeussler notes, “shared rules of conduct, a language of status symbols and exempla for élite lifestyle and élite activities.”2 But even those identities are continually negotiated or challenged by social actors in the face of different material conditions, laws, opportunities, 1 2

O. W. Holmes, “The Autocrat at the Break-Fast Table,” The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 13 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1891), 1.19. R. Haeussler, Becoming Roman? Diverging Identities and Experiences in Ancient Northwest Italy (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013), 25. Also R. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire (London: Routledge, 2005), 46.

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aspirations, and the continual infusion of new social groups with their own cultural norms, especially as both Rome and the United States become increasingly globalized. The problem is this: If everyone can potentially be Us, then who are We? Answering this is tied to a corollary question: Who are They? But the question itself betrays a deeper dissonance that lies at the core of what it means to imagine oneself as a We that is comprised entirely of Theys. There has been increasing scholarly focus on the permeability of identities, showing how hegemonic cultures adopt, adapt, and are influenced by other identities.3 But there has been less attention paid to the complex portrait of the Other by these hegemonic discourses. Approaches often start with a defined Other and then show how a Roman or American identity either is organized as a binary opposition to the Other4 or appropriates aspects of the Other into its own identity.5 For example, Gruen suggests that in Roman texts can be seen a process of construction of the Other: “not how they distinguished themselves from others but how they transformed or reimagined them for their own purposes. The ‘Other’ takes on quite a different shape. This is not rejection, denigration, or 3

4

5

On challenges to the Romanization paradigm, see D. J. Mattingly and R. B. Hitchner, “Roman Africa: An Archaeological Review,” Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): 165–213; P. van Dommelen, “Colonial Constructs: Colonialism and Archaeology in the Mediterranean,” World Archaeology 28 (1997): 305–23; G. Woolf, “Beyond Romans and Natives,” World Archaeology 28 (1997); R. Laurence and J. Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1998); Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture; D. J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); A. Johnston, The Sons of Remus: Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Haeussler, Becoming. My argument is influenced by these approaches, especially in their view of the social actor as an agent in negotiating identities. I should note that I am exploring one type of interaction; namely, how the Stranger is constructed as a mechanism of identity formation. For example, Quint. Epic, 23–24, argues that “otherness” is defined “through a series of binary oppositions” that “constitute a single ideological program.” Influenced by postcolonial studies, others have employed the dualities of nativism/dominant power and resistance/acceptance that rest on a view of a confrontation of two cultures that are unified and static systems: e.g., M. Bénabou, La résistance africaine à la romanisation (Paris: Maspero, 1976); A. Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, trans. R. Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). See important discussions of the construction of the Other in E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and the examples of the Roman Other in J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); A. Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 192–243; and I. Ferris, Enemies of Rome: Barbarians through Roman Eyes (New York: The History Press, 2013). For example, Reed, Gaze; Gruen, Rethinking; P. J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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distancing – but rather appropriation. It represents a more circuitous and a more creative mode of fashioning a collective self-consciousness.”6 Gruen does a better job in breaking down these binaries than he does in identifying the persistence of the Other, though. The question I am asking is how the Other plays a role in collective self-consciousness, not in being appropriated but in being created. The Other, or what I will refer to as the Stranger, exists within the society, is actually part of or potentially part of that society, and is a fluid category concerning who is defined as a Stranger and why. I explore how the Stranger is constructed as a counternarrative by which individuals shape their own identities and notions of belonging as cultural members and social actors.7 Identity is key here. Identity has both a temporal and spatial dimension. When Quintus Cicero talks about Rome as a joining of nationes, he is referring to “communities of people of the same descent, who are integrated geographically in the form of settlements or neighborhoods, and culturally by their common language, customs and traditions.”8 Each natio consists of people who are connected to each other both by their location in a place and their genealogy in time. Unlike, say, Athens or Israel or contemporary Germany or Japan where membership is defined by descent, or even France where membership is defined by a common and carefully regulated language, for Rome and the United States there are no clear temporal or spatial criteria of inclusion.9 In an immigrant community, there are only Theys who bring with them their own identities. The question of belonging – of what makes a We – is commonly answered by way of formal categories of membership. Individuals are seen as a We as they are integrated as juridical beings with a particular legal status into a civitas or state. That is, a national identity is conferred by state membership, a resolution attributed to the rise of the modern nationstate, but also one that shares features with Rome.10 Acquiring this status parallels the founding journey, requiring that individuals shed “their 6 7

8

9 10

Gruen, Rethinking, 4; also Reed, Gaze. Helpful here is D. Howes, “Introduction: Commodities and Cultural Borders,” in Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (London: Routledge, 1996), 6, who views cultures as intersections and practices. J. Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity,” in B. van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage, 1994), 22. On Roman conceptions of ethnicity, see R. Laurence, “Territory, Ethnonyms, and Geography: The Construction of Identity in Roman Italy,” in Laurence and Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, 95–110. On German and French notions of citizenship, see R. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). On the evolution of citizenship in Rome, see A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 41–42. Laurence, “Territory,” 103, suggests that what it meant to be Roman

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polluted primordial identities” and take on a particular civic identity, “learning how to embody and express those qualities” of the core group (however defined).11 But Rome provides a valuable lens for identifying the incompleteness of citizenship in resolving the question of who constitutes a We. Formal citizenship effaces the body, offering an abstracted notion of commonality and membership that replaces other identities. Even though the founding narratives of Rome and America imagine a new history that rests on a dislocation from the old, that newness, as we saw in the previous chapter, has a bodily dimension. The body is not effaced but altered, carrying the memory of dislocation and displaying particular dispositions. Unresolved is how this body that is dislocated from both time and space situates itself in time and space. In the Roman and American cases, juridical citizenship only heightens the irresolution because anyone can potentially be Us, leaving unanswered the question “Who are We?” In this chapter, I explore elite efforts to construct the boundaries of belonging by creating a particular genealogy, a genealogy of purity, that is set against a particular Stranger, the corrosive Stranger. The threat posed by the corrosive Stranger arises from the persistence of memory; specifically, an ascribed continuation of one’s connection to a natio that is seen as challenging the possibility of a new history. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity but is used to construct an imagined purity that both gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership.12 In this section, I look at two critical moments in the construction of a national identity: the consolidation of Roman control

11

12

was to have the status of citizenship. On connections between Roman conceptions and modern, liberal notions of citizenship, see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times,” in R. Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 34–36, 43; B. Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). J. C. Alexander, “Theorizing the ‘Modes of Incorporation’: Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation,” Sociological Theory 19 (2001): 243–44. Note the claim in President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, The 1776 Report (Jan. 2021), 4, in a report written in response to the 1619 Project: “The American founders understood that, for republicanism to function and endure, a republican people must share a large measure of commonality in manners, customs, language, and dedication to the common good.” I am not seeking to answer the question of whether there is such a thing as a Roman or American identity, a question that is being asked with increasing frequency in scholarship precisely because of the complex ways in which global cultures are seen as intersecting. Note the opening sentence of M. Grahame, “Roman Identity: The Spatial Layout of Pompeian Houses and the Problem of Ethnicity,” in Laurence and Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, 156: “In this chapter I wish to ask whether there was such a thing as a Roman cultural identity?”

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over Italy and the decades following the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. In both cases, it is not anxiety about state power; rather, it is a concern with what a mix of people with their own histories share. I explore Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans, and Noah Webster for the United States in their attempt to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger.

The Stranger I draw on the insights of phenomenology, and in particular the work of Alfred Schütz, who has developed most fully the social aspects of the experience of the Other, to provide some conceptual backdrop to this question of identity and belonging. The question of collective selfconsciousness, to recall Gruen, is what Schütz refers to as a “Werelationship” in which we “imaginatively project” experiences of a shared group as constituted in the same way as our own.13 What this means is that the actor assumes that the response of others in the We-group to a situation will be like mine because we share “principles of comprehension.”14 Those principles are reinforced culturally by the inculcation of particular habits, attitudes, and beliefs, as well as by direct interactions in which we expect those principles to be upheld in the actions of others. Founding stories become part of that cultural matrix, communicating the experiences of predecessors that impact who we are in the present (and to which we are to conform).15 They appear to us as abstractions rather than as real people with whom we interact, as ideals or principles by which we imagine a continuity of past and present. I focus on one aspect of the Other, the appearance of the Stranger, since this notion goes to the heart of the assimilating identities of both Romans and Americans. The Stranger is a person who is like a wanderer (like the Trojans or an immigrant) but who is now in a group to which he or she does not belong from the beginning.16 The relationship to the Stranger entails a different orientation, one that Schütz refers to as a “They-orientation.”17 One’s knowledge of a “they” has no “intrinsic reference” to persons nor to the matrix of 13 15 16

17

Schütz, Phenomenology, 115. 14 Schütz, Phenomenology, 204. Schütz, Phenomenology, 209–10. G. Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1908), 685; also A. Schütz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology 49 (1944): 499–507. Schütz, Phenomenology, 202.

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their experiences. Rather, one’s understanding of them is “built up out of a synthesis of my own interpretations of his experiences” that makes the character as a type of person who is “basically homogeneous and repeatable.”18 The Other becomes “anonymized” from any particular context, understood by general characteristics derived from indirect experience (experiences we have heard about) or by their functions.19 This is less a problem if the person is simply somewhere else, removed from any social interaction. The problem that the Stranger poses for the “We-group,” who is contained within spatial boundaries of the We and temporally will be there tomorrow, is the introduction of doubt that they will respond with the same interpretive scheme.20 The appearance of a Stranger who does not share the background assumptions of a culture places into question “everything that seems to be unquestionable.”21 That is, they pose a threat to the background assumptions – what are seen as natural – by which individuals understand themselves, their relationship to others, and their relationship to their past. They destabilize both the spatial and temporal dimension of community life. My interest is to show how characterizations of these groups arise from questions of memory and intersect with Rome and America’s continuing effort to define who they are. They are assertions of self-definition that arise in a context in which the boundaries of identity are continually blurred. I will look first at how the Stranger arises as a threat to the temporal aspects of identity for both Rome and the United States, and then in the next chapter turn to its spatial aspects.

Claiming a Past The founding myths of both Rome and the United States are premised on a dislocation from the past. Where earlier forms of community membership are seen as organized around preexistent identities that lend the

18 20 21

Schütz, Phenomenology, 184. 19 Schütz, Phenomenology, 184–85. Schütz, Phenomenology, 202. Schütz, “Stranger,” 502. Interesting here is H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, trans. N. Schott, H. Delitz and R. Seyfert (eds.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018, orig. 1931), who sees “the opposition of familiarity and foreignness” (53) as arising out of unfathomability: the tension between recognizing human powerfulness (as the distinctly human recognition of having a body and the almost incomprehensible indeterminateness in ways of giving it an identity) and powerlessness (as a recognition of our positionality within an already constituted realm of culture and belonging). The fear of the Stranger arises from the uncanniness of the Other as both familiar (in that We recognize a similar constituting power in the Other) and unsettling (in that it potentially exposes the indeterminateness of what We have constituted as familiar). We will see how the Stranger is not separate from, but is continually linked with, the constituting of a We. My thanks to Isaac Catt for drawing Plessner to my attention.

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community a perceived purity and unity, such as ethnicity, religion, place, or language, in both the Roman and American cases individuals are integrated as juridical beings with a particular legal status under a state organization. For Cicero (106–43 bce), and the same is true of an American ideal, there are no people who cannot potentially become citizens. Cicero notes that one can only be a citizen of one state because different states have different legal systems (Balb. 30–31). But state identities are not simply issues of legal standing. As Cicero notes in De legibus, one might have two patrias, or fatherlands, one by citizenship and the other by birth. Cicero is writing as much from observation as personal experience, since he was born in Arpinum in the Volscian highlands. Arpinum was an area originally captured by Rome in 305–303 bce and administered directly by Rome as a praefectura, at first as citizens without the right to vote (civitas sine suffragio) and then with full citizenship after 188 bce until incorporated as a municipium with their own local administration under Roman law in 90 bce. These two patrias raise the possibility of two different sources of affection (caritas) (Cic. Leg. 2.5), one that is formal and legal, the other that is genealogical. In one, one’s connection to the state is abstract, comprised of particular rights and protections that derive from formal citizenship. In the other, affection is oriented by one’s relationship to time: a history that confers identity. The issues of two homelands and two sources of affection are complicated by the founding narratives. Both Rome and the United States face questions of who they are as a community that is comprised of different histories and attachments, as well as intertwined with histories and cultures that precede theirs: Greece for the Romans and England in the early emergence of the United States.22 At stake is how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity but is used to construct an imagined purity that both gives a community a genealogy that 22

As G. S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41, notes, “If they were to be a single national people with a national character, Americans would have to invent themselves, and in some sense the whole of American history has been the story of that invention.” Many Americans “came to believe that they had to fight another war with Great Britain in order to reaffirm their national independence and establish their elusive identity,” which is what happens in the War of 1812.

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distinguishes it from other communities and posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look first at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans, and then by Noah Webster for the United States, to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. The Corrosive Stranger and the Construction of a Roman Genealogy In the third and second centuries bce, Rome swallowed the Hellenistic world in successive gulps. Flooding into their system were centuries of literature, philosophy, rhetorical theory, and art, as well as the carriers of those cultural memories: Greek prisoners and freedmen who traveled with the elite, along with those who were part of Roman everyday life, serving as teachers, doctors, artists, masons, and slaves.23 The concern with the influx of different identities goes beyond the Greeks. The Italian allies, who had been instrumental in the defeat of Hannibal and later the conquest of Macedonia, had their own traditions. And where Rome largely controlled the rules of incorporation before, granting citizenship to individuals or communities based on their service to the state, the Social War (91–88 bce) and its aftermath brought all that crashing down with the extension of citizenship to the Italians and later to the Gauls. Whatever was the relationship of these groups with the Romans before, their presence within the empire as participants (rather than outside it as enemies or allies) changed the stakes.24 The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls were no longer a distant Other, but a present Stranger who brought with them their different habits, dispositions, and styles of dress, as well as their own identities and histories. The externus becomes the civis, conquered and formally Roman, but dangerous because he does not necessarily share the same background or commitments. One hears this concern when P. Scipio Africanus responds to the popular outcry over his defense of the assassination of Tiberius Gracchus (whose sister is Scipio’s wife) in 133 bce: “Let people to whom Italy is a stepmother [quibus Italia noverca est] hold their tongues.” Then in response to the shouts, he adds, “You won’t make me 23 24

See N. Rudd, Themes in Roman Satire (London: Duckworth, 1986), 162–63; D. Noy, Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers (London: Duckworth, 2000), 223–25. On the mingling of colloquial Greek and Latin, see A. Meillet, Esquisse d’une histoire de la langue latine (Paris: Hachette, 1938), 108–9; L. R. Palmer, The Latin Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 82–84; R. MacMullen, “Hellenizing the Romans (2nd Century B.C.),” Historia 40 (1991): 419–38.

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afraid of those I brought in chains now that they are loose” (Val. Max. 6.2.3). New groups unsettle relations: challenging conventions, shifting power, increasing competition for office, and diluting the popular voice.25 The Roman reaction to the influx of these groups has been interpreted by scholars as driven largely by elite assertions of power and authority; as attempts “to culturally subjugate their ‘others’ and to redefine themselves as an aristocracy ruling over an ever-expanding world.”26 Power is certainly in play. But the singular focus on power, which has become the language of choice by which scholars analyze culture, reduces human motivation and experience to a hegemonic impulse. I complement these approaches by suggesting that the construction of the Stranger is not just directed outward by a desire to exercise power over others, but also is directed inward by questions of cultural ownership and belonging. The expansion of the Roman state (as a form of military and political control and administration) and the incorporation of new peoples with their own histories required a reconfiguration of nationhood.27 If natio was used, often but not necessarily pejoratively, to refer to communities organized by lineal or ethnic descent, then Rome, as a collection of nationes (to recall [Quintus Cicero]) had to conceive of its collective identity differently. Those terms varied: civitas, populus Romanus, civitas Romana, patria, or even, at times, Italia.28 The range of language indicates some of the struggle to project 25 26

27 28

For example, Fannius in E. Malcovati, Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta liberae rei publicae (Aug. Taurinorum-Mediolani-Patavi: In aedibus I. B. Paraviae, 1967), 142–44. E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose: From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 124. Also M. Chassignet, “Caton et l’impérialisme romain au IIe siècle av. J.-C. d’après les ‘Origines’,” Latomus 46 (1987): 285–300; Gruen, Culture, 64–83; T. N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 34–68; B. A. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 22–24; and J. Rüpke, “Räume literarischer Kommunikation in der Formierungsphase römischer Literatur,” in M. Braun, A. Haltenhoff, and F.-H. Mutschler (eds.), Moribus antiquis res stat Romana: römische Werte und römische Literatur im 3. und 2. Jh. v. Chr. (Munich: Saur, 2000), 31–52. See F. Pina Polo, “Die nützliche Erinnerung: Geschichtsschreibung, ‘mos maiorum’ und die römische Identität,” Historia 53 (2004): 154–57. See the helpful discussion in F. W. Walbank, “Nationality as a Factor in Roman History,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972): 145–68. Cicero seems to contrast other nationes with the Roman civitas: “All nations can endure slavery, while our community cannot, and for no other reason than because those others shun toil and pain and are ready to put up with anything in order to avoid those hardships, whereas we have been thoroughly schooled by our ancestors to make dignity and valor our touchstones in every decision and act” (Phil. 10.10; Omnes nationes servitutem ferre possunt, nostra civitas non potest, nec ullam aliam ob causam nisi quod illae laborem doloremque fugiunt, quibus ut careant omnia perpeti possunt, nos ita a maioribus instituti atque imbuti sumus ut omnia consilia atque facta ad dignitatem et ad virtutem referremus). Elsewhere, in his discussion of the different levels of social bonds, he sees a civitas as closer than the bonds of a gen, natio, or lingua

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a city onto an empire. One can get a sense of this difficulty of definition when Cicero talks about the “blood connection” (sanguis conjunctus), an allusion to something more like a natio, that exists “between all Roman citizens” (II Ver. 5.172, trans. modified). Whatever the terms, Rome’s global identity depended on its ability to define what was its own; to instill a particular memory of the past that organized and oriented a Roman multiethnic identity. The Romans sought to locate themselves in time. The invocation of the corrosive Stranger becomes a mechanism by which a Roman genealogy could be asserted. Perhaps most famous is Cato the Elder’s (234–149 bce) claim, however hyperbolic, that “Rome would lose her empire when she had become infected [anaplêsthentes] with Greek letters” (Plut. Cato Mai. 23.2–3). Cicero speaks to the diffuse cultural threat in a letter to Papirius Paetus in 46 bce, when he contrasts “our native brand” of pleasantries with “its present decline; for forgotten as it had already become by Latium after the influx of the foreign element into our city, it is now with the accession of the trousered tribes from over the Alps [the more Romanized Gallia Norbenensis] so overwhelmed that no trace of the old gay charm is any more to be found” (Fam. 196.2 Bailey, trans. modified).29 Sallust uses sentina to compare foreigners to bilgewater (Cat. 37). Appian uses pammigês to characterize the mixing of plebeian with foreign blood. Referring to the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination when the conspirators looked to gain support from the people, Appian notes that they were appealing to incompatible dispositions of the people: that they loved liberty and that they could be bribed. Appian explains the reason for the latter group being much easier to find: “The plebeians are now much mixed with foreign blood, freedmen have equal rights of citizenship with them, and slaves are dressed in the same fashion as their masters. Except in the case of the senatorial rank the same costume is common to slaves and to free citizens” (B Civ. 2.120).30 Moreover, “The multitude, too, of discharged soldiers who

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(Offic. 1.53). He refers to the Greek natio (De or. 2.18). In De finibus he divides the world into Graecia, Italia, and barbaria (Fin. 2.49). He also provides a list of different nationes of Italy (as well as non-Italian nationes) (Rep. 3.7). Quintilian seems to apply natio to Rome as well as differentiate natio from patria: “Nationality, since peoples have their own characters, and the same action is not equally probable in a barbarian, a Roman, and a Greek; Country, because, in the same way, the laws, institutions, and opinions of societies differ” (Inst. 5.10.24–25; natio, nam et gentibus proprii mores sunt nec idem in barbaro, Romano, Graeco probabile est; patria, quia similiter etiam civitatium leges instituta opiniones habent differentiam). Translation from Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. D. A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Translation modified from Cicero, Letters to Friends, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Translations are from Appian, Roman History, trans. B. McGing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

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were no longer dispersed one by one to their native places” are easy to be purchased as mercenaries (App. B Civ. 2.120). For Appian, there was not only a loss of a shared commitment to the res publica because of this hodgepodge of different influences, but also the inability to distinguish the true Roman, however defined, from the Stranger. The memory of servitude underlies the limits Augustus would place on grants of citizenship and manumission “to keep the people uncorrupted by any taint of foreign or servile blood” (Suet. Aug. 40.3, trans. modified; ab omni colluvione peregrini ac servilis sanguinis incorruptum servare populum).31 In truth, there is no pure Roman blood. There are no original Romans. Rome’s origins can always be traced not just to somewhere else – Troy, Greece, Italy, etc. – but to anywhere else. Each of these people had their histories. And of all the legends and histories that trace the genealogies of the people of Rome, there is nothing that is originally Roman. All communities are at some level imaginary in defining what is their own. But Rome’s own founding mythology, as it imagines a community constituted entirely of Strangers, invariably cedes its cultural title to Strangers. I argue that contained within invocations of the corrosive Stranger is an assertion of a genealogy – a reference to some earlier, imagined version of the community – to which the individual as Roman can claim to be heir. An early and important figure in these assertions of a genealogy is Cato the Elder, whose name has become synonymous with the parochial, rugged, and self-denying image of the Roman. Cato attracts our attention, at least in part because of his acerbic denunciations of Roman luxury and his equally uncompromising views toward Greek and foreign elements. Interpretations of Cato have divided between those who see him as irrationally anti-Hellenic and revisionist approaches that reject his anti-Hellenism and see him, instead, as pro-Roman.32 In fact, these interpretations emanate from the either/or binary choices that underlie conceptions of the Other. The inadequacy of the formulation becomes immediately apparent: An anti-Hellenic Cato is 31

32

Also Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.24, who contrasts the old custom of slaves freed for meritorious conduct or honest labor against new practices of purchasing or obtaining freedom by corrupt means. As Gruen, Rethinking, 210n105, notes, the goal of Augustus’ limits was to slow down the process of manumission, “thereby securing the socialization of ex-slaves,” though Gruen’s concern here is demonstrating that the view of slaves was not racial. Translation based on Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Gruen, Culture, 64–83; E. Jefferson, “Problems and Audience in Cato’s Origines,” in S. T. Roselaar (ed.), Processes of Integration and Identity Formation in the Roman Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 324: pro-Roman rather than anti-Hellenist; A. E. Astin, Cato the Censor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172–81; U. Gotter, “Cato’s Origines: The Historian and His Enemies,” in A. Feldherr (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112: anti-Hellenist.

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inconsistent with his own acquaintance with and use of Greek literature, language, and historiography; a pro-Roman Cato downplays the denunciatory rhetoric that he actually uses when referring to the Greeks. The Greeks, I argue, do not simply function as the antithesis of being Roman – as a static set of characterizations against which Roman hegemony and cultural superiority are either threatened or asserted. There is more of a temporal aspect to the role played by the Greek as corrosive Stranger, not as the Greek is juxtaposed to an already existent culture and identity but as the construction of the Greek as Stranger plays a part in the formation of that identity. The invocation of the corrosive Stranger – a Stranger who threatens some imagined purity – is itself an assertion of a genealogy, some purer past, to which one belongs. What is foregrounded through this lens is less the language of power and more that of familiarity and ownership. Cato is part of a growing interest beginning in the late third century bce in associating Latin with being Roman. The concern with language is not simply hegemonic; a way of displaying power.33 Language conveys history by way of the references that are employed, communicates one’s background by way of particular accents or colloquialisms, and is embodied in mannerisms, thus providing a mechanism of familiarity (e.g., Cic. Brut. 258; De or. 3.42–46). One can hear this connection of language to tradition in Plutarch’s explanation of why Cato uses an interpreter even though he could have addressed the Athenians in Greek (Cato Mai. 12.4; also Mar. 2.2). Though often read as a demonstration of Roman power, Cato seems more to cast himself as an heir of the Roman past: “He could have spoken to them directly, but he always clung to his native ways, and mocked at those who were lost in admiration of anything that was Greek” (Plut. Cato Mai. 12.4–5; also Val. Max. 2.2.2).34 In this same vein, Cato takes aim at historical accounts derived from and dependent on Greek history, which were the only versions of Roman history as a narrative of a people up to that point.35 He mocks the patrician Postumius Albinus, “who wrote a history in Greek, and asked the 33

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For example, J. Farrell, Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1, describes “the power of latinity to establish its sway over non-Latins. Throughout history this power has been linked to the role of Latin as a civilizing force: an instrument for ordering the disorderly, standardizing the multiform, correcting or silencing the inarticulate.” Translations are from Plutarch, Lives, vol. 2, trans. B. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). See E. Dench, From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 69–72. For example, the first Roman national history by Fabius Pictor is written in Greek.

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indulgence of his readers. Cato said they might have shown him indulgence had he undertaken his task in consequence of a compulsory vote of the Amphictyonic Assembly” – a sarcastic reference to the ancient interstate Greek assembly (Plut. Cato Mai. 12.5). The quip is aimed directly at the question of who authorizes the Roman past rather than whether the Greeks are good or bad. In their place, Cato writes the Origines, the first Latin work of historical prose that foregoes the previous patrician accounts of family histories and, instead, sets out “to write the deeds of the Roman people” (populi Romani gesta discribere), like Varro would do in the late 50s in Antiquitates (F1b Cornell = Pomp. GL 5.208).36 As Ernst Badian writes, after Cato, “history that mattered was now written by Romans for Romans.”37 Dionysius Halicarnassus comments that Cato assembled the “ancestries [genealogías] of the cities in Italy” (T11 Cornell = Dio. Hal. 1.11.1; also T10 Cornell = Cic. Rep. 2.2). The history does not exclude connections to the Greeks or other nationes. In fact, as has been noted, Cato’s Origines draws on Greek models of historiography that blend local history and legends.38 What is noteworthy from the fragments we have is a picture of Italy comprised of groups with indeterminant origins. It is a community of wanderers who displace others. Gotter suggests that what emerges through the Origines is a layering of ethnic connections by which a collectivity is imagined.39 Jefferson argues along these same lines that the Origines “de-Romanizes” history, “making it a less problematic source of exempla for any non-Romans who read the work.”40 I would suggest that there is something more paradoxical, and more in line with a founding narrative, that is at stake here. By creating a genealogy of wanderers, Cato gives commonality and familiarity to Rome’s own legacy of conquest. Rome is no longer the Stranger but now shares with these other communities a dislocated past. Anchises comes to Italy (F6d Cornell = Serv. Aen. 3.710–11). Latinus is told of strangers driven from their homeland (F10 Cornell = Pseudo-Aurelius Victor, Origo Gentis Romanae 12.5–13.5). 36

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Cato’s Origines relates events but does not name the leaders (Corn. Nep. Cato 4; Plin. HN 8.11 = T20 Cornell). On the construction of a common history, see C. Letta, “L’ ‘Italia dei mores romani’ nelle Origines di Catone,” Atheneum 64 (1984); Astin, Cato the Censor, 233; U. Gotter, “Die Vergangenheit als Kampfplatz der Gegenwart: Catos (konter)revolutionäre Konstruktion des republikanischen Erinnerungsraums,” in U. Eigler, U. Gotter, N. Luraghi, and U. Walter (eds.), Formen römischer Geschichtsschreibung von den Anfängen bis Livius: Gattungen, Autoren, Kontexte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 124–26; Pina Polo, “Die nützliche”; Sciarrino, Cato, 124; Jefferson, “Problems.” E. Badian, “The Early Historians,” in T. A. Dorey and E. A. Thompson (eds.), Latin Historians (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 10. Gruen, Culture, 59. 39 Gotter, “Cato’s Origines,” 114. 40 Jefferson, “Problems,” 323.

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Aeneas fights against Latinus and Turnus, which is portrayed as a civil war (F6a Cornell = Serv. Aen. 1.267–28). The Arcadians came at one point to an already inhabited territory (F3 Cornell = Lydus, Mag. 1.5), as did the Volscians (F24b Cornell = Osbern, Derivationes 466 Bertini). Aborigines once dwelled in Achaea but migrated before the Trojan War (F49 Cornell = Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.11.1). The Sabines originally came from the village of Testruna, then invaded Reatine territory that was inhabited by aborigines before sending out additional colonies (F30 Cornell = Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.49.1–5). The origins are unknown of the Comum, Bergomum, Forum Licinii, and some neighboring communities of Orumbivian stock (F57 Cornell = Plin. HN 3.123–25). Similarly, it is unknown who occupied Pisa before the Etruscans (F70 Cornell = Serv. Aen. 10.179–80). What emerges from this genealogy is not a common blood but a common ethos. Cato the Elder finds that commonality in the “‘severis’ disciplina” of his Sabine birthplace that he then generalizes as a Roman mos (F51 Cornell = Serv. Aen. 8.637–38).41 Plutarch notes, in validating Cato’s own image of a purer past that was defined by a shared ethos, “The commonwealth had now grown too large to keep its primitive integrity; the sway over many realms and peoples had brought a large admixture of customs, and the adoption of examples set in modes of life of every sort” (Cato Mai. 4.2–3). In decrying Rome’s new ways, Cato plays a critical role in fashioning an image of the “native simplicity” of the Romans in contrast with the mix of foreign elements in a globalized Rome (Plut. Cato Mai. 3.6) – embracing, as the Americans would after the Revolution, the view held by others of them as backwoods rustics.42 It is the image, again like we see in the elevation of the archetypical American citizen, of the small, frugal farmer with whom Cato aligns himself as the class that produces “the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers” (Cato, Agr. pref. 4). Cato’s other invocations of the corrosive Greek are similarly aimed at constructing a notion of belonging by contrasting the anonymized habits and beliefs of the Greeks with the natural and familiar attributes of a Roman. For example, Cato takes aim at the prevalence of Greek teachers in Rome, which adds to the sense that it is Greek history, and not a Roman past, that is 41

42

See W. Blösel, “Die Geschichte des Begriffs mos maiorum von den Anfängen zu Cicero,” in B. Linke and M. Stemmler (eds.), Untersuchungen zu den Formen der Identitätstiftung und Stabilisierung in der römischen Republik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 53–59, on the broadening of mos as a character of the Roman people. See Habinek, Politics, 48–49. For example, the supposed modest hut of Romulus was maintained on the Palatine until the fourth century ce. See Cass. Dio 53.16.5; C. Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32–42.

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being taught. Cato takes over the education of his son from his Greek slave Chilo, who “was a school-teacher, and taught many boys” (Plut. Cato Mai. 20.3–4). Gruen sees this decision as motivated by class, not Greekness.43 I would modify Gruen’s claim, suggesting it is also a question of ownership over Rome’s past. In his teaching, Cato instills in his son the knowledge of how to act like a Roman, as Cato understands it: reading, law, throwing the javelin, fighting in armor, riding horse, boxing, enduring heat, and swimming. Others, too, would juxtapose a purer form of Roman education to the corrosive Stranger. For example, Sallust describes Marius’ “unspoiled nature” (integrum ingenium) because of his Roman rather than Greek training (Iug. 63.3; also 85.12–13, 32: virtus; Cic. De or. 2.76: Greeks lecture on military matters while Romans conquer; Sen. Controv. 1.pr. 9–10: invokes Cato the Elder to scold new habits of luxury). I do not think it is an accident that Plutarch’s account moves to a reference to Cato’s own historiography. “His History of Rome, as he tells us himself, he wrote out with his own hand and in large characters, that his son might have in his own home an aid to acquaintance with his country’s ancient traditions” (Cato Mai. 20.5). The echo of who is doing the educating can be heard again in the famous episode when the Greek embassy of philosophers visits Rome to appeal a case in 155 bce. Characterizing the visiting philosophers as casting an almost magical and erotic spell – the exoticism of the Stranger – Cato the Elder is distressed by how the “other Romans were pleased at this, and glad to see their young men lay hold of Greek culture and consort with such admirable men” (Plut. Cato Mai. 22.3). “We ought,” he says to the senate, “to make up our minds one way or another, and vote on what the embassy proposes, in order that these men may return to their schools and lecture to the sons of Greece, while the youth of Rome give ear to their laws and magistrates, as heretofore” (Plut. Cato Mai. 22.5). Whatever was Cato’s critique of Greek ways, one should not ignore the element of possession in these examples: our (rather than their) laws and magistrates, our history, our traditions, and our education.44 We can also see this assertion of cultural ownership in Cato’s reaction to Greek doctors who had poured into Rome, often engaging in charlatanism to pad their own pocketbooks. It was not only Greek philosophers that he hated, but he was also suspicious of Greeks who practised medicine at Rome. He had heard, it would seem, of 43 44

Gruen, Culture, 67. In 92 bce, there is a renewed concern, echoing Cato’s, about the influence of these rhetoricians on the education of the Roman youth (Suet. Gram. et rhet. 1).

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Hippocrates’ reply when the Great King of Persia consulted him, with the promise of a fee of many talents, that he would never put his skill at the service of Barbarians who were enemies of Greece. He [Cato] said all Greek physicians had taken a similar oath, and urged his son to beware of them all. (Plut. Cato Mai. 23.3–4; also Cato, De medicina fr. 1.6–9 in Plin. HN 29.14; Cic. Flac. 61: Greeks hate Romans)

The Greek doctor becomes now literally the infecting Stranger: The justification of Otherness derives from the Greek view of the Romans as barbarians and enemies. Cato’s rejection of the Greek division of the world into Greeks and barbarians is itself noteworthy: a shift away from viewing themselves and others through a Hellenic lens.45 Often overlooked in recounting this passage, though, is Cato’s elevation of a native form of medicine. “He himself, he said, had written a book of recipes, which he followed in the treatment and regimen of any who were sick in his family” (Plut. Cato Mai. 23.4). Even Cicero, who admits his own admiration for Hellenism, casts the Greek as the Stranger in the effort to assert a Roman cultural familiarity. Reacting to the embrace by Roman intellectuals of Greek culture, Cicero, no foe of things Greek (e.g., Att. 1.15.2: philhellene), decries the “ignorance of our Romans” (Brut. 66) who study Attic oratory without any knowledge “of the same quality in Cato” (Brut. 67) as well as those who “are quite willing to read Latin plays translated word for word from the Greek” (Fin. 1.4) but are ignorant of “ours” (Fin. 1.5, trans. modified).46 That is, the Romans do not know or recognize their own traditions. Cicero is not exempt from this criticism, decrying the inadequacies of both Roman historiography and poetry (Leg. 1.5–6).47 Nonetheless, he wonders (by way of Crassus) why people dislike their “native language” (sermo patrius) (Fin. 1.4; also 1.10: contempt for home products), an emerging association of being Roman with speaking Latin. And he, like Cato before, differentiates between Us and Them: “If Greek writers find Greek readers when presenting the same subjects in a different setting, why should not Romans

45

46

47

See Walbank, “Nationality,” 158–59, who makes two observations: The Romans at one point (Walbank draws on Plautus) were willing to accept “the Greek valuation” of them as barbarians; and the Romans did not divide the world rigidly between Roman and barbarian. Translation based on Cicero, Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939) and Cicero, On Ends, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). M. H. Crawford, “Greek Intellectuals and the Roman Aristocracy in the First Century B.C.,” in C. R. Whittaker and P. Garnsey (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World: The Cambridge University Research Seminar in Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 202.

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be read by Romans?” (Fin. 1.6). Why should We not be familiar with Ourselves? Cicero’s corrosive Stranger is different from Cato the Elder’s, but the role of this Stranger in crafting a Roman genealogy is similar. Cicero starts in the same place as Cato the Elder: with Romulus’ cesspool (Att. 2.1.8). In his defense of the extension of citizenship by Pompey to Balbus, Cicero recollects Rome’s founding mythology of mobility (Balb. 18) and incorporation (Balb. 31). Cicero responds in Pro Sulla to being called a peregrinus (22–23). He holds up Gaius Marius, a foreigner from Cicero’s birthplace, as an exemplar of Romanness (Sest. 37, 50). He includes Latins as among the optimates, a term Cicero uses to refer to the best men of the res publica (Sest. 95). And he defends Octavian against Antony’s taunt for being from humble birth, noting how “just about all of us” come from municipia (Phil. 3.15).48 More explicitly than Cato the Elder, and suggestive of the success of the spread of Latin in the intervening century, Cicero describes Rome as defined by the “ties of a common language [sermo]” (II Verr. 5.167). Recalling the founding myth, Cicero views language as a bond that extends to the bodies of Roman citizens. “Poor men of humble birth sail across the seas to shores they have never seen before, where they find themselves among strangers, and cannot always have with them acquaintances to vouch for them” (II Verr. 5.167). And in those moments what it means to be Roman is that they will be “safe” from magistrates (where law and public opinion restrain) and the people (where they have ties of language and law). Without that protection, Roman citizens will be excluded from other nations, provinces, and the world “to which Romans, above all other men, have had free access until now” (II Verr. 5.168). But there is a looming unfamiliarity. For Cicero, the influx of provincials is seen as vulgarizing the language, bringing to Rome traces of their non-Roman past.49 Cicero has his close friend, Pomponius, sound the 48 49

Translations from Cicero, Philippics 1–6, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by J. T. Ramsey and G. Manuwald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Any notion that they were Romanized before the Social War has now been largely discounted by scholars. For example, in his Origines, Cato portrays the war between the Trojans and Latins as a foreign war, not a civil war (F6a Cornell = F9 Peter = Serv. Aen. 1.267–68; F7 Cornell = F10 Peter = Serv. Aen. 4.620). Drawing on this earlier tradition, see Livy 1.1.5–6; Dion. Hal. AR 1.57.2. See H. Mouritsen, “II The Making of Second Century Italy: 3 The Romanisation of Second Century Italy,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42 (1998): 81, for a survey of the arguments and K. Toll, “Making Roman-Ness and the ‘Aeneid’,” Classical Antiquity 16 (1997): 37–38. The fear of the Stranger too easily blending in can be seen in the numerous attempts to crack down on Italici who acquired citizenship illegally (or appeared on citizen rolls without being citizens) in 187, 177, 126,

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alarm. The “influx of many impure speakers coming from different places” has led to a deterioration of public oratory at a magnitude qualitatively different than in the past (Brut. 258). Cicero (by way of Crassus, a famous orator who dies in 91 bce), too, talks about how the res publica is “deluged” (oppressi) with vulgar and half-educated opinions (De or. 3.24). In part, Cicero (through Crassus) is drawing a contrast to orators who add “rustic” elements to their speeches in order to lend themselves dignity by connecting their speech to the old ways (De or. 3.42–43).50 Such archaizing gestures appear to be “copying not the orators of old days but the farm-labourers” (De or. 3.46). There are orators like Sisenna who believe that good speech employs “strange and unheard of words” (Brut. 259). Cicero is also referring to the colloquialisms, accents, and lack of “urban color” that is characteristic of foreign oratory (Brut. 171), thus situating true Romanness in a type of urban vernacular that Crassus, by way of Cicero, associates with the “particular accent peculiar to the Roman race and to our city” (De or. 3.44; also Brut. 3.43).51 Cicero’s focus on oratory tells us something about Rome’s own emergent identity in the intervening century since Cato the Elder. As Brutus, who less than two years after the dialogue was written would be part of the assassination of Julius Caesar, exclaims at one point (in a phrase that recalls Cato, and Horace will repeat later), “For the one thing in which conquered Greece still remained our conqueror [oratory], we have now wrested from her” (Brut. 254–55; Brut. 49: birth of oratory in Greece; see Hor. Epist. 2.1.156–57). Oratory appears as the foundation of Roman political life and identity: the basis of interaction between elites and the populus by which elites gain distinction (Brut. 182, 281; De or. 3.55), the source of Roman prestige (Brut. 254–55 against the Greeks), and a critical mechanism by which the res publica is governed (Brut. 256–57, 276, 289, 322). Like Cato the Elder’s efforts to construct a pure Roman past in which he is an heir, so Cicero places himself (and in turn Brutus) within a genealogy of Roman oratory that he constructs (Brut. 123, 311–30). In this genealogy, Cicero’s Brutus distills the purity of Rome’s history. Cicero fends off the vulgarizations by provincials as well as Pomponius’

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under a law passed by the tribune L. Iunius Pennus, 95, under the lex Licinia Mucia, and then 65 under the lex Papia, which prosecuted socii et Latini who had acquired citizenship illegally (see Cic. Sest. 30; Leg. agr. 1.13; Att. 4.18.4; Cass. Dio 37.9.5). The problem of peregrini pretending to be citizens remained a sufficient problem that Claudius forbade peregrini from adopting Roman clan names and made it a capital offense for any peregrinus to act as a citizen (Suet. Claud. 25). Translations from Cicero, On the Orator, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). See J. N. Adams, “‘Romanitas’ and the Latin Language,” Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 191.

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elevation of Greek over Roman models (Brut. 289–97: Pomponius; Brut. 298: Cicero). Though recognizing the contributions of Greek oratory and his own training in it, Cicero continually recalls the Roman models that guided his education (Brut. 126–27, 164, 299, 311–30). Brutus is the student (exclaiming at points that he did not know of the contributions of particular orators [e.g., 147]) and heir (331), thus emulating in the dialogue the process of cultural learning. After speculating about the likely oratorical skills of the earliest Romans, Lucius Junius Brutus included, Cicero identifies Marcus Cornelius Cetheges as the first orator for whom there is a record of being praised for his “sweetness of speech” (Et oratorem appellat et suaviloquentiam tribuit) (Brut. 62). Cicero elevates his history over others, digressing to describe how earlier preserved orations, usually funeral speeches, distort Roman history by recalling false triumphs, false numbers of consulships, or false associations of plebeian with patrician status (Brut. 62). He similarly corrects the record, criticizing Romans for ignoring the greatness of Cato the Elder (Brut. 67) and identifies in Quintus Catulus a change from the old Roman style to the modern style with uncorrupted (incorrupta) Latin that is learned and well-read (Brut. 132), an attribute that shows up frequently in his characterizations of other orators (Brut. 108, 126, 128, 132, 135, 143, 228, 233, 252, 258; also De or. 3.29, 39, 49). But the purity of a Roman genealogy is now under assault and by the end of Brutus there is a sense of disarray. Cicero sees Brutus (and himself) as “the guardians of orphaned eloquence”: “Let us keep her within our own walls, protected by a custody worthy of her liberal lineage. Let us repel the pretensions of these upstart and impudent suitors, and guard her purity, like that of a virgin grown to womanhood, and, so far as we can, shield her from the advances of rash admirers” (Brut. 330). Now, Cicero laments, Brutus is without a res publica and the res publica is without Brutus (Brut. 328–29, 322). What emerges is a contending version of Romanness set against the Stranger. Cato elevates the farmer tilling the rocky Sabine soil to craft a version of a Roman genealogy. Cicero at times invokes this rural simplicity, but he also urbanizes that identity, locating true Romanness in the sophistication of the city in which there is “no note or flavour of provincialism” nor any “rustic roughness” or “provincial solecisms” (De or. 3.44).52 Against the affectations, on the one hand, and the vulgarizations, on the other, the purity of language is portrayed as a return to something more familiar. That familiarity is naturalized by way of a Hellenistic framework of progress in which language, like the arts, evolves from 52

See Adams, “‘Romanitas’,” 191.

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archaic harshness (elements of which are visible in Cato the Elder) toward more natural renderings that display variations of rhythm and tone (Brut. 70; Orator 57–59, 168–69). With a natural, and now pure, Latin, words transparently convey meaning (De or. 3.49). It appears as the “easy and familiar speech of daily life,” as Caesar is quoted (Brut. 253). It is part of what every “true Roman” (Brut. 140) is heir, in which proper Latin is learned at home and in daily intercourse (De or. 3.48; Brut. 258). There was a time, as Cicero has Pomponius remark, that everyone employed good usage unless they were raised outside Rome or “some crudeness of home environment had tainted their speech” (Brut. 258). The Stranger cannot stop being the Stranger, marked by speech that makes them unfamiliar and regressive. The Latin scholar Varro (116–27 bce), too, in his Lingua Latina, a work dedicated to Cicero, offers a method of tracing and conjecturing about etymologies by which the native form of Latin – and thus of culture – can be recovered against the forces of decay (Ling. Lat. 5.5; 9.14). By working backward from usages, tracing the relationship of words like the roots of a tree as they cut across boundaries (5.13), the scholar (and the orator as a mediating force between proper and popular usage) can put “each word in its own place” (6.56), intervening like a doctor to correct bad usage (9.11). The result for Cicero is a recovery of what is Roman about Roman culture, not in its archaic origins but as it evolved. Cicero makes clear the connection of language to a larger concern with identity when he comments on Varro’s efforts to give a chronology of history, systematize and classify the religious and civic institutions, and trace Roman topography (that extends beyond the Lingua Latina, which is not yet finished at this point), suggesting that he “has enabled us at last to realize who and where we were” (Acad. 1.9).53 The flipside of this sense of familiarity is evoked by Ovid in his exile when he apologizes to his readers for the foreign words that may have entered into his Latin from his barbaric surroundings (Tr. 3.1.17–18). There is an irony in Cicero’s statement about familiarity. Latin does reflect Roman identity, not in its imagined purity but in the complexity of incorporation through the emulation by other elites from across the empire and also the introduction of foreign words and regional variations that mirror the borrowings of material culture.54 The elites could claim their 53 54

Translations from Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods. Academics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). For example, see Haeussler, Becoming, 25.

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authority as the speakers and writers of true Latin, but what emerges is a less static authority that arises precisely from the fluidity of Rome’s expanding citizenship. We get a hint of the more fluid aspects of language in Varro’s claim, “I am not the master – so to speak – of the people’s usage, but it is of mine” (Ling. Lat. 9.8). Lurking in his etymologies – and this shows up prominently in Varro’s discussion of places in Book 5 – are the diverse origins of Rome’s language, like Rome itself (e.g., 5.53, 54, 55).55 We see in Caesar’s own work, De analogia, a more republicanized idea of making Latin accessible (see Cic. Brut. 260–61). Atticus characterizes the “careful selection of Latin words” in Caesar’s work as “a selection incumbent on every true offspring of Roman blood whether orator or not” (Brut. 261). Atticus’ language connotes nationhood more than statehood; a sense conveyed by language of affective, rather than formal, belonging. By the time of Quintilian, a rhetorician of the first century ce, there are still biases. Quintilian suggests at one point, “If possible, then, let all our words and our pronunciation have a whiff of city breeding, so that our speech seems to be native Roman, not simply naturalized” (Inst. 8.1.3). He describes the range of terms in Latin that draw on provincial derivations, noting Cicero’s ridicule of a Sardinian derivation (1.5.8). He notes, as well, the different sounds (which he sees as faults) that one recognizes coming from particular nationes (1.5.33). But there is more acceptance. As Quintilian notes, “Foreign words, just like people and indeed many institutions, have come to us from almost every nation” (1.5.55), observing generally, “I can surely treat all Italian words as Roman” (1.5.56), and includes as well Sabine, Tuscan, Praenestine, Gaulish, Punic, and Greek elements (1.5.55–57). In talking about whether to follow Latin rules when using Greek names, Quintilian observes, “Usage has now prevailed over Authority” (1.5.64).56 Latin becomes the hegemonic discourse of empire even though it is officially required only for birth certificates and wills. In fact, its universality undercuts its role in distinguishing the Roman from the Stranger, 55

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For discussions of Varro’s Lingua Latina as engaging in a larger cultural argument about republican Rome, see W. M. Bloomer, Latinity and Literary Society at Rome (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 41–72; A. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67–70; D. Spencer, “Movement and the Linguistic Turn: Reading Varro’s Lingua Latina,” in D. J. Newsome and R. Laurence (eds.), Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–80. On the hybridization of Latin, see F. Biville, “The Graeco-Romans and Graeco-Latin: A Terminological Framework for Cases of Bilingualism,” in J. N. Adams, M. Janse, and S. Swain (eds.), Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 77–102.

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leading to an uneasiness about the “leveling of linguistic distinctions” that we see with the spread of Latin after the Hannibalic war.57 In To Rome, written a few decades before the extension of citizenship to all male residents of the empire by Caracalla in 212 ce (the Constitutio Antoniniana), Aristides expresses a view of Rome emptied of its culture and history, understood only through the control it asserts over and the protections it provides to others.58 Although Aristides describes Rome as a name extended to a whole nation, one’s relationship to Rome is an abstraction. It is a people bound over a vast territory (and Aristides emphasizes the vastness) that do not share a history but only a set of legal protections that differentiate the citizen from the subject (Or. 26.59). In a sense, Aristides serves as the culmination of the dissonance of a founding premised on the dislocation from history, and one repeated in the modern nation-state, in which belonging is defined abstractly, resting on the denial of history. Noah Webster and the Construction of an American Genealogy In the previous section, I looked at how the Stranger is employed in Roman discourse as a way to assert a genealogy. I now look at the counterpart in Noah Webster’s efforts to craft an American genealogy and identity against both a European one and what he sees as the forces of vulgarization within America. Webster (1758–1843) is most well-known for his works on grammar, orthography, pronunciation, and, ultimately, his dictionary, in the decades following the American Revolution. Although Webster states that a “national language is a band of national union,” the impetus behind this claim is less clear.59 Most attribute Webster’s motivations to a vague democratic patriotism or nationalism in the wake of the Revolution.60 Wood views this as a larger historical movement, seeing Webster’s efforts as 57 58

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Habinek, Politics, 42. See L. Pernot, “Aelius Aristides and Rome,” in W. V. Harris and B. Holmes (eds.), Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 188–90. Rome would ultimately fall to the Stranger Alaric, who wanted to belong but remained defined as the Stranger. See D. Boin, Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020). N. Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Co., 1789), 397, italics in original. See H. E. Scudder, Noah Webster (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882), 46, 192; M. Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York: Knopf, 1950), 105: extol “the American language to free Americans from dependence on English texts” and make money; R. B. Morris, The Forging of the Union, 1781–1789 (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 21; H. G. Unger, Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998).

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an extension by a nation that already saw itself as “homogenous” to “carry this uniformity further” by creating a language “as pure, simple, and systematic as our politics.”61 Rollin is less sanguine, viewing Webster’s efforts, especially after the disruptions of the 1780s and 1790s, as a form of social control meant to “reestablish the deferential world order that he believed was disintegrating.”62 Although I think there is truth in these different claims, they tend to reduce his work to single forces that operate at either the national, political level – the revolutionary fervor – or at a biographical level: his New England Protestantism. In doing this, we risk simplifying the irresolution of cultural tensions at play in his work. There was little consensus about a vision of nationhood: There were persistent regional, local, and ethnic rivalries and attachments; and there were rival and more popular spellers and textbooks that retained British spellings and emphasized regional and state connections.63 Just as Cato the Elder, Cicero, Varro, and Caesar seek recourse in language, at least in part to answer the question of what it means to be Roman with the dramatic expansion of citizenship after the Social War, so Webster similarly looks to language to address how a diverse people who carry with them the marks of their foreignness can constitute a nation. In his understanding of both the problem and the solution (or solutions), Webster combines Cato the Elder, Cicero, Varro, and Caesar. Like Cato, he juxtaposes a native purity of the United States to the corruption of Europe, generally, and England, specifically. Like Cicero, he seeks to identify a particular presentation of oneself through language as a standard of familiarity. Like Varro, he in turn attempts to purify that language, returning it to a native simplicity that is in keeping with America’s own developing sense of itself. And like Caesar, he broadens the language, making it accessible to all citizens. It is not just coincidence: Webster draws upon Roman examples in his own efforts. Interestingly, in both the Roman and American case, the attempt to purify the language of a community based on incorporation ends in a similar place: with a language of incorporation. 61 62

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Wood, Empire, 40, 48. R. M. Rollins, “Words as Social Control: Noah Webster and the Creation of the American Dictionary,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 416; also R. M. Rollins, The Long Journey of Noah Webster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980); T. P. Bonfiglio, Race and the Rise of Standard American (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 81–85; V. P. Bynack, “Noah Webster’s Linguistic Thought and the Idea of an American National Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 99–114. See M. A. Nash, “Contested Identities: Nationalism, Regionalism, and Patriotism in Early American Textbooks,” History of Education Quarterly 49 (2009): 422–25.

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We saw earlier how for Cicero language is embodied: It serves as a form of elite display of mannerisms and dialect by which status is affirmed; it creates a bond for all citizens by which their bodies are literally protected; and what I have emphasized most, it serves as a mechanism of familiarity. Webster’s efforts demonstrate a similar notion of the embodiment of language that authorizes our recognition of each other as a We rather than a They. In suggesting that language is embodied for Webster, I am not necessarily disagreeing with Bynack’s insightful discussion of how, for Webster (after his conversion), language is the expression of the noumenal: of God’s spirit.64 Rather, I think there is another aspect to Webster’s concern with language that precedes his conversion and extends through his life, and that is the phenomenal aspect of language. Webster conceives of language in its origins as expressing the condition and movement of physical bodies. Webster writes: Original words express physical action, or properties. No term in language, expressing a moral or abstract idea, is original. The principal word, in all known languages, is the verb; and it is a question not yet settled whether all other words are not derived from verbs. The most of them are certainly thus derived.65

It is by way of language that we describe bodies. Stated more generally, language encompasses how we communicate ourselves to, how we appear before, and how we are judged by others. For this reason, language not only constitutes a We but may also divide. We enunciate or construct sentences in a particular way, speak with a particular cadence, or use some words and not others, all which authorizes our recognition of each other as We rather than They. When Webster writes that “knowledge and intercourse are embarrassed by differences of language,”66 he is saying more than that it is difficult to talk when people do not understand each other. He is saying that we form judgments about how we see that person: whether they are like us or different (by measures of class, race, gender, education, region, nation, etc.); whether they share the same attachments; whether they command our respect; or whether we recognize in them some authority. Thus, Webster expands on his comment about the difficulties of social 64

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Bynack, “Noah,” 108, argues that Webster seeks to ground language is something more fixed: a spiritual truth or a racial etymology that cuts against a founding notion. Bynack, “Noah,” 105, also notes Webster’s interest in German nationalist theories of language in which language transcends social, political, and economic differences and can influence thought. N. Webster, Observations on Language, and on the Errors of Classbooks: Addressed to the Members of the New York Lyceum (New Haven, CT: S. Babcock, 1839), 3. Webster, Dissertations, 21.

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intercourse, saying: “Pride and prejudice incline men to treat the practice of their neighbors with some degree of contempt. Thus small differences in pronunciation at first excite ridicule – a habit of laughing at the singularities of strangers is followed by disrespect – and without respect friendship is a name, and social intercourse a mere ceremony.”67 In a nation of Strangers, we remain Strangers to each other. Imperiling the idea of a nation are precisely the variations that derive from America’s origins. In his Dissertations on the English Language (1789), Webster notes America’s founding by immigrants, suggesting the need to “destroy the differences of dialect which our ancestors brought from their native countries.”68 There are “vicious pronunciations, which prevailed extensively among the common people of this country,” as well as “provincial prejudices that originate in the trifling differences of dialect.”69 Webster’s critique is not just pointing downward toward the common people but also toward a particular elite, especially the grammarians and language instructors, who (and Webster sounds like Cicero here) learn Greek and Latin but are “ignorant of their own tongue.”70 They seek to impose “arbitrary rules” of usage and introduce into their own language unnecessary ornamentation.71 Webster provides a humorous example of how the use of language creates judgments when he describes how those trained academically (and following the popular grammar book by Robert Lowth, a bishop of the Church of England) come out using particular words: “They pride themselves, for some time, in their superior learning and peculiarities; till further information, or the ridicule of the public, brings them to use the language of other people.”72 Webster pursues several remedies. Cicero comments that Varro does not want to write what “the unlearned would not be able to understand” (Acad. 1.4). Rather than copying what the Greeks do, Varro seeks to make known to Romans the doctrines not available from the Greeks (Acad. 1.8). So, in his Spelling Book, Webster includes the states, capitals, counties, and inhabitants.73 Explaining this addition, he writes: The advantage of familiarizing children to the spelling and pronunciation of American names, is very obvious and must give this work the preference to 67 69

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Webster, Dissertations, 20. 68 Webster, Dissertations, 19. N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 (New York: S. Converse, 1828), preface; also N. Webster, The American Spelling Book: Containing an Easy Standard of Pronunciation – Being the First Part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1790), viii. Webster, Dissertations, viii. 71 Webster, Dissertations, vii, 30. 72 Webster, Dissertations, vii. Webster, Spelling, 127–31.

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foreign spelling books. It is of great importance to give our youth early and correct information respecting the geography of this country. We have a multitude of books which give us the state of other countries, but scarcely one which affords us any account of our own.74

Like with Cicero’s comment that Varro gives the Romans a home, so for Webster who we are requires knowing where we are. In his lifelong work of creating a dictionary, Webster attempts, like Varro, whom he describes as “among the most celebrated authors of antiquity” on “the subject of language,”75 to uncover “the primary sense of original words” by comparing words and languages.76 The aim is to “purify” the language from “palpable errors,” “reduce the number of its anomalies,” give it “more regularity and consistency,” banish pronunciations that fit “the fashion of the day,” and “furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue.”77 Reversing the efforts of grammarians, he looks to “understand” how the language is used rather than concocting a scheme for how it should be constructed.78 As Webster writes, “Grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar.”79 He seeks to “fix” language by “the rules of the language itself, and the general practice of the nation, [which] constitute propriety in speaking.”80 Webster is not making an argument for a different language; he is giving American English a purer genealogy that distinguishes the United States from the corruption and decline he associates with Europe. Sounding like Cato the Elder, Webster points to the identity of this purified English. “The English language, when pronounced according to the genuine composition of its words, is a nervous, masculine language, well adapted to popular eloquence; and it is not improbable that there may be some connection between the manly character of the language and the freedom of the British and American constitutions.”81 Yet, lurking in these etymologies – and this shows up prominently in Varro – are the diverse origins of a Roman and American language, like Rome and the United States themselves (e.g., Ling. Lat. 5.53, 54, 55). Webster writes of this continual infusion of foreign words, “I would compel them to submit to the formalities of naturalization, before they should be admitted to the rights of citizenship; I would convert them into English words, or reject them.”82 To be an American word, like an American, requires shedding one’s earlier identities. 74 76 78 80 82

Webster, Spelling, viii, italics in original. 75 Webster, Dictionary, 1, intro F. Webster, Dictionary, 1, preface. 77 Webster, Dictionary, 1, preface, intro F. Webster, Dissertations, vii. 79 Webster, Dissertations, 37. Webster, Dissertations, 27, italics in original. 81 Webster, Dictionary, 1, intro F. Webster, Dictionary, 1, intro G.

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There is a striking replay of Varro’s claim, “I am not the master – so to speak – of the people’s usage, but it is of mine” (Ling. Lat. 9.8), when Webster writes, “The language of a nation is the common property of the people, and no individual has a right to make inroads upon its principles.”83 But all usages are not permissible. Like for Varro, there are immutable, fixed principles of language.84 But these principles, which are “interwoven with the very construction of a language, coeval and coextensive with it, are like the common laws of a land, or the immutable rules of morality.”85 In likening the formation of language to “the unanimous consent of a nation,”86 and in turn seeking, like Caesar, to make the acquisition of the “vernacular tongue” easier through simplified spellings and grammatical constructions, he is broadening the sense of attachment to that language.87 Webster sees in the Romans the same efforts “to make subjects, rather than slaves, of their conquered nations; and the introduction of their own tongue among them was considered as a necessary step towards removing prejudices, facilitating an intercourse with their provinces, and reconciling distant nations to the Roman government.”88 Establishing a common system of language promises to “weaken the prejudices which oppose a cordial union.”89 Over time, separated now from our foreign ancestors and bound by a common and purer language, “our amor patriae [can] acquire strength and inspire us with a suitable respect for our own national character.”90 The language of patria invokes an earlier Roman effort to create a sense of national attachment that intersected with, but is not the same as, the state protections of citizenship. Webster had about as much success as Varro. The etymologies have been largely discounted; few of the orthographical changes accepted; and the goal of establishing a distinctively American literature undercut by the more popular readers of the time who continued to draw heavily, often entirely, on British contributions. And despite the strict standards of requiring citizenship of new words, Webster’s dictionary – his longstanding legacy – is alive with words that reflect the plural character of America’s continual refounding. It is noteworthy that John Pickering, in his essay seeking to purify English from Americanism, offers an observation by Edward Augustus Kendal, an English traveler and writer, that “‘immigrant’ is perhaps the only new word, of which the circumstances of the United States has in any degree demanded the addition to the English 83 86 88

Webster, Dictionary, 1, intro F. 84 Webster, Dissertations, 29. Webster, Dissertations, 29. 87 Webster, Dictionary, 1, preface. Webster, Dissertations, 48–49. 89 Webster, Dissertations, 36.

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Webster, Dissertations, 29. Webster, Dissertations, 36.

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language.”91 (Shumsky has suggested the novelty of Webster’s definition, possibly borrowed from chemistry, of moving from one state to another for the purpose of permanent residence.)92 Even if we accept Kendal’s observation at face value, it points to the exceptional nature of the founding of the United States, one that requires a new word to explain the composition of a nation.

Washington, Du Bois, and the Burden of Memory I began this chapter by suggesting that the founding narratives of both Rome and the United States raise similar questions about identity. Both narratives are premised on the incorporation of different nationes who do not necessarily share a past. One aspect of this incorporation occurs through the formal relationship of citizenship. But questions persist about the resultant collective identity. In a community formed by Strangers, the corrosive Stranger emerges around the persistence of a memory that precedes or runs contrary to a founding narrative. In the previous section, I explored one such persistence that is associated with speaking, in which provincialisms mark one as a Stranger. The proliferation and incorporation of provincialisms into both Latin and English suggest how memories persist and, in fact, how boundaries of identity are permeable as a We comes to employ some of the Stranger’s language as one’s own. But the relationship of identity to memory is complicated. In the founding narrative, Strangers both shed these memories and yet are bound together by the memory of dislocation from these pasts. In the United States, a particular dilemma of memory surfaces in the casting of the African American as a Stranger with a separate genealogy that is marked by race. The difficulty of fitting the African American experience into the founding narrative is that they were not wanderers or exiles but chattel. What makes forgetting so complicated is that African Americans carry a history that is America’s own. The threat posed by African Americans as the Stranger is not that their memories are somehow foreign; it is that those 91

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J. Pickering, A Vocabulary or, Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America to Which is Prefixed an Essay on the Present State of the English language in the United States (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1816), 108. N. L. Shumsky, “Noah Webster and the Invention of Immigration,” New England Quarterly 81 (2008): 131. “By telling Americans that immigration involves coming from another country, Webster set up an us-versus-them opposition, foreigner against native-born. By telling Americans that immigration is permanent and involves the intent of residence, Webster encouraged them to fear that in time they might be displaced, their cities overrun and their jobs jeopardized” (Shumsky, “Noah,” 134). I am not sure we can read that in Webster.

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memories are America’s memories of what was done. I reflect on the different attempts by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to confront this burden of memory. Washington (1856–1915), founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and Du Bois (1868–1963), a Harvard educated sociologist, are joined in the history of African American leaders, interpreted by way of a series of similarly aligned dichotomies: accommodation/resistance; pragmatist/idealistic; and archivist/conceptualist.93 Houston Baker has challenged these dichotomies, showing how both Washington and Du Bois are engaged in the mastery and manipulation of cultural forms.94 I continue in that direction, showing how both figures draw on, and at times confront, an American founding narrative. Washington’s famous 1895 speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta has been read from a variety of perspectives: as a capitulation to industrial progress;95 as an idealistic faith in democracy;96 as a savvy play for power;97 as pragmatic and situational;98 as accommodationist;99 and as employing a religious language of

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For example, L. R. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Accommodation,” in J. H. Franklin and A. Meier (eds.), Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 1–18; L. R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan, R. Smock (ed.) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 141–52: goal of power; R. M. Dennis, “The Situational Politics of Booker T. Washington,” in D. Cunnigen, R. M. Dennis, and M. G. Glascoe (eds.), Racial Politics of Booker T. Washington (Amsterdam: JAI Press Inc, 2006), 3–21: situational; B. E. Lawson, “Booker T. Washington: A Pragmatist at Work,” in B. E. Lawson and D. F. Koch (eds.), Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 125–41: Washington as pragmatist in Deweyan sense; J. H. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York: Knopf, 1967), 393–97: accommodation; W. A. Drake, “Booker T. Washington: Racial Pragmatism Revisited,” in Cunnigen, Dennis, and Glascoe (eds.), Racial Politics of Booker T. Washington, 33–59: accommodation; D. L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: H. Holt, 1993), 238–64: accommodation; J. T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 54–64: accommodation. See H. A. Baker, “Meditation on Tuskegee: Black Studies Stories and Their Imbrication,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (1995): 51–59; H. A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15–17, 67–68. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 238–64. M. R. West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 204. Harlan, “Politics of Accommodation”; Harlan, Booker T. Washington in Perspective, 141–52: goal of power. Dennis, “Situational Politics”; Lawson, “Booker T. Washington”: pragmatist. Franklin, From Slavery, 393–97; Drake, “Booker T. Washington”; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 238–64; McCartney, Black Power Ideologies, 54.

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redemption.100 West argues that Washington, in his idealistic faith in democracy, seeks to prepare former slaves for citizenship.101 But the speech is also about memory, specifically a memory recast on the terrain of an American founding journey.102 Washington is not just addressing the reality of the African American situation but also placing that situation in the framework of a mythic founding from which they are excluded. Washington opens his speech with a metaphor of “a ship lost at sea,” recasting the forced diaspora into the shared wandering of the American founding myth.103 The African American appears to Whites as that Stranger: “the incoming of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits.”104 Although much has been written about Washington’s famous refrain “Cast down your bucket where you are,” often viewed as a statement of either self-help or accommodation, it taps into the dislocation of past and future that is central to an American mythology. Whatever the past, there is a type of forgetfulness that extends to both races: a shedding of “grievances” and in its place a shared disposition of labor.105 “Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour” and “tilling a field.”106 In his 1896 speech at Harvard, in describing the “American crucible,” Washington spells out the journey of belonging: We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all. This, this is the passport to all that is best in the life of our republic, and the Negro must possess it, or be debarred.107 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107

C. Jorgensen, “Booker T. Washington and the Sociology of Black Deficit,” in Cunnigen, Dennis, and Glascoe (eds.), Racial Politics of Booker T. Washington, 113. West, Education, 204. B. J. Vivian, “Up from Memory: Epideictic Forgetting in Booker T. Washington’s Cotton States Exposition Address,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45 (2012): 189–212, places the notion of memory in the context of witnessing, suggesting that Washington pursues a strategy of selective forgetting to further the goals of justice amid threats of continual violence. B. T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” in L. R. Harlan and J. W. Blassingame (eds.), Booker T. Washington Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 331. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 332. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 331. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 331. B. T. Washington, “An Address as the Harvard University Alumni Dinner, June 24, 1896,” in R. Smock and L. R. Harlan (eds.), The Booker T. Washington Papers Collection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 184, read as social Darwinism by McCartney, Black Power Ideologies, 60–61,

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It is by way of labor, like in Josey – but more similar to Horatio Alger’s ragsto-riches vision of commercial labor – that particular dispositions are formed. It is by way of these dispositions that Washington moves from a Theyorientation to a We-orientation, from the Stranger to someone who is familiar. In Up from Slavery, Washington portrays himself as joining in a founding journey. He seeks to generalize that journey, pointing to the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.108

What Whites will be “surrounded by [are] the most patient, faithful, lawabiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen,” as evidenced by “a devotion that no foreigner can approach” in the previous decades of slavery.109 By forgetting genealogy and even claims of social injustice and recalling, instead, a shared disposition of labor, a new history and future is possible.110 Washington’s language embraces the language of Manifest Destiny, that of “awaken[ing] among us a new era of industrial progress.”111 The language is of the future: He passes over “whatever other sins the South may be called to bear,” looking instead to a “new era” of business that has done more to advance friendship “since the dawn of our freedom.”112 Although similarly addressing an American founding mythology, Du Bois departs fundamentally from Washington in the question of memory. Du Bois opens The Souls of Black Folk with the statement, “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question.”113 The question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”114 is precisely about the persistence of the past. and A. Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 117. 108 Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 332. 109 Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 332. 110 Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 333. 111 Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 331. Jorgensen, “Booker T. Washington,” 113, situates this language in the religious language of new life. 112 Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 331. 113 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, H. L. Gates and T. H. Oliver (eds.) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 9. 114 Du Bois, Souls, 9.

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Du Bois describes the “shadow” that sweeps over African Americans, one of a genealogy that casts one as a “stranger in mine own house.”115 The African American remains the Stranger, excluded from a founding narrative that, as Du Bois notes, regenerates itself both in the embrace of humble origins and in a forgetfulness of the history that precedes the journey.116 The humble origins are the beginning point of the American Dream in which whatever preceded it is abstracted and communalized, like it is for the Trojan wanderers, as a shared experience of suffering. When Du Bois begins with “between,” he is pointing to the plight of African Americans who are unable to replicate the founding myth. There is a note of defiance in becoming a Stranger in one’s own country: “Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here.”117 Du Bois recalls, as well, the founding conquest of wildness. The African American brought “the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil.”118 But unlike for Washington, there is no unity in a shared disposition of labor. There is only “white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water.”119 There was not just the dislocating journey but also an enduring lostness in America until “emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of weary Israelites.”120 But they cannot begin a new history because they cannot escape the old. The African American is given a new genealogy, not one premised on forgetting the old but one that bears the marks of the old. The African American carries the “dead-weight of social degradation.”121 With the “systematic legal defilement of Negro women,” they now bear the “hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers.”122 Nor can White America escape that past. When Du Bois writes, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land,” these notions are linked.123 In the American founding myth, that promised land rests on a people bound by a new history, not separated by an old. Thus a “shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people” of an “unattained ideal.”124 The African American is a reminder of the failed myth and, thus, is looked at with “disdain” by others who want to forget but cannot. Du Bois 115 116

117 120 123

Du Bois, Souls, 10. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten (The Negro Question in the United States) (1906),” in N. D. Chandler (ed.), The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Fordham University, 2015), 286. Du Bois, Souls, 162. 118 Du Bois, Souls, 162. 119 Du Bois, Souls, 11. Du Bois, Souls, 12. 121 Du Bois, Souls, 14. 122 Du Bois, Souls, 14. Du Bois, Souls, 12. 124 Du Bois, Souls, 12.

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tries to negotiate this dilemma, not by the practiced forgetting of Washington in which African Americans journey by way of their labor into an American nationhood, but through the recovery of a genealogy that posits an alternate nationhood. When Du Bois states as axiomatic, “The history of the world is the history . . . of races,” he is challenging, by recasting, the relationship between memory and race.125 In part, race carries with it a burden of memory – a legacy of inferiority – that excludes the African American from full participation in an American national identity.126 And thus there is an effort to erase one’s African race. As Du Bois notes in his 1897 “The Conservation of Races,” delivered at the founding meeting of the American Negro Academy, the Negro has been led to “deprecate and minimize race distinctions.”127 But an ongoing effort of Du Bois is to reintroduce race into his discussion of the Negro and into his discussion of nationhood. In “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois begins to explore how “human beings are divided into races” and how “in this country the two most extreme types of the world’s races have met,” suggesting that the future relation of these races is not only of immediate interest “but forms an epoch in the history of mankind.”128 My interest here is not to debate Du Bois’ justifications, as others have done,129 but to point to the challenge that Du Bois makes to America’s conception of nationhood. That Du Bois is signaling an interest in nationhood is suggested by his discussion of the evolution of communities: from tribes, to cities, to nations. Each form is differently organized: tribes by blood, cities by domicile and “ideals of life” that increasingly differentiated cities, and nations by culture or “the spiritual and physical differences of race groups which constituted the nations.”130 (The evolutionary chronology tracks German Romantic notions of nations organized by a particular 125 126 128 129

130

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in R. Wortham (ed.), The Sociological Souls of Black Folk: Essays by W. E. B. Du Bois (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 112. For example, Du Bois, “Conservation,” 111. 127 Du Bois, “Conservation,” 111. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 111. Important evaluations of Du Bois’ discussions of race are made by A. Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 21–37; A. Appiah, Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); R. Gooding-Williams, “W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics,” in B. W. Bell, E. Grosholz, and J. B. Stewart (eds.), Outlaw, Appiah, and Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39–56; T. L. Lott, “Du Bois on the Invention of Race,” Philosophical Forum 24 (1992–93): 166–87; J. Glasgow, “The End of Historical Constructivism: Circularity, Redundancy, Indeterminacy,” The Monist 93 (2010): 321–35; C. Jeffers, “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races,’” Ethics 123 (2013): 403–26. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 114, italics in original.

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Volkgeist.)131 At times sliding back-and-forth between race and “these nations,” Du Bois identifies eight racial groups, all of which correspond to groups who have a relationship to a particular place, language, and tradition: Slavs, Teutons, English, Hindus, Romance peoples, Semites, Mongolians, and Negroes.132 Du Bois moves away from more purely biological approaches to define races in cultural terms: as primarily “spiritual, psychical, differences – undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them.”133 Race also transcends the state, providing the sense of belonging that corresponds to the idea of a nation: “What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”134 Washington, too, in an address at Hartford in 1914, describes the African American presence as “a nation within a nation.”135 But for Washington, the claim is more a statement of the size of the population than a claim about history. In fact, Washington describes the African American as “a new race” with an “optimistic future” rather than “an obscured past.”136 For Du Bois, the nation he describes is deeply rooted in history and cuts across state boundaries. “But one thing is sure and that is the fact that since the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.”137 Du Bois argues that the development of the African American requires the realization of their particular nationhood, their “full spiritual message” as part of a “vast historic race.”138 To that extent, there needs to be both a historical connectedness to their own history, which becomes an increasing concern for Du Bois, and race organization, such as 131

132 133

134 135 136

137

For example, see J. G. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772),” in M. N. Forster (ed.), Herder: Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 148, 151. See A. R. Schafer, “W. E. B. Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892–1909,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 925–49; Appiah, Lines of Descent. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 113. See Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument,” 28. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 113; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1; W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49: encountered in Berlin and at Harvard. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 112. B. T. Washington, Booker T. Washington Papers, 14 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 12.423. Washington, Booker T. Washington Papers, 12.423. It is worth noting the role that Washington’s ideas play in the development of African nationalism. See W. M. Marable, “Booker T. Washington and African Nationalism,” Phylon 35 (1974): 398–406. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 59. 138 Du Bois, “Conservation,” 114, 116.

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colleges, newspapers, and businesses that develop the “peculiar contributions” of their culture.139 Du Bois recognizes the confrontation with an American national ideal, noting that his argument runs counter to an “American impatience” in its own founding narrative with a notion that “closed race groups make history.”140 But the realization of the Negro as a nation with its own Volkgeist requires that the “people of Negro blood in the United States of America” must realize that “to take their just place in the van of PanNegroism” requires resisting “absorption” into white America and losing “our race identity.”141 Du Bois is quite aware of the struggle with issues of national identity that African Americans struggle with: “What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro?” “Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish, or Italian blood would?”142 Du Bois tries to place this transnationalism within the pluralism of the United States, suggesting there can be different “national ideals” within a state if there are similarities of political ideas.143 For Du Bois, the African American, while part of a “vast historic race,” is also part of America by birth and citizenship as well as through their shared political ideals, language, and religion.144 By adding race, Du Bois complicates Cicero’s notion that opened this chapter that there may be two different sources of affection, one by birth and the other by citizenship. And it reverses, as well, the founding journey that dislocates one from a past. There is still the possibility of each group working alongside each other in both realizing their own aspirations and making their distinct contributions to “the culture of their common country.”145 But these contributions to the country depend on a journey back to recover a genealogy that transcends and precedes that country. The language of incorporation, self-assimilation, creolization, and appropriation gives us a more complex picture of the different ways in which cultures intersect. But it does not do full justice to the experience of memory: the dissonance of a founding myth of a new history that rests on the continued infusion of old histories. To remember is to reveal the strangeness of what comprises one’s own relationship to a national identity. Thus, one sees continual attempts to construct a particular genealogy that purifies impure origins. Claims of purity can be read as assertions of the promise of a new history that require that groups break from the old, 139 141 143 145

Du Bois, “Conservation,” 118. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 115. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 115. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 118.

140 142 144

Du Bois, “Conservation,” 113. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 115. Du Bois, “Conservation,” 116.

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shedding the markers of their genealogies (language, accents, clothing, customs, etc.). But this mythical cleansing imposes its own forgetfulness on how, in both the Roman and American experiences, there is no We that precedes They. There is not an original Roman or American. There is no pure originating moment. The new history testifies to the continual intertwining with and borrowing from the old. We see that in the founding myths, whether told by Virgil or depicted in Josey. We see it in the evolution of both Latin and American English that invariably mirrors the multiethnic cultural landscape of the communities. And we see it in the attempts by Washington and Du Bois to confront the burden of memory that excludes African Americans from the founding journey. Tacitus gives us some sense of the cultural longevity of this struggle to purify the past when he reports a debate in 48 ce in which one member of the imperial council under Claudius speaks against extending senatorial rank to the elite in Gallia Comata. I will quote an extended aspect of the speech because it conveys some of the dissonance that attends the founding myth in discussions of membership: Once upon a time natives had suffered for kindred peoples [i.e., neighboring peoples were content with only natives of the city of Rome as members of the senate], they said, and no one rued the state of old: indeed men still recalled the examples which, under old-time conventions, the Roman character had produced in respect of excellence and glory. Was it not enough that the Veneti and Insubres had burst into the curia, with a throng of aliens being brought in, as if the community had been captured? What further honor would there be for the residual nobility, or for any poor senator who came from Latium? Everything would be filled by those rich men whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been leaders of enemy nations, slaughtering our armies by the violence of their swords and blockading Divine Julius at Alesia. These were recent events; but what if there sprang up the memory of those who had perished when the Capitol and Roman citadel were laid low by the hands of the same men? By all means let them enjoy the designation of ‘citizenship’; but they should not cheapen the insignia of the fathers or the adornments of the magistrates (Tac. Ann. 11.23.2–4)146

Who are We if We are potentially everyone? One hears in these words an effort to locate some purer Roman past – the “old Republic” in contrast to the vulgarizing present – by homogenizing a complicated history of incorporation that begins at the founding. 146

Translation from Tacitus, The Annals, trans. A. J. Woodman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004).

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Claudius, in turn, addresses the senate, summoning the founding myth and giving a history of a Rome in which there is no pure moment of origins: My ancestors, of whom the most ancient, Clausus of Sabine origin, was assumed into Roman citizenship as well as into the families of the patricians, encourage the use of similar counsels in political life, namely the transferring hither of whatever proves to be exceptional elsewhere. For I am not unaware that the Julii were summoned into the senate from Alba, the Coruncani from Camerium, the Porcii from Tusculum, and (not to explore the past any further) others from Etruria, Lucania, and the whole of Italy, and finally that the country itself was advanced to the Alps so that not only single individuals but lands and peoples might unite in our name . . .. What else brought extermination to the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, although they were a force at arms, except the fact that they excluded the vanquished as being aliens? Our founder Romulus, however, was so effective in his wisdom that he regarded many peoples as enemies and then as citizens on the same day! Immigrants have reigned over us; bestowing magistracies on the sons of freedmen is not, as many misconceive it, a recent thing but was done habitually by the people earlier . . .. Everything, conscript fathers, which is now believed most olden was new: plebeian magistrates came after patrician, Latin after plebeian, those of the other peoples of Italy after the Latin. This too will grow old, and what today we defend by examples will be among the examples. (Tac. Ann. 11.24.1–7)

There is no original version of being Roman; there is no moment of purity. Rather, the genius of Rome lies in the mixing of Strangers. But Claudius also smooths out history. Memory continually directs one to a future, to the ongoing realization of a new history in which each act of incorporation is built on precedents that in turn become precedents. There is a similar irresolution to what a founding history looks like in American discourse. In the naturalization ceremonies, there is a ritual reaffirmation of America’s founding. Speaking in 2015, President Obama comments on the “remarkable journey all of you have made. And as of today, your story is forever woven into the larger story of this nation.”147 It is that journey, the dislocation from a past, that serves as the connective tissue of national identity. After all, unless your family is Native American, one of the first Americans, our families – all of our families – come from someplace else. The first refugees were the Pilgrims themselves – fleeing religious persecution, crossing the stormy Atlantic to reach a new world where they might live and pray 147

B. Obama, “Naturalization Ceremony,” C-SPAN, Dec. 15, 2015.

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freely. Eight signers of the Declaration of Independence were immigrants. And in those first decades after independence, English, German, and Scottish immigrants came over, huddled on creaky ships, seeking what Thomas Paine called “asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty.”148

But a founding that relies so heavily on forgetting carries its own burdens. Part of that forgetting is folding these foundings into processes. Thus, President Trump, in the same naturalization ceremony, states, “You followed the rules, upheld our laws, and contributed to the strength and success and vitality of our nation.”149 Another part of forgetting is naturalizing one’s own past, casting as a Stranger those who seem to embody not just a different history but any history. Kelly’s remarks about the inability of “rural” immigrants to assimilate into our modern society tracks Cicero’s concerns with the vulgarization of Roman identity by rustics (Mur. 61).150 And Trump’s attempt to keep out people from “shithole countries”151 and the language of immigrants as “infest[ing]”152 is simply the most recent version of efforts to purify our own origins. In that purity, the individual is imagined without a history: separated out and identified as a success by standards of an anonymous market (Trump’s emphasis on skills for serving the market) or grouped and banished. Obama notes the irony: “Those who betrayed these values were themselves the children of immigrants. How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two generation passes, and suddenly we don’t remember where we came from. And we suggest that somehow there is ‘us’ and there is ‘them,’ not remembering we used to be ‘them.’”153 The challenge of both founding narratives in which a history is forged from a dislocation from the past is what to remember. 148 149

150

151 152 153

Obama, “Naturalization Ceremony.” D. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump at a Naturalization Ceremony,” news release, Jan. 19, 2019, www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-naturalizationceremony/ (page removed). J. Kelly, “Transcript: White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Interview with NPR,” NPR Morning Edition, May 11, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/05/11/610116389/transcript-white-house-chief-of-staffjohn-kellys-interview-with-npr. J. Hirschfeld Davis, S. Gay Stolberg, and T. Kaplan, “Trump Alarms Lawmakers with Disparaging Words for Haiti and Africa,” New York Times, Jan. 11, 2018. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, June 18, 2018. Obama, “Naturalization Ceremony.”

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chapter 3

The Wild Stranger and the Conquest of Space

A humble shepherd in the lonely mountains, he nursed her on a wild mare’s fresh milk; he’d squeeze the udder’s drops onto her baby lips.

(Virg. Aen. 11.570–72)

Yi-fu Tuan suggests: “[People] cannot live in a space-time continuum. The world, to be livable, must be reconstituted to reflect the human need for privileged location and boundaries.”1 The Roman and American founding identities are built around mythic journeys into unsettled space: Aeneas’ flight, the migration to America, the errand into the wilderness, and the settlement of the frontier – all of which imagine a space as unbounded, at points inconceivable, and potentially dangerous. But the narratives do not allow for a simple movement from space to place, or from unsettled to settled. There is no tabula rasa, as imagined of America by John Locke in The Second Treatise.2 There is no new world without a history within which space is settled and government established. Instead, the boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that is not potentially converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited 1

2

Y. Tuan, Man and Nature (Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, 1971), 18. Discussions of space and identity include Y. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); C. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); A. Gupta, “The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 63–79, on transnationalism; R. D. Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); E. S. Casey, “Body, Self, and Landscape: A Geophilosophical Inquiry into the Place-World,” in P. C. Adams, S. Hoelscher, and K. E. Till (eds.), Textures of Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 403–25; M. Munkelt, M. Stein, and M. Schmitz (eds.), Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking (Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013). J. Locke and P. Laslett, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), sect. 36–37, 49.

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place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. In this chapter I explore the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The reality – the differences within Samnite and Native American communities, the various attitudes toward incorporation, or the mobility of certain elites who prosper or find their way into positions of power – is less important than how the groups are imagined. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of identity. We saw how the Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

Identity and Space Time and space are related as components of identity. Ricoeur argues for “an entanglement between the architectural configuring of space and the narrative configuring of time.”3 By that he means that acts of building are ways of giving intelligibility and coherence to space (like narratives do with time), condensing space into something familiar that can be remembered and recalled.4 That familiarity is bodily, thus suggesting the embeddedness of a sense of place in personal identity. As Casey states, “The self relates to the place of habitation by means of concerted bodily movements that are the embodiment of habitudinal schemes, their explication and exfoliation in the inhabited place-world.”5 The body has a sensation of place and impression of a place that “remains lodged in our body.”6 In other words, there is a “persistence of place in body.”7 We see this notion of embodied place set against the vastness of space in Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio.” The Roman general Scipio Aemilianus is lifted 3 4

5

P. Ricoeur, “Architecture and Narrativity,” Études Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies 7 (2016): 31. See also T. Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 1–14. Ricoeur, “Architecture and Narrativity,” 36. On Roman conceptions of public space, see C. Steel, Reading Cicero: Genre and Performance in Late Republican Rome (London: Duckworth, 2005); A. Russell, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Casey, “Body,” 412. 6 Casey, “Body,” 415. 7 Casey, “Body,” 415, italics in original.

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into space, which emerges as the experience of astonishing distances and whirls of noise, the place almost unrecognizable and insignificant from the distance of space (Rep. 6.16, 18). In imagining this vastness, Cicero suggests if we were to see the whole earth from afar, we would see those regions that are “habitable” and that are “wholly uncultivated” (Tusc. 1.45–46; omni cultu . . . vacantes) (also Tusc. 1.62, 68, 69; also Rep. 6.20). Set against the disorienting vastness of space is a connection of bodily memory to place. Cicero has Atticus say that “we are affected in some mysterious way by places about which cluster memories of those whom we love and admire” (Leg. 2.4). In these recollections, Cicero points us to the tangible artifacts of earthly life. Odysseus, himself, as Cicero recalls, foregoes the promise of divinity so that he may “see” Ithaca once more (Leg. 2.3). Quintus, on returning to the island of Fibrenus, points to his house that was “rebuilt and extended by my father’s care” (Leg. 2.3). Dotting the landscape are memorials of one’s ancestors, as well, linking past to present (Leg. 2.3). The question the Romans faced, and it is a question that the United States similarly faced, is how to give familiarity to a vast and expanding space. In drawing this comparison, I need to address two issues. First, there is the question of whether there are shared conceptions of space. John Tomlinson, for example, distinguishes between ancient and modern notions of space. The ancients are seen as having “neither the capacity for political and cultural integration over distance” nor “the social capacity to handle time and space as we routinely do in the modern world.” Rather, a sense of belonging tends to be local.8 In contrast, modern conceptions of space are seen as organized by the economic structures of global capitalism and the political exigencies of the nation-state.9 The space is integrated through vast transportation, communication, and exchange networks, but it is also segmented and parceled to control the use of different types of space and the movement of people within and between those spaces. There is now growing scholarship demonstrating not only the global interconnectedness occurring in Rome but also the variety of mechanisms for disciplining space and movement, especially amid a space that was both expanding and changing with the influx of different groups: the leveling of 8 9

J. Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 37, 40. See Lefebvre, Production; M. Kearney, “Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (March 1991): 53–55, though arguing that we are now in a transnational period; L. G. Basch, N. G. Schiller, and C. Blanc-Szanton, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (London: Routledge, 1994), 35–36. Recent work has begun identifying the complexity of place in what is variously described as transnationalism or translocalism. See Kearney, “Borders”; Gupta, “Song”; Munkelt, Stein, and Schmitz (eds.), Postcolonial.

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space (as Rome does with Carthage); the parceling of property and the imposition of concepts of private property (e.g., Livy 42.4.3–4);10 the construction of administrative divisions – municipia, coloniae, civitates, provinciae, and Italian regiones – which “often contradicted existing perceptions of space,” rendering unfamiliar what had been familiar;11 the mapping and reshaping of land and transportation networks to orient towns to these roads;12 the creation of land registers for census evaluations and to stabilize local hierarchies;13 and the introduction of such new customs as public spaces for holding markets and meeting in assemblies.14 The second issue is to clarify the unit of analysis. One could identify particular structural elements (e.g., of population pressures, economic pressures, labor pressures, land pressures, flows of wealth, and security) that shape the organization of space to make it usable. My focus is on the role of social actors who make choices about the organization of space, mediating between these larger structures and the cultural resources by which these choices are seen as important, and the space made familiar. Both the Roman and American disciplining of space and movement are certainly driven by the desire to establish administrative control and extract resources, but in both cases the actions are justified under a larger cultural guise of a civilizing mission: the promise of a new history.15 For the Romans, we see that civilizing mission articulated in the notion of humanitas, a term connoting an elite version of “culture and conduct” to which both Romans and the rest of humankind could aspire.16 Important here are two aspects of humanitas. First, the notion is not a binary (like Greek/barbarian) but points to gradations of progress from 10

11 12

13 14 15 16

M. Stahl, “Herrschaftssicherung und patronale Fürsorge: Zum Schiedsspruch der Minucier für Genua (CIL V 7749) und seiner Rezeption im frühen 16. Jh,” Historia 35 (1986): 280–307; Haeussler, Becoming, 111. Haeussler, Becoming, 152. There is also the creation by Augustus of eleven administrative regions. See Nicolet, Space, 194–203; Laurence, “Territory,” 106–8. On road systems, see R. Laurence, The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 1999); P. Zanker, “The City as Symbol: Rome and the Creation of an Urban Image,” in E. Fentress and S. E. Alcock (eds.), Romanization and the City: Creation, Transformations, and Failures: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy in Rome to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Excavations at Cosa, 14–16 May, 1998 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000), 25–41; Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 78; Haeussler, Becoming, 160. In the American context, see the important study by D. Martindale and R. G. Hanson, Small Town and the Nation: The Conflict of Local and Translocal Forces (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969). E. Gabba, “Per un’interpretazione storica della centuriazione Romana,” Athenaeum 63 (1985): 265– 84; Haeussler, Becoming, 162. Haeussler, Becoming, 55. See G. Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–58. Woolf, Becoming, 55.

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savagery to civilization by which people, potentially all people, can become “truly human.”17 Those gradations marked distinctions both within Rome and between Rome and other peoples. Second, Rome saw itself as the inheritor (from Greece) and the carrier of the civilizing mission. Cicero describes a time of savagery before humanitas (Cael. 26; also Vitr. De arch. 2.pref. 5; 2.1.6: savagery and rustic life to civilization), one that progresses through the Greeks (QFr. 1.1.27–28). But now it is by way of Rome in its invocation of a new history that other people can be civilized. Cicero describes Rome’s obligation to govern the barbarous nationes (QFr. 1.1.27–28), a notion repeated by Virgil (Aen. 6.851–53). Cicero credits Caesar’s extended command in Gades (now Cádiz in Spain) with introducing law and removing the “ingrained barbarity” of the people’s customs and institutions (Balb. 43). Pliny characterizes Rome as uniting scattered empires and bringing together jarring and uncouth tongues to give humankind humanitas (HN 3.39). Cassius Dio relates the gradual introduction of new practices to the Germans, and “under careful watching,” their gradually forgetting and “unlearning” their old ways (Cass. Dio 56.18.3).18 Tacitus describes, though ironically, how Agricola introduces humanitas to the Britons, making them more Roman in language, manners, and dress by altering the landscape from a scattered population to communities with temples, marketplaces, and houses, as well as educating the elite in the liberal arts (Agr. 21; also Plut. Sert. 14.2–3: really held captive under guise of education).19 In Cicero’s picture of the origin of states where “men roamed, scattered and dispersed over the country,” uncivilized men recognize the “treasonableness of human nature” and find the alternative to a “life of savagery” through the creation of law (Sest. 91–92). 17 18 19

Woolf, Becoming, 57. Translations are from Dio Cassius, Roman History, trans. E. Cary and H. B. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). On urbanization, see J. B. Ward-Perkins, “From Republic to Empire: Reflections on the Early Provincial Architecture of the Roman West,” Journal of Roman Studies 60 (1970): 1–19; W. L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, An Urban Appraisal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); J. Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); M. Pfanner, “Modelle römischer Stadtentwicklung am Beispiel Hispaniens und der westlichen Provinzen,” in W. Trillmich and P. Zanker (eds.), Stadtbild und Ideologie: die Monumentalisierung hispanischer Städte zwischen Republik und Kaiserzeit – Kolloquium in Madrid vom 19. bis 23. Oktober 1987 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, commissioned by C. H. Beck, 1990), 59–116; D. G. Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); K. Lomas, “Roman Imperialism and the City in Italy,” in Laurence and Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, 64–76; Woolf, Becoming; Zanker, “City”; Fentress and Alcock (eds.), Romanization and the City.

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The distinction between savagery and civilization appears in an American context, as well. Although Greg Woolf differentiates between the Roman conception of civilization and modern notions that see civilization as unnatural,20 they both overlap in the underlying teleology of human progress. In the American case, the language of progress derives from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sociocultural theories of evolution in which civilization is seen as evolving in stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization (notably, Lewis Henry Morgan), or hunting and gathering, nomadic, agricultural, and commercial (Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer). The evolution from savagery to civilization is placed in stark relief in such historiographies as Francis Parkman’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s, in which the progress of history is seen as a contest of races or nations, in this case a nation within a nation.21 In this clash of barbarism and civilization, as the secretary of the Interior concludes in 1883, not unlike the Romans before, “Civilization and savagery cannot dwell together.”22 The formulation in both a Roman and American context suggests one resolution to what Ricoeur refers to as “the heritage of founding violence,” and that is seeing the violence as one moment that disappears into the much larger progress of civilization.23 Although both Rome and the United States justify violence in the name of civilization, neither the securing of the new space into something familiar nor the violence associated with it ever gets completely resolved. The founding narratives contain within them an identification of space that is fluid. Inhabited space is conquered; whatever the place was before is displaced in the founding by newcomers. The diffuse boundaries imagined in the myth allow, in turn, for the entrance of new groups who threaten to undermine whatever certainty there might be about the familiarity of place. One need only recall the opening scenes of Josey and the Aeneid when Josey’s and Aeneas’ homes are destroyed, and both are thrown back into disorienting space. The narratives doubly remind us of the instability of place when the wanderers encounter the remnants of places that have been returned to the wild and original inhabitants who will soon be 20 21

22 23

Woolf, Becoming, 57. See F. Parkman, History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, and the War of the North American Tribes against the English Colonies after the Conquest of Canada (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1851); F. Parkman, “Review of The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America: Vol. 1 by Hubert Howe Bancroft,” North American Review 120 (1875): 34–47; T. Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1889). H. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882/1883), iii. Ricoeur, Memory, 58.

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violently displaced. Moreover, the narratives imagine a founding that is, itself, unbounded: not defined by city walls or a reclaimed territory but continually expanding to encompass a vast land. Rather than there being a linear movement from past to future, from wildness to civilization, and from space to place, there is, instead, an ever-present wildness – an equation with the vastness of space – that must be conquered, but continues to be retained within the founding memory. One might note Horace’s concern that with civil war, the ground will be returned to wild animals (feri) (Epod. 16.10) and barbarians (16.11), recalling how the Phoceans “abandoned their lands and ancestral gods, leaving their shrines to be occupied by boars and savage wolves” (16.18–21).24 The wild Stranger emerges in this context, not just as occupants of the space that precede the founding but also as a threat to undo the founding. The state disciplines the movement and space of the wild Stranger, altering space to erase memories of what came before, as well as constructing and connecting space to make it familiar. But in the cultural imagination the wild Stranger is frozen in time, given a prehistory against which the new history is affirmed.

The Samnites In Livy’s History, after the Second Latin War (340–338 bce), the Roman statesman and general Camillus puts in stark terms the two choices that he sees an incorporating community facing: “You may blot out all Latium, and make vast solitudes of those places where you have often raised a splendid army of allies and used it through many a momentous war. Would you follow the example of your fathers, and augment the Roman state by receiving your conquered enemies as citizens?” (8.13.15–16).25 As Camillus makes clear, being an enemy is not enough to make one a Stranger. In fact, Livy paints a picture of Roman and Latin homogeneity. He notes that Roman anxiety in preparing for war was “sharpened by the fact that they must fight against the Latins, who were like themselves in language, customs, fashion of arms, and above all in military institutions; soldiers had mingled with soldiers, centurions with centurions, tribunes with tribunes, as equals and colleagues in the same garrisons and often in the same maniples” (8.6.15). Cicero also affirms Rome’s founding identity 24 25

Translations are from Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. N. Rudd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Translation from Livy, History of Rome, vol. 4, bks. 8–10, trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926).

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when he notes that Romulus’ treaty with the Sabines taught us that “this State ought to be enlarged by the admission even of enemies as citizens” (Balb. 31). Cicero mentions some of those past enemies: Tusculum, Lanuvium, the Sabines, the Volsci, and the Hernici. But the Samnites are missing in the list of incorporated people (Balb. 31). The Samnites, though at one time allies through a treaty in which each side agreed to leave the other alone, and later defeated, were not part of the assimilating group. Nor would they become part of that group. Unlike these other Italian communities on Cicero’s list, the Samnites emerged in the Roman imagination – and to some extent were largely created as a singular entity by the Romans – as an abstracted image of wildness that both defined an unfounded space and differentiated a Roman identity in taming that space. Little is known of the origins of the Samnites, though there is some suggestion that they share a common ancestry with other Indo-European “safin-” groups, including the Sabines, who are the first to be “broken off” and joined in a relationship with the Romans.26 The designation “Samnite,” itself, also varied, used to refer to inhabitants of central and south Italy, to the four tribes – the Caraceni, Pentri, Caudini, Hirpini with their separate, independent political structures– and then, in an undifferentiated way, to those who remained hostile to the Romans. There were several factors that contributed to the Otherness of the Samnites. Roman conquest and incorporation were complicated because the Samnites were surrounded by barren territory; they lived in isolated, mountainous, dispersed villages with some city strongholds (Livy 9.13.7–8; Varro, Rust. 2.10.6; on urban areas, see Livy 9.42.6; 9.44.14; 10.34.7–8; 10.41.14; 10.43.5–7; Strab. 5.3.10; 5.4.11).27 They retained their Oscan language (while other non-Latin speaking areas began to petition to correspond in Latin28). Moreover, though they were comprised of a confederation of four Oscan speaking tribes, they also developed a “sentiment of shared ethnicity,” which was probably “catalyzed” by the confrontations with Rome in the mid-fourth and third centuries, which we know as the Samnite Wars.29 The Samnites continued to be depicted as 26 27

28 29

Dench, Barbarians, 204. On Samnium cities, see S. P. Oakley, The Hill-Forts of the Samnites (London: British School at Rome, 1995); H. Jones (ed.), Samnium, Settlement and Cultural Change, The Proceedings of the Third E. Togo Salmon Conference on Roman Studies (Archaeologia Transatlantica, XXII) (Providence, RI: Center for Old World Archaeology and Art, 2004); A. Faustoferri and J. Lloyd, “Monte Pallano: A Samnite Fortified Centre and Its Hinterland,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 11 (1998): 5–22. Habinek, Politics, 42: some uneasiness about “leveling of linguistic distinctions.” R. Scopacasa, “Building Communities in Ancient Samnium: Cult, Ethnicity and Nested Identities,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 33 (2014): 69–72; also E. Togo Salmon, Samnium and

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rebellious (Livy 8.17.8; 31.7.12) and anti-Roman (Flor. 1.11.7–8), remembered for the alliances with Rome’s other historic enemies, notably Hannibal, Epirus, and the Gauls. They were also among the most antiRoman of rebels in the Social War who, more than seeking citizenship and political protections, desired independence (e.g., Vell. Pat. 2.27.2–3) (notably minting their own coins of a bull – the symbol for Italy – goring a wolf, an image associated with Rome).30 And they were described as alone among the Latins to take up arms after the grant of citizenship, joining with Marius and Cinna against Sulla (Livy, Epit. 80), though likely staying out of any conflict after 87 bce.31 Stated slightly differently, to the Romans the Samnites did not appear to want to be Romans. The Romans, who generally preferred to incorporate, pursued the first of Camillus’ options: the separation and extermination of the Samnites.32 The Samnites came to be physically in the way as they expanded into the Middle Liris and Northern Campania – to relieve population pressures and acquire agricultural and mineral resources33 – and Rome moved into the same areas (including a colony at Fregellae [328 bce]), with increasing interests in trade and commerce, as well as security.34 With each Samnite defeat in the Samnite Wars as the Romans pushed outward, the Samnites suffered major losses (e.g., Livy 9.17.14; 9.31.16; 9.43.17; 10.42.5), their towns destroyed or looted (Livy 9.18.5; 9.31.5), and land confiscated and turned over to either private owners or converted to public lands. After the Romans established control, they displaced segments of the Samnite population with colonies at Beneventum (268 bce) (Livy 9.27.14; Per. 15) and Aesernia (263 bce) (which becomes the capital of the rebel resistance during the Social War). In 180 bce, Rome also established the colony of Apuan Ligurians (Livy 40.38). In 125 bce, Lucius Opimius destroyed Fregellae, an early colony where Samnites, bringing their Oscan language,

30 31 32

33

34

the Samnites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 96; C. Letta, “Dall’ ‘oppidum’ al ‘nomen’: i diversi livelli dell’ aggregazione politica nel mondo osco-umbro,” in L. A. Foresti, A. Barzanò, C. Bearzot, L. Prandi, and G. Zecchini (eds.), Federazioni e federalismo nell’Europa antica: Bergamo, 21–25 settembre 1992 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1994), 387–405; Dench, Barbarians, 202–3. E. T. Salmon, “The Cause of the Social War,” Phoenix 16 (1962): 118–19; Dench, Barbarians, 213–16; Strab. 5.4.2. Salmon, Samnium, 381–82. It is notable that despite the possibly early relationship of the Sabines and Picentes to the Samnites, and the different tribes amongst the Samnites, the Romans tended to view the Samnites as a block. See Dench, Barbarians, 203–8. On the Samnite economy and their linkages and trade, see D. Hoyer, “Samnite Economy and the Competitive Environment of Italy in the Fifth to Third Centuries BC,” in S. T. Roselaar (ed.), Processes of Integration and Identity Formation in the Roman Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 179–96. Salmon, “Cause,” 189–206.

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had migrated following the Second Punic War (the Hannibalic War) (Livy 41.8.8).35 The Samnites had been involved in five wars against Rome: the three Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290 bce), allying with Epirus in the Pyrrhic War (280–75 bce), and aiding Hannibal to a lesser extent in the Hannibalic War (216–201 bce). The Samnites would again be in the mix in the Social War (91–88 bce), a rebellion of Italian allies (socii) and one Latin colony, Venusia – Horace’s hometown in the heart of Samnite territory. A Samnite, Gaius Papius Mutilus, was chosen as one of the two consuls in the Italian cause; the Samnite territories were witness to some of the fiercest fighting. In Strabo’s account, Sulla gives us some sense of the enduring hold of the Samnites on the Roman imagination when he states that “not a Roman could ever live in peace so long as the Samnitae held together as a separate people” (Strab. 5.4.11; also Plut. Sulla 29.4 from Sulla’s Memoirs). To garner support for his return to Rome after the Social War, Sulla signed a treaty with the “Italic peoples,” though the Samnites were excluded from negotiations (Livy, Epit. 86).36 The Samnites soon recognized that they could not stay out of the struggle between Sulla and Marius following the Social War, so the Samnites joined forces with Marius. Sulla singled out the captured Samnites at Sacriportus and ordered them slaughtered (Plut. Sulla 28.8; App. B Civ. 1.87).37 The Samnites made one last futile effort to avoid destruction but were defeated for the last time at the Battle of the Colline Gate (Livy, Epit. 88.1: alone of the Italians not to lay down arms; Vell. Pat. 2.27; App. B Civ. 1.93; Plut. Sulla 29.2). The Samnites were separated out and killed (App. B Civ. 1.94), then any surviving Samnites of importance “destroyed” or banished (Strab. 5.4.11; App. B Civ. 1.95–96). From there their remaining lands were looted and confiscated, a path to wealth laid for the well-connected, and the rest of the lands made into ager publicus (App. B Civ. 1.96). After the Social War, they were defined as a municipium and placed in a tribe, the Voltina, that was reserved for them rather than being integrated into the other tribus rustica (a total of sixteen) created for the new Italian citizens. So they were slow to be enfranchised. Sherwin-White notes that the rebel troops, especially when they were comprised of “large ethnic groups,” were largely concentrated (with some exceptions) in seven tribes reserved for them (notably Voltinia for Samnites, Sergia for Marsi and Paeligni, and Arnensis for 35 37

Salmon, “Cause,” 110. 36 Salmon, Samnium, 382. The Samnites become associated with the most dangerous insurgents against Rome, which by this time are only the Pentri. See Salmon, Samnium, 343; Dench, Barbarians, 207–8.

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Frentani and Marrucini). We do not know the reasons for this. SherwinWhite does not see it as “malicious or partisan,” noting that the distributions were made by those sympathetic to the enfranchisement.38 We do not have to understand it as either malicious or partisan; rather, it may point to a more general and shared anxiety about the extent to which the groups with the most memory – that is, those who retained, or who were seen as retaining, their historical identities most exclusive of the Romans – were truly Roman. It was a way of keeping separate the most dangerous Strangers. It is not just that any vestige of Samnite power was destroyed; it is how Roman writings memorialized this invisibility. Florus comments, “The Romans so thoroughly subdued and conquered this people and so demolished the very ruins of their cities that to-day one looks round to see where Samnium is on Samnite territory, and it is difficult to imagine how there can have been material for twenty-four triumphs over them” (1.11.8–9).39 Strabo observes that their cities had been reduced to mere villages (5.4.11).40 Of those who survived, different Samnite local elites competed for prestige, some advancing in Roman politics, usually through individual patronage.41 Few show up as senators in the Republic, owing in part to views of their rural life as inferior, their history of antagonism, and their lack of easy access.42 When some Samnites – Horace and P. Vedius Pollio – appear under Augustus, they “seemed more like Romans than authentic Samnites” in their habits, language, and patriotism.43 As Salmon notes, “extermination, dispossession, and pauperization had done their work” in rendering the Samnites invisible.44 But there is a second aspect of the Samnite as Stranger that is in tension with the first. Consigning a people to oblivion means they are forgotten. But the Samnite as Stranger was remembered: abstracted and frozen in the Roman imagination at a particular point when Rome was asserting a territorial identity. They did not exist as a “polarity” like Hall sees as 38 39 40

41 42 43

Sherwin-White, Roman Citizenship, 156. Translations are from Florus, Epitome of Roman History, trans. E. S. Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). Dench, Barbarians, 133, suggests that the destruction of the Samnites was important to post-Sullan Roman ideology and may be exaggerated. On the efforts by Augustus to obliterate any remnants of a Samnite identity through urban renovation, see S. Collins-Elliot, “Social Memory and Identity in the Central Apennines under Augustus,” Historia 63 (2014): 194–213. See J. Patterson, “Settlement, City and Elite in Samnium and Lycia,” in J. Rich and A. WallaceHadrill (eds.), City and Country in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 1991), 157. T. P. Wiseman, New Men in the Roman Senate, 139 B.C. – A.D. 14 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 25–26, 29. Salmon, Samnium, 395. 44 Salmon, Samnium, 393.

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demarcating the Greeks from “the rest of the world”45 or like Dench sees as the Romans adopting this binary from the Greeks.46 In particular, unlike the unbridgeable gulf between Greek and barbarian, the Stranger was always potentially Roman. There were important points of intersection. Of all groups, they were most like the Romans in their ferocity: brutal (Livy 9.12.8; 9.31.2, 8; 9.43.1; 10.38.11), powerful in arms and resources (Livy 7.29.2), warlike (Sil. Pun. 10.314), and a source of terror (Livy 8.10.7). They were also rustic. Livy portrays them as montani atque agrestes who saw themselves as rugged and the surrounding people of the plains and coast as soft (9.13.7; also 7.30.12). Rusticity was also associated by way of the Sabines with Roman manliness by Cato the Elder and others. Owing to these shared characteristics, the Samnite Wars were recalled for the enormity of their sweep (Cic. Off. 1.38; Livy 8.23.9; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 17/18.3; App. Sam. 4.5). Livy puts into the voice of a Samnite envoy the claim that the First Samnite War would decide who will govern Italy (Livy 8.23.9). And Diodorus describes the Samnites as “fighting bitterly against the Romans for supremacy in a struggle lasting many years” (Diod. 19.72.3).47 Whether either side knew that they were fighting for peninsular control is uncertain. More important for our discussion here is how the conquest was given significance in the wake of the Social War as the critical moment in establishing Roman control of Italy. But as much as the Samnites were like the Romans, they could not be Roman. And they could not be because they were defined in a way that authorized Roman control over space. In the Roman imagination, the Samnites became tied to Rome’s construction of its own identity: to particular characteristics that explained not only that Rome ruled but why it should. The Samnites were not just rustics but primitives who lacked the Roman values of humanitas. They were treacherous (whereas Roman treachery was treated as necessary) (Livy 7.29.3–7 [iniustus]; 7.30.1– 23 [greed]; 7.30.12 [nefarius]; 8.3.2 [secretly concoct war]; 8.22.7 [infidus]; 8.24.6 [lack fide]; 8.37.2 [not hold to treaty]). They were less restrained compared to Rome’s restraint in exacting vengeance at Luceria (Livy 9.14.10–16). And there was also an exoticism that further abstracted the Samnite Stranger. They practiced mysterious rituals (Livy 10.38.5–6; 10.39.16), including retaining barbaric practices of human sacrifice (sacrifice children in the ver sacrum [Sisenna F119 Cornell = F99 Peter; Strab. 45 47

Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 3–4. 46 Dench, Barbarians, 50–66, 101. Translation from Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, vol. 10, bks. 19.66–20, trans. R. M. Geer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).

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5.4.12; Dion. Hal. 1.16.1–5 [aborigines]; compare to Cic. Font. 31). That exoticism extended to their colored tunics, white linen, and shields glittering with gold and silver (Livy 9.40.2–3, 16), which contrasted with the Romans who trusted in “iron and courage” and who believed that soldiers should be rough to look at (Livy 9.40.4–5). The Roman surrender in the Battle of the Caudine Forks (321 bce) was remembered for its humiliation (Livy 9.1.1; 9.5.11–14; 9.6.1–13; 9.38.4–5; 22.14.13–15; Front. Strat. 1.16; Amm. Marc. 25.11). The Samnites did not just defeat the Romans but almost conquered “Roman valor and independence” (Livy 9.6.13), a memory employed to demonstrate the danger of luxury and to further fashion a notion of Roman character as necessarily rugged. The image of the Samnites continued to live in the Roman imagination as the Romans equipped their gladiators in Samnite garb, the enemy fashioned into entertainment (Livy 9.40.17). The danger posed by the Samnites and the magnitude of the victories, including the vengeance for the surrender at Caudine Forks (Livy 9.14.10– 16; 9.15.8), affirmed Rome’s glory (Livy 7.29.3: empire exalted because of greatness of danger). The victory at Luceria after Caudine Forks so inspired Livy that he digresses on the greatness of Papirius and other Roman generals, comparing them favorably to Alexander the Great and Cyrus (9.16.19; 9.17.1 to 9.19.17). The Battle of the Colline Gate where the Samnites sought to destroy Rome (Vell. Pat. 2.27.2–3; Luc. Phars. 2.135– 38) was celebrated as a Roman national triumph for centuries (which is what one does against enemies). It is precisely the Samnite presence in the Roman imagination that served to affirm Rome’s conquest of space and the extension of place. The Samnite Wars were seen as a coming of age for Roman imperium and a critical step in creating a unified Italy.48 The once isolated Samnite territories were now connected by way of the Via Appia (begun in 312 bce) and the Via Valeria (begun in 306 bce), part of a large infrastructure system across Italy that provided a map of Roman territory. Traditional sites were largely abandoned. One sees the creation of cities in these formerly hostile territories as “a quite deliberate effort at suppressing the indigenous population and imposing urban culture of a Roman variety.”49 Among these cities was a new capital built at Paelignian Corfinium, once the rebel capital during the Social War, with a forum and senate house, 48 49

Laurence, “Territory,” 109, suggests that the use of ethnonyms for Augustus’ administrative categories and in descriptions of geographers was part of creating an imagined tota Italia. Lomas, “Roman,” 69.

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with local elites moving to the new municipium.50 The Stranger remained present, becoming part of Rome’s own memory: a reminder and remainder of Rome’s conquest and incorporation of Italy. Where the Greek as Stranger was used to affirm Rome’s ownership of itself in time, the Samnite as Stranger affirmed Rome’s ownership of space.

Native Americans The Native American looms like the Samnite as an image of untamed space and movement, whether as a constructed fantasy of the Other51 or as a people or peoples whose own sense of place, history, ceremony, and language was surprisingly resilient.52 The Indian Other appears as the Stranger: a proximate but unfamiliar presence who becomes frozen in the American imagination as occupying a space and possessing a genealogy that both precedes and threatens that founding. The legal instantiation of the Indian as Stranger can be seen in John Marshall’s opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (30 US 1 1831), in which, commenting that “in general, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other,” he characterizes their status as “denominated domestic dependent nations” (30 US 1 2). For Marshall, there were fundamentally different loyalties that separated the Indians from Americans. They were 50 51

52

Lomas, “Roman,” 66; Patterson, “Settlement,” 156–57. On the construction of the Indian as a dangerous Other, see the seminal discussion by T. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), on Columbus and European exploration. Also R. H. Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953); R. F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1978); B. W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); J. A. Clifton (ed.), The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990); and S. E. Bird (ed.), Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). See discussions of depictions of Native Americans in literature and film in J. Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and the important contributions to cultural studies by L. K. Barnett, The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975); L. Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); R. S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); C. Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); S. Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Slotkin, Regeneration; R. L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 2000); Prats, Invisible; Deloria, Playing Indian. See T. Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 23.

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a They: occupying the same space by their “right of possession” (30 US 1 2) but defined by their separate loyalties, cultures, and political systems (30 US 1 1). They were nations within a nation. Government policy fluctuated between extermination and resettlement (often joined), both with the same purpose: to render invisible the persistence of the past. At one point, Senator Dawes notes in the annual report of the Dawes Commission in 1894 – in language that parallels Rome’s attitude toward the Samnites before the wars – it appears reasonable “that these Indians could have set apart to them a tract of country so far remote from white civilization and so isolated that they could work out the problems of their own preservation under a government of their own.”53 The relentless push westward, though, made spatial separation less and less tenable so that America’s new history was brought continually into “collision” with its old.54 “The Indian can no longer hide himself in the fastness of the mountains or in the solitude of the wilderness,” the secretary of the Interior writes in 1883.55 The issue was no longer that the Indians posed any real danger to the survival of the nation. There were pockets of resistance, periodic raids, and outbreaks of hostilities, dutifully detailed in each Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (Santee War [1862], massacre at Sand Creek [1864], conflict with the Medocs [1873], Little Big Horn [1876], Nez Percé [1877], Ponca Affair with Standing Bear [1879], Wounded Knee [1890]). But as Secretary of the Interior Lamar states, the Indians are now an “inutile” group who pose little real threat to the US Government.56 Nor was the issue legal or moral control of the land. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano makes explicit what had been the implicit assumption of policy: By virtue of both superior power and a more advanced civilization, we have the “right to control the soil” and the “duty to coerce them, if necessary, into the adoption and practice of our habits and customs.”57

53

54

55 56 57

H. Dawes, M. Kidd, and A. McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” in Annual Reports of 1894, 1895, and 1896 [to the Secretary of the Interior] (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894, 1895, 1896), 16. C. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876/1877), ix; see also C. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870/ 1871), 7. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), iii. L. Q. C. Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884/1885), 24. C. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, (1871/1872), 4; also the “Report of the Commissioner of Indian

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In the decades after the Civil War, the “Indian problem,” as it was characterized,58 took on a different (though related) definition and solution than simply resettlement. If in some iterations of the founding myth, the Indian exists as an image of wildness that must be conquered, against the backdrop of an emergent commercial society this wildness appears as a case of “arrested progress” that threatens and must be incorporated into the new history.59 In a founding myth – now given a commercial guise – that celebrates the unleashing of individual potential, “the tribal relation” was seen as “a hindrance to individual progress.”60 In a myth that extolled a new ethos of labor, the tradition of holding property in common created (in language used of the “urban mob,” as well) “idle and insolent vagrants and paupers.”61 The Indian appeared as an unconstrained body roaming across an unbounded space, variously condemned for “living in the woods”;62 for their “roving habits”;63 for their lawlessness;64 as “outcasts and intruders”;65 for their “warlike passions” incited by their dances and feasts;66 for “their constitutional disrelish for toil”;67 all of which overlay earlier characterizations of Indian savagery, culminating in descriptions of “their barbarous habits”68 and the exaggerated accounts of their “barbarous outrages.”69 As Delano reports, “Little progress can be made in the work of civilization while the Indians are suffered to roam at large over immense reservations, hunting and fishing, and making war upon neighboring tribes.”70 Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller writes, “Humanity revolts at the idea of his destruction, yet it is far better that he should disappear

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Affairs,” in Z. Chandler, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874/1875), 739. For example, Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1876/1877), viii. Dawes, Kidd, and McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” 15. H. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880/1881), vii. Slotkin, Gunfighter, 91: “urban mob”; E. Smith, “Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,” in Chandler, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1874/1875), 729; also Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), viii: “beggars and thieves,” “pauperism and crime.” Dawes, Kidd, and McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” 15. Z. Chandler, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875/1876), vii. Dawes, Kidd, and McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” 17. Smith, “Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,” in Chandler, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1874/1875), 739. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), xi. Chandler, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1874/1875), 747; also Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 8. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1871/1872), 4. Dawes, Kidd, and McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” 17. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1871/1872), 6.

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from the face of the earth than that he should remain in his savage state to contaminate and curse those with whom he must necessarily come in contact in the future.”71 If the Indian body could not be removed, it could be disciplined, its space dispersed, and its genealogy remade as progressing to both commercial and Christian. Helpful here is Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of disciplinary methods in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that “became general formulas of domination,” encompassing new approaches to everything from prison reform to social reform and from medicine to education.72 The techniques that emerged were aimed less at controlling a population en masse and more at inculcating particular forms of “mastery of each individual over his own body” through a constant supervision and codification “that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.”73 Against the persistence of the traces of a history that preceded the founding, this new “humane”74 governmental policy enacted the myth of a new history that rested on a dislocation from the old, seeking to “dissolve” or to “break up the tribal system of government” and connections to the traditional authority of chiefs and medicine men.75 In doing so, they could accomplish “individuality in Indian manhood,”76 achieving “so complete an absorption of the Indians in our social and political system that they no longer appear as an incongruous and troublesome element.”77 The Indian would disappear into the new history, now being shaped by the forces of economic liberalism. My interest here is not to recount the different policies but to draw attention, instead, to the disciplinary language used by governmental officials aimed at enclosing, partitioning, training, and monitoring the movement of the Indian body in space. Enclosing and partitioning space. To regulate the “disturbances”78 posed by the Indian – which encompassed hostile encounters with settlers, various outbreaks, and roaming and hunting across the land – governmental policy aimed at what Foucault refers to as enclosure, “the specification of 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), iii. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 137. Foucault, Discipline, 137. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 3. C. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879/1880), 4. W. Vilas, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887/1888), xxix. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1876/ 1877), viii. C. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872/1873), 685; also Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1871/1872), 5: “circumscribing and confining the evil.”

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a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself.”79 The vagueness and permeability of previous boundaries had to be given more precision. As Secretary Teller recommends in his report: “One great difficulty in keeping the Indians on their reservation and the whites off is the uncertainty of the boundary lines. The exterior of all reservations should be surveyed, and plainly marked.”80 And once clearly marked, “the first step,” as Secretary Delano reports, “is fixed homes in the establishment and rigid enforcement of regulations to keep them all upon reservations” so that they “will be removed from such contiguity to our frontier settlements.”81 Where fixed boundaries are meant to contain bodies within a space, the further partitioning and enclosing of space is meant to organize what Foucault refers to as “confused, massive or transient pluralities.”82 Discipline, as Foucault writes, “proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.”83 Schools under contract with religious societies were built – and ultimately education made compulsory – for training in English, husbandry, agriculture, manual labor, and industrial education, and “girls should receive a good training in household duties and habits of cleanliness.”84 The boarding school, in particular, was seen as critical because it created an enclosed space that removed the child from the habits and influences of homelife.85 So too was the importance of schools that were outside the reservation. In 1878, Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz announced the experiment under the supervision of Captain Pratt, an ardent reformer, in which fifty Indian boys and girls from different tribes were sent to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia to be taught English and “thorough practical instruction in farming and other useful work, to be sent back to their tribes after the completed course.”86 Building on these successes, additional Indians were sent to Forest Grove in Oregon and the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, an institution built around military discipline, which recalls how the Romans sought to instill similar discipline among local troops in their camps (Plut. Sert. 14.1).87 To address the problem of 79 80 81 82 84 85 86 87

Foucault, Discipline, 141. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), xxix. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1872/1873), 688, 685. Foucault, Discipline, 143. 83 Foucault, Discipline, 141. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1876/1877), xii. C. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878/1879), 10. C. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877/1878), iv. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1878/1879), 11; Holm, Confusion, 20.

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those who, once graduating or returning to the tribe, were no longer under the “restraints, discipline and intelligent guidance” of school, government programs encouraged continued discipline through apprenticeships by farmers, skilled mechanics, workshops, or households.88 There were other types of training, such as “Indian auxiliaries” organized from different tribes under the supervision of military authorities, which served to help “keep the Indians on reservations and to prevent disturbances and conflicts.” As importantly, the auxiliaries would be “disciplined in the service of peace and order.”89 And there were ongoing efforts to regulate activities that were seen as obstructing discipline: the call to get rid of the medicine men who were seen as practicing magic and, more problematically, as holding an almost mystical authority that bound people to their ancient customs and rites;90 and prohibitions on dances, including bans on the Cheyenne performances of the Sun Dance in 1883 and at Tongue River in 1887 because they incited “warlike passions.”91 Like the exoticism attributed to Samnite rituals, the Indian dance was inextricably tied to the wildness of the Stranger, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 to suppress the Ghost Dance movement. But what was seen as the single greatest barrier to civilization was the tradition of holding property in common: an unbounded expanse that was seen as fostering idleness and discouraging industry.92 As Teller comments, civilization is slow to come “to those who wander without fixed homes.”93 Although the thought of transforming the Indian into the yeoman farmer was expressed since at least Washington and continued with Jefferson,94 beginning with the Allotment Law (also known as the Dawes Act [1887, repealed in 1937]) and extending to the Five Civilized Tribes and the Osage of the Indian Territory through the Curtis Act (1898), the president was authorized to divide Indian lands into 160-acre allotments per family and 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Vilas, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1887/1888), xxxvii. Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1877/1878), vi. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), xii. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), xi; see Holm, Confusion, 38–39. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1872/1873), 687. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), iv. For Washington, see Knox to Washington, July 7, 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 3: 134–41. For Jefferson, see Jefferson to Brother Handsome Lake, Nov. 3, 1802, in B. Oberg (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 38.628–31; to Homastubbee and Puckshunubbee, Dec. 17, 1803, in J. McClure (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 42.127–31; “Second Inaugural Address,” Mar. 4, 1805, in J. McClure (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 45.652–67; to Cherokee Nation, Jan. 10, 1806, “Founders Online,” National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-2979.

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open up any remaining lands to be sold.95 The explicit goal was “the extinguishment of the national or tribal title to any lands within that Territory now held by any and all of such nations or tribes, either by cession of the same or some part thereof to the United States, or by the allotment and division of the same in severalty among the Indians of such nations or tribes.”96 Doing this required a mix of negotiation, inducement, and coercion, as well as the creation of an administrative apparatus that would further quantify and categorize the Indian population. Agents were directed to complete a census of all adult male Indians, present or absent, belonging to the territory and another list of those twenty-one years and above and those eighteen to twenty-one and arrange lists so that “Indians of each band, respectively, shall, subject to the division in respect to age, be placed together.”97 (A renaming program to standardize names was instituted in 1900 to make easier the tracking of individuals and allotments.)98 Individuals in the tribes were required, as far as was found practicable, to scatter out upon the best lands of their reservations, build houses, wear the dress of civilized people, engage in some kind of industry, and practice the cultivation of the soil, so that when allotments should be authorized and made they would be able to select land upon which they lived and had made improvements.99

Land was fenced in for cultivation.100 Attendant with the idea of a fixed home was also a call for the adoption of “some system of marriage” in which the “Indian [would be] compelled to conform” to ensure care and support for the family.101 The Dawes Commission made clear how this new discipline would make possible their incorporation: Indians living in the woods are by the admission of their wisest men less civilized and fit for citizenship than they were twenty years ago. Theirs is 95 96

97 98

99 100 101

L. Q. C. Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885/1886), 4. D. M. Browning, Commissioner, Department of the Interior, to H. Dawes, M. Kidd, A. McKennon, Nov. 28, 1893, in G. Foreman (ed.), Foreman Transcripts: Superintendent for the Five Civilized Tribes, Muskogee, Oklahoma, vol. 20, Dawes Commission, 1, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma, https://www.okhistory.org/research/digital/foremantrans/foreman .sup20.pdf. Vilas, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1887/1888), clxxvii. See H. Garland and C. Garland, Companions on the Trail: A Literary Chronicle (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 136–39, and D. Littlefield and L. Underhill, “Renaming the American Indian: 1890–1913,” American Studies 12 (1971): 33–45. The program was largely under the direction of Hamlin Garland, aided by Charles Eastman. Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1885/1886), 24. Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1885/1886), 4. Teller, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1882/1883), xi.

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Monitoring. The valuation and normalization of this new disciplinary framework was reinforced through constant monitoring and measuring of progress. As the secretary of the Interior reports, we can only make citizens “of a race of unlettered barbarians” by slowly changing their habits through a policy developed “after a careful observance of the results of measures already in operation.”103 To provide for “increased vigilance,”104 a variety of administrative tools were put in place: a Board of Indian Commissioners – a voluntary board of Christian reformers with commercial interests – in 1869 for the purpose of “inspecting their condition, and observing the progress they were making in education”;105 agents from the religious associations associated with each reservation to report on the “christianization [sic] of the race”;106 inspectors to report on the condition of the tribes and to “enforce uniformity of management”;107 a call for “a carefully-devised system of accounts, uniform for all agencies, [to] be established, with the mode of issuing and accounting for all articles definitely prescribed”;108 and a recommendation that the commission “investigate and report” the different conditions, “peculiar circumstances, and needs,” of Indians living there to better adjust policy.109 In the normalization of conduct, categories of progress were established with individuals and tribes judged by way of these categories: the civilized (which included the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory and the Six Nations of New York), who were advanced in manners and morals, selfsupporting, and had written constitutions and laws; the semicivilized, who were “progressing in order and peace, improving in habits, and engaging in industrial pursuits” yet still dependent and required direction; and savages “who require constant watchfulness to restrain them from following their savage mode of life.”110 The Five Civilized Tribes were praised because of 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Dawes, Kidd, and McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” 15. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 8. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 5. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 3. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 3–4. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1870/1871), 3–4; also Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1876/1877). Chandler, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1874/1875), 663. Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1884/1885), 27. Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1885/1886), 24.

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how their spaces now resembled the reformer’s vision of a civilized society. As Lamar writes, “They have temples of justice, seminaries and high schools, and common schools scattered over their reservations; they have asylums for the orphans, the blind, the crippled, the insane, and the indigent.”111 Reports delineated by reservation quantified and showed statistical changes in population, square miles of land, types of schools, number of schools, number of teachers, number of pupils, acres cultivated, bushels of wheat, bushels of corn, bushels of oats, bushels of potatoes, tons of hay, horses owned, cattle owned, and hogs owned.112 To further normalize judgments of adherence to norms, different corrective punishments and rewards were imposed: “compulsory education” with punishment of withheld annuities; the payment of premiums “for the best cultivated farm above a certain established standard of excellence”; and a recommendation that Indians who could provide evidence that they had supported their families for a number of years could “be admitted to the benefits of the homestead act” and if they “detach themselves from their tribal relations, to the privileges of citizenship.”113 The process was one of rewarding individuals who separated themselves from their previous identities. Both the Samnites and Native Americans are placed in service to the transformation of space into place in the Roman and American founding narratives. Both foundings recount a notion of space as unbounded and treacherous: a dislocation from a prior home, a journey across uninhabitable space, and then a carving out of a place from a wild space that is, itself, unbounded. Cicero’s image of a world divided between cultivated and uncultivated space captures the expansiveness of the vision: not the boundaries of existent communities but an almost endless frontier that is transformed into a place. But both the Roman and American narratives of place contain within them the reminder of their temporality: how everything familiar can be undone and returned to wildness. The wild Stranger looms as this reminder, the memory of conquest serving as a moment of reassurance of the mastery of space – of making it both proximate and familiar – upon which a narrative of national identity is secured. 111 112 113

Lamar, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1885/1886), 19. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1871/1872), 4, 6–8; Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1879/1880), 5. Delano, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1871/1872), 4–5; Schurz, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (1876/1877), xi.

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Charles Eastman, Horace, and the Persistence of Bodily Memory There is no easy resolution to the tension between incorporation and estrangement, any more for Americans than for the Romans, because it is so embedded in the respective founding narratives. I do not mean to suggest that a founding narrative causes a particular treatment of Native Americans, any more than it did for the Samnites. What I am suggesting is that the founding narratives create a symbolic terrain by which individuals within communities think about themselves, including the language by which they understand the community and others within the community. Rather than seeing the construction of the Stranger as simply a failure to realize a founding myth of incorporation – a failure to live up to the ideals of a nation114 – I am interested in how the promise of a new history that is premised on dislocation from the old carries its own tensions. There is dissonance in how a community comprised of Strangers understands Strangers. One resolution to this dissonance is to put the founding myth in service to a notion of incorporation defined in increasingly impersonal terms: politically, as the extension of formal protections; socially and economically, as the conformity to rules of behavior. But unresolved is the more affective sense of belonging: how one locates oneself in space and time. What is most feared – what confronts a national identity constituted by Strangers – is the Stranger with a history. And, thus, the Stranger is constructed as a mechanism to affirm what are in fact the diffuse boundaries of a national identity, to give assurance of a genealogy and place. The founding narratives are about the dislocating journey into an unfamiliar land, but they are also about incorporating those who already inhabit that land. The language of incorporation disguises its violence: The Stranger as a historically constituted being is rendered invisible, either by the Stranger shedding his or her identity by way of a symbolic journey, or by being placed on the margins of society, confined to a reservation or urban ghetto, erased from textbooks, or exterminated. But there is a problem: humans do not forget. There is always a past that persists, whether in one’s own memories or in how one is remembered. Aeneas does not forget; nor do the members of Josey’s band. I ended Chapter 2 by exploring how Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois address the persistence of a genealogy marked by race and servitude. I build 114

Notably, G. Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944).

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on that discussion in this chapter by exploring the persistence of what I will refer to as bodily memory: the intimate way in which the sensation of both place and time are embedded in the experience of the body. The persistence of memory exists in dissonance with a founding myth of incorporation in which one seeks to, but is never fully able or allowed to, forget a past. In this section, I begin by looking at one experience of the disciplinary methods aimed at Native Americans, that of Charles Eastman (1858–1939) in his popularly received autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). Eastman reveals the persistence of bodily memory in the face of the disciplinary mechanisms of space, time, and movement. I end the section by looking at a Roman instance of bodily memory in Horace’s recollections of his Samnite past. I am shifting here from my earlier Foucauldian discussion of how space is disciplined to a more phenomenological account of the experience of that discipline. At first glance, Foucault and phenomenology form an uneasy alliance. Foucault criticizes how phenomenology conceptualizes “the event,” viewing it as either “facticity” that is then made into meaning through consciousness or a “domain of primal significations which always existed as a disposition of the world around the self.”115 I have suggested in the Introduction a different relationship between social structures and consciousness that does not depend on either a sovereign or transcendental consciousness. What I develop here is the insight that phenomenology can lend to my earlier Foucauldian discussion as well as to the broader discussion of memory and identity. Eastman, born a Santee Sioux and trained as a doctor, became an important spokesperson for retaining elements of Native American heritage while supporting their acculturation to White America through his work with the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, the Society of American Indians, and the Boy Scouts. Often criticized for what has been described as his naïve assimilationist views,116 his works do not contain any of the dramatic instances of coercion and suffering recounted by Zitkala-Ša or Luther Standing 115 116

M. Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 175. R. A. Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 7–8: “sentimental”; D. Lopenzina, “‘Good Indian’: Charles Eastman and the Warrior as Civil Servant,” American Indian Quarterly 27 (2003): 730: “somewhat oblivious to the exigencies of reservation life and the complex nature of the social ills most Native Americans faced”; H. D. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 163: “Social Darwinist.” Deloria, Playing Indian, 189: Eastman ends up “acting Indian, mimicking white mimickings of Indianness.”

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Bear.117 In many ways, and I think purposefully, Eastman’s work mimics the trajectory of a journey: from savagery to civilization, as an early review of From the Deep Woods noted;118 from the dark woods to civilization, as the book is titled; from fugitive to settled; from pagan to Christian; and from hunter to doctor. The book is structured as a traditional conversion narrative, though as one author notes, without any identifiable epiphanic moment.119 I think his account portrays a different type of journey: a disciplinary journey that is a type of violence exercised on the individual that is disguised in founding notions of incorporation and assimilation. Eastman’s account reveals how the disciplinary practices of acculturation alter identity by shaping the bodily experience of space and time. But the journey is neither linear nor totalizing: By exploring the experience of these practices, we see the fissures that open up within the system as past memories assert themselves, creating dissonance between a myth of a new place and traces of the old. Eastman journeys twice: first fleeing to Manitoba after the 1862 Sioux Uprising, where he is raised by his maternal grandmother and her family; then, at the age of fifteen going to live with his father in the Dakota Territory. His father had fought in the 1862 outbreak and had been presumed dead from either the battle or the mass hangings employed as punishment, but had survived, become a Christian, and was pardoned by Abraham Lincoln. Eastman’s account of his journey self-consciously mimics the founding myth, leaving behind the past as both a fugitive and exile for a new history. But he also reverses that myth, leaving “wild existence” and entering into commercial society, going from west to east, and in returning, imagining himself as “a pioneer in this new line of defense of the native American, not so much of his rights in the land as of his character and religion.”120 The mythical formation of an American character does not occur by replacing one past – the Indian legends that Eastman’s grandmother 117 118

119 120

Š. Zitkala, American Indian Stories (Washington, DC: Hayworth, 1921), 69; L. Standing Bear, My People, the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). For example, “Review of From the Deep Woods to Civilization,” North American Review 204 (1916): 948: “What really gives a special interest to Dr. Eastman’s reminiscences is the fact that in less than half a lifetime he has traversed the whole of the long path from savagery to civilization—no small achievement, nor a common one.” L. Tatonetti, “Disrupting a Story of Loss: Charles Eastman and Nicholas Black Elk Narrate Survivance,” Western American Literature 39 (Fall 2004): 282, 289. C. A. Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916), 3–4, 136, 188.

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recounts in the evening – with another: America’s own history. In fact, in Eastman’s account (like in The Outlaw Josey Wales) there is no mention of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or the Puritans and Pilgrims. Rather, he describes a different way in which time and space are organized, a regulation of the individual body that occurs, in Foucault’s words, “at the level of the mechanism itself – movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity; an infinitesimal power over the active body.”121 As Eastman recounts at one point, “I was now a stranger in a strange country, and deep in a strange life from which I could not retreat.”122 The strangeness lay in his encounter with the disciplinary mechanisms of American life. Eastman foregrounds how his wildness – the barbarous habits described by government officials – was organized by a particular conception of space and time: as a “manful and honest, unhampered existence” that was connected closely to place.123 As Holm notes, Native Americans referred to themselves as “the people of” a particular deity or territory, each distinct.124 The Sioux “roamed over an area nearly a thousand miles in extent,” in the winter dividing “into small groups or bands and scatter[ing] for the trapping and the winter hunt.”125 As a child, Eastman was “trained to be a warrior and a hunter” and “to harmonize . . . with nature.”126 This required a particular view of the body, as one both symmetrical and enduring – a house for the soul to live in – a sturdy house, defying the elements. I must have faith and patience; I must learn self-control and be able to maintain silence. I must do with as little as possible and start with nothing most of the time, because a true Indian always shares whatever he may possess.127

And his “superstitious” grandmother describes the seamlessness of past and present: “The Great Mystery cannot make a mistake. I say it is against our religion to change the customs that have been practiced by our people ages back – so far back that no one can remember it.”128 In his intersection with the reform policies of the late nineteenth century, Eastman portrays a different orientation of the body than from his boyhood, one in which space and time are now segmented, enclosed, specialized, and quantified. In Eastman’s first encounter with two boys while on horses on the way to the boarding school, he presents us with two different images of the body: his that folds into nature as he slides back and lays his head against the pony’s shoulder, and their more regimented bodies 121 124 127

Foucault, Discipline, 137. 122 Eastman, Deep Woods, 54. Holm, Confusion, 51. 125 Eastman, Deep Woods, 4–5. Eastman, Deep Woods, 2. 128 Eastman, Deep Woods, 24.

123 126

Eastman, Deep Woods, 6. Eastman, Deep Woods, 1–2.

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with their short haircuts as they ride “erect and soldier-like.”129 Activities were enclosed in spaces, continually juxtaposed in Eastman’s account to the openness and fluidity of Indian life: a church rather than “counsel” in the “thick woods”; a schoolhouse rather than “bird’s-track and fish-fin studies on the sands”; and a fenced-in property rather than the wide-open land.130 And the activities within those spaces were organized by a routine: Sunday was set aside as a day of worship; beds were made each morning and chores assigned; a bell announced the beginning of school, all with a “wearisome regularity” that was “like walking railway ties – the steps were too short for me.”131 The world itself was partitioned. And when the teacher placed before us a painted globe, and said that our world was like that – that upon such a thing our forefathers had roamed and hunted for untold ages, as it whirled and danced around the sun in space – I felt that my foothold was deserting me. All my savage training and philosophy was in the air, if these things were true.132

Time was partitioned, as well. “But how do you count the days, and how do you know what day to begin with?” I inquired. “Oh, that’s easy! The white men have everything in their books. They know how many days in a year, and they have even divided the day itself into so many equal parts; in fact, they have divided them again and again until they know how many times one can breathe in a day,” said White Fish, with the air of a learned man.133

Speech was partitioned into letters and words which seemed almost violently to impose themselves.134 As Eastman writes, “Like raspberry bushes in the path, they tore, bled, and sweated us – those little words rat, cat, and so forth – until not a semblance of our native dignity and self-respect was left.”135 Activities could be quantified. As his father exudes, “But here is a race which has learned to weigh and measure everything” and that everything included “time and labor and the results of labor.”136 Eastman contrasts the difference of this quantified world from his past: “Aside from repeating and spelling words, we had to count and add imaginary amounts. We never had had any money to count, nor potatoes, nor turnips, nor bricks. Why, we valued nothing except honor; that cannot be purchased!”137 But Eastman was brought to see the logic of economic behavior: “Later on, when Dr. Riggs explained to us the industries of the white man, his thrift and 129 131 133 136

130 Eastman, Deep Woods, 18, 20, 25, 44. Eastman, Deep Woods, 23, 26. Eastman, Deep Woods, 7, 22, 43, 46. 132 Eastman, Deep Woods, 47. 134 Eastman, Deep Woods, 20. Eastman, Deep Woods, 17. 135 Eastman, Deep Woods, 46. 137 Eastman, Deep Woods, 8. Eastman, Deep Woods, 47.

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forethought, we could see the reasonableness of it all. Economy is the able assistant of labor, and the two together produce great results.”138 Even the horse was for labor (we can recall Lone Watie’s statement in Josey that he did not surrender but his horse did). When he tells the boys that his horse had been used to hunt buffalo and in battles, they respond, “Well, as there are no more buffalo to chase now, your pony will have to pull the plow like the rest.”139 Commentators have seen a “blinding progressivist optimism” in his conversion to this “true” and “ideal civilization.”140 But this trajectory is continually interrupted in Eastman’s own narrative as memories resurface, both by what he is reminded of and how he is remembered.141 The topography of the American landscape as he journeys east gives physical form to – and suggests to some extent the inescapability of – the layering of memory. On his arrival at Beloit College in 1876, he remarks, “The college grounds covered the site of an ancient village of mound-builders.”142 Seeking a job on a farm that summer, he set out “in a southerly direction” and states that “as I walked, I recalled the troubles of that great chief of the Sac and Fox tribe, Black Hawk, who had some dispute with President Lincoln about that very region.”143 When his train pulled into Chicago as he was heading to Dartmouth to finish his college degree, Eastman recounts: “I had in mind the Fort Dearborn incident, and it seemed to me that we were being drawn into the deep gulches of the Bad Lands as we entered the city. I realized vividly at that moment that the day of the Indian had passed forever.”144 Leaving Albany, I found myself in a country the like of which, I thought, I would have given much to hunt over before it was stripped of its primeval forests, and while deer and bears roamed over it undisturbed. I looked with delight upon mountains and valleys, and even the little hamlets perched upon the shelves of the high hills. The sight of these rocky farms and little villages reminded me of the presence of an earnest and persistent people. Even the deserted farmhouse, the ruined mill, had an air of saying, “I have done my part in the progress of civilization. Now I can rest.” And all the mountains seemed to say, Amen.145

At Dartmouth, “away up among the granite hills,” Eastman surveys the “rugged and wild” country and reflects: “Thinking of the time when red 138 141

142 145

Eastman, Deep Woods, 47. 139 Eastman, Deep Woods, 19. 140 Warrior, Tribal, 7, 48, 57. Some scholars, however, have questioned the view of Eastman as simply assimilationist. See G. P. Coskan-Johnson, “What Writer Would Not Be an Indian for a While? Charles Alexander Eastman, Critical Memory, and Audience,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 18 (2006): 105–31. Eastman, Deep Woods, 52. 143 Eastman, Deep Woods, 56. 144 Eastman, Deep Woods, 62. Eastman, Deep Woods, 64.

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men lived here in plenty and freedom, it seemed as if I had been destined to come view their graves and bones.” He determined, instead, to continue in the struggle to save the Indian “from extinction.”146 Eastman at one point remarks how the younger generation of Indians “have really become an entirely different race” after years of being trained in white ways.147 His Indian boyhood, to recall the title of his first autobiography, remains with him as he imagines himself in that moment as “a warlike Sioux, like a wild fox” who had found its way into “this splendid seat of learning.”148 He sees, as well, the Old Oak Tree on the campus where the “Indians were supposed to have met for the last time to smoke the pipe of peace,” now appropriated by civilization as “under its shadow every graduating class of my day smoked a parting pipe.”149 While at Boston University to pursue his medical degree, he would attend Mr. Moody’s summer school in Northfield, which was created to provide a Christian education for students who might not have other educational opportunities. He recalls a conversation with Moody: “One morning as we walked together, we came to a stone at the roadside. ‘Eastman,’ said he, ‘this stone is a reminder of the cruelty of your countrymen two centuries ago. Here they murdered an innocent Christian.’”150 Eastman responds ironically: “‘Mr. Moody,’ I replied, ‘it might have been better if they had killed them all. Then you would not have had to work so hard to save the souls of their descendants.’”151 And at Pine Ridge Indian agency, where he takes his first position as a doctor, he encounters Blue Horse, who embodies this layering of history: he fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn, served as one of the first Sioux army scouts, traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, carried with him his worn military papers that served as his “credentials,” and spent the evening telling “the tale of his exploits.”152 Even on Issue day, when the Indians who are scattered over the reservation come for rations, Eastman describes the scene as “a veritable ‘Wild West’ array that greeted [his] astonished eyes.”153 It is not just what Eastman remembers; it is what his body recalls to others. His skin marks him. The Buffalo Bill shows of the era froze the image of the Indian in time as a potential menace that was also a curiosity, like the Samnite gladiator put on display. And there was no shortage of frenzied reports of Indian barbarism. Even the Dawes Commission, a commission of reformers, reports, “A reign of terror exists, and barbarous 146 149 152

Eastman, Deep Woods, 65. Eastman, Deep Woods, 69. Eastman, Deep Woods, 78.

147 150 153

Eastman, Deep Woods, 164. Eastman, Deep Woods, 74. Eastman, Deep Woods, 79.

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148 151

Eastman, Deep Woods, 68. Eastman, Deep Woods, 74.

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outrages, almost impossible of belief, are enacted.”154 With the memory of Custard’s army just three months old, Eastman is reminded as he arrives at Beloit that he is Sitting Bull’s nephew by the joking refrain of another student that “likely he’ll have your scalp lock before morning!”155 The Indian remained the ever-present enemy. And Eastman’s own consciousness of himself becomes filtered through the gaze of those he encounters. When he seeks work after his first year at Beloit, as the door of the first farm he tries is opened, “I read in her clear blue eyes the thoughts that passed through her mind.”156 He introduces himself as a student at Beloit, to which the farmer responds, recalling the 1862 Sioux Uprising and the 1812 Battle of Fort Dearborn: “‘Oho! you can not work the New Ulm game on me. I don’t think you can reproduce the Fort Dearborn massacre on this farm. By the way, what tribe do you belong to?’ ‘I am Sioux,’ I replied. ‘That settles it. Get off from my farm just as quick as you can! I had a cousin killed by your people only last summer.’”157 Even the less overtly fearful responses still reveal Eastman’s status as a Stranger, subject to continual scrutiny. At points, Eastman seems too willing to accommodate stereotypes, such as when he dresses up as an Indian at Dartmouth to sell goods in a scheme concocted by a friend, or when he portrays himself as a Turk for business purposes, never answering “any direct questions on the subject of my nativity.”158 But these moments make all the more serious the discomfort he conveys at always being seen through the eyes of another. On the train going east, Eastman recounts how we had not gone far when a middle-aged man who had thoroughly investigated my appearance both through and over his glasses, came to my seat and without apology or introduction began to bombard me with countless questions. “You are an Indian?” he began. “Yes,” I murmured. “What is your tribe?” “Sioux.” “How came you so far away from the tribe? Are you a member of Sitting Bull’s band? Are you related to him?” he continued. I was greatly relieved when he released me from his intrusive scrutiny. Among our people, the children and old women sometimes betray curiosity as regards a stranger, but no grown man would be guilty of such bad manners as I have often met with when traveling.159

But it is in his work as a physician at Pine Ridge that he is confronted most dramatically with the dissonance between what it means to be an 154 155 158

Dawes, Kidd, and McKennon, “[Dawes] Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes,” 17. Eastman, Deep Woods, 53. 156 Eastman, Deep Woods, 56. 157 Eastman, Deep Woods, 57. Eastman, Deep Woods, 70. 159 Eastman, Deep Woods, 63.

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“Indian white doctor” – a fused amalgam of old and new by which he imagines himself as able to see and act from the perspective of both cultures (“no interpreter needed,” Eastman proudly exclaims) – and what, in fact, white culture sees.160 Participants in the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement aimed to reunite the living with the dead and usher an Indian revival, were facing threats of force by the government. For Eastman, it seems that “the craze would die out of itself before long” without any force.161 Eastman’s first impulse is to return to his work and, as tensions escalate, to negotiate the situation, all while he becomes increasingly aware of the “ruthless fraud and graft practiced upon a defenseless people.”162 When the buffalo soldiers arrive, Eastman notes how the press “seized upon the opportunity” to predict an “Indian uprising,” noting as well how “the poor Indians are as badly scared as the whites and perhaps with more reason.”163 After the army opened fire on Wounded Knee with four Hotchkiss machine guns, the cavalry returned with their dead and wounded, as well as some of the wounded Lakotas. On the third day, after a blizzard, an expedition went to see if there might be others who were left wounded. Eastman describes the scene: Fully three miles from the scene of the massacre we found the body of a woman completely covered with a blanket of snow, and from this point on we found them scattered along as they had been relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered while fleeing for their lives. Some of our people discovered relatives or friends among the dead, and there was much wailing and mourning. When we reached the spot where the Indian camp had stood, among the fragments of burned tents and other belongings we saw the frozen bodies lying close together or piled one upon another. I counted eighty bodies of men who had been in the council and who were almost as helpless as the women and babes when the deadly fire began, for nearly all their guns had been taken from them. A reckless and desperate young Indian fired the first shot when the search for weapons was well under way, and immediately the troops opened fire from all sides, killing not only unarmed men, women, and children, but their own comrades who stood opposite them, for the camp was entirely surrounded. It took all of my nerve to keep my composure in the face of this spectacle, and of the excitement and grief of my Indian companions, nearly every one of whom was crying aloud or singing his death song.164

When the Indians who had been ordered to vacate their houses return, they find them “pillaged.”165 Eastman provides what is perhaps his most critical 160 163 165

Eastman, Deep Woods, 81. 161 Eastman, Deep Woods, 88. 162 Eastman, Deep Woods, 99. Eastman, Deep Woods, 102–3. 164 Eastman, Deep Woods, 111–12. Eastman, Deep Woods, 116.

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assessment of government actions: “I have tried to make it clear that there was no ‘Indian outbreak’ in 1890–91, and that such trouble as we had may justly be charged to the dishonest politicians, who through unfit appointees first robbed the Indians, then bullied them, and finally in a panic called for troops to suppress them.”166 It is that sensibility and outspokenness that led the Indian agent to begin a program of harassment to make Eastman’s position “intolerable,” leading to his resignation.167 In reassessments of Eastman, he has been variously viewed as offering “a reimagined Indian-ness” by being authentic in both settings and being able to be a subject in both settings,168 as moving “fluidly between dominant/non-dominant perspectives,”169 as containing in his writings a “subversive rage and resistance,”170 or as a “cultural orphan” who is conscious of his “labored construction of identity.”171 I have come at Eastman’s work from a different perspective, viewing it as a tale of incorporation that replicates and problematizes the myth of a founding identity. The myth imagines a new history that is made possible by a dislocation in both time and place from the old, in this case through the disciplinary mechanisms of reform policies. For Eastman and for other Native Americans, that dislocation is a story of exile – of continually being moved from their lands by the founding. But Eastman’s depiction of his experiences is also epistemic, going to the foundational ways in which the relationship to time and space is understood as a bodily phenomenon. Eastman conveys the tensions that reside in a founding narrative in which incorporation rests on a progressive journey of memory, identifying a persistence and burden of memory (both of himself and of others toward him) that exposes the fissures of identity.172 It is striking that Eastman ultimately chooses memory over incorporation, retreating to a cabin in upstate New York. 166 168 169 171 172

Eastman, Deep Woods, 117. 167 Eastman, Deep Woods, 122. M. Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” College Composition and Communication 53 (2002): 418. Tatonetti, “Disrupting,” 287. 170 Coskan-Johnson, “Writer,” 129. Lopenzina, “‘Good Indian’,” 740. There are some contemporary fictional accounts that explore these fissures of identity. B. Wood and J. Giampoli’s Rome West (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2018) is a graphic novel that imagines an alternate founding in which Romans accidentally land in America and intermarry with Native Americans, successfully fending off Columbus. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which premiered on Broadway in 2010, uses the form of a rock-opera to seemingly exalt in Jackson’s celebrity while exposing the backdrop of Native American extermination. Tracy Letts’ play The Minutes, which appeared at the Steppenwolf in 2020 and will be returning in 2022, explores the missing minutes of a small town in Illinois that reveal, as they seek to hide, a suppressed Native American history.

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Although access to personal experiences is complicated, classical scholars are beginning to explore this persistence of the past, not just as particular institutional forms or structural conditions but as embodied memories in ancient Rome.173 Groups maintaining their own histories and identities against assertions of juridical incorporation include the Jews,174 the Gauls, Germans, and people of Spain,175 the Sardinians,176 the Britons,177 the early Christians,178 the Berbers,179 and the Donatists.180 So too Horace, who born in Venusia, recalls these memories. Venusia, lying on the border of Samnium, Lucania, and Apulia, was a Samnite city (after an invasion by the Samnites) that was conquered by Rome in 291 bce and then colonized – a Roman city on a hill in the midst of Samnite lands. It was also the only Roman colony to defect during the Social War (possibly fostered, in part, by continued Oscan settlement in the colony). Horace signals the enduring hold of the memory of the Social War, recalling the otherwise “oblivious” wine jars from more peaceful times that remember the Marsum duellum, Horace’s term for the Social War (Odes 3.14.18).181 Although now in Augustus’ court, Horace describes the “plain” (campus) fattened by Latin blood (Odes 1.1.29–30) and the sea (gurges) and rivers (flumina) stained with blood (Odes 1.1.33–35; also 1.35.33–34; Epod. 7.3–4). But he also references 173

174

175 176 177

178 179 180

181

See the excellent discussion in L. Meskell, “The Somatization of Archaeology: Institutions, Discourses, Corporeality,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 29 (1996): 1–16, in thinking about the role of the body in archaeology. Although the details are unknown, it appears that Jews, who of all groups maintained the most separate community and identity, were expelled in 139 bce because they tried “to infect Roman manners [Romanos inficere mores]” with the cult of the Asian god Jupiter Sabazius (Val. Max. 1.3.3). On Jewish identity, see Noy, Foreigners, 287. On the expulsion, see Noy, Foreigners, 41–42. There are also expulsions in 19 ce when four thousand Jews were sent to Sardinia as well as those practicing Jewish and Egyptian rites. Tac. Ann. 2.85; Suet. Tib. 36; Josephus, Ant. 18.65–84; Sen. Ep. 108.22; Cass. Dio 57.18.5a. A. King, Roman Gaul and Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Johnston, Sons of Remus. P. van Dommelen, “Punic Persistence: Colonialism and Cultural Identities in Roman Sardinia,” in Laurence and Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, 25–48. J. C. Barrett, Andrew P. Fitzpatrick, and Lesley Macinnes, Barbarians and Romans in North-West Europe: From the Later Republic to Late Antiquity (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1989); D. J. Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC–AD 409 (London: Allen Lane, 2006). A. Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016). M. Rachet, Rome et les Berbéres: Un Problème Militaire D’Auguste à Dioclétien (Brussels: Latomus, Revue D’Études Latines, 1970). W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); B. D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). R. G. M. Nisbet and N. Rudd, A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 188.

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more specifically the Samnites being driven out of Venusia, marking the blurring of these geographic identities. He it is I follow – I, a Lucanian or Apulian, I know not which, for the settlers in Venusia plough close to the borders of both lands. Thither they were sent, as the old story goes, when the Samnites were driven out, and to this end, that no foe might ever assail the Romans through an open frontier, whether the Apulian race or whether Lucania lawlessly threatened any war. (Sat. 2.1.34–39)

But Horace also depicts the bodily memories and movements associated with this landscape, seeking, like Eastman does, to valorize it: “A stream of clear water, a few acres of woodland, a harvest that never lets me down” (Odes 3.16.29–30), in contrast with those who seek relief in “Phrygian marble, or the wearing of clothes brighter than Sidon’s purple, or Falernian vines, or Persian spikenard,” or in the struggle “to build a towering hall in the modern style with a doorway that arouses envy” (Odes 3.1.40–47). Recalling the simplicity and frugality of his life, Horace asks, “Why should I change my Sabine valley for riches that will bring an increase only of trouble?” (Odes 3.1.47–48; also 2.18.13). “Happy the man who, far from business concerns, works his ancestral acres with his oxen like the men of old” (Epod. 2.1–2; also 16.41–44: rusticity; Odes 1.1.11–12: tilling; 1.20.1–12 and 3.16.44: frugality). The landscape is connected to a set of habits: Often, by way of a change, swift Faunus comes from Lycaeus to my delightful Lucretilis and unfailingly protects my goats from the blazing summer heat and rainy winds. The wives of the malodorous spouse wander unharmed through the safe woodland in search of concealed arbutus leaves and thyme; the kidlings, Tyndaris, have no fear of green snakes or Mars’ wolves, when the valleys and smooth rocks on the slopes of Ustica echo to his sweet pipe. The gods watch over me; the gods are pleased with my devotion and my Muse. Here in your honour Plenty will flow to the full, rich with her horn that pours out the glories of the countryside. (Odes 1.17.1–16)

Employing the more inclusive Sabellus to include groups like the Samnites with the Sabines,182 Horace suggests that the fiercest of Rome’s soldiers 182

Salmon, Samnium, 32–33, and G. Farney, “Roman Plural Identity,” in J. McInerney (ed.), A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 450, see Sabellus as a term used to avoid the taint of prejudice associated with the Samnites. Dench, Barbarians, 103–8, 223–26, modifies these claims, arguing that the name adds a foreign aura to the Sabines (as it includes a Samnite connection) without taking on the less desirable qualities of Samnites. Mentions of the Sabelli include Varro, Men. fr. 17 (Astbury); Hor. Sat. 1.9.29–30; 2.1.34–9; Hor. Epod. 17.27–29;

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The Wild Stranger and the Conquest of Space

were the “manly children of peasant soldiers, who had been taught to turn the sod with a Sabellian mattock, and on the instructions of their stern mother to cut and carry firewood, when the sun was lengthening the shadows on the hillside, lifting the yoke from weary oxen and bringing on the cheerful hour with his departing car” (Odes 3.6.33–44). In contrast, “The freeborn boy is so green that he doesn’t know how to hold his seat on a horse and is afraid of hunting; he is more skilled at games, whether you ask him to play with a Greek hoop or, if you prefer it, with the dice that are forbidden by law, while his father’s deceitful word of honour defrauds friend, partner, and guest in his eagerness to hand on money to his worthless heir” (Odes 3.24.45–62). The Stranger never completely leaves behind the familiarity of bodily memory: the habits connected to one’s relationship to place. There is an indeterminacy and enduring unfamiliarity that resides in a founding narrative unbounded by space or time. Globalization and what is referred to as translocalism have only magnified the fluidity of space and time as groups more easily flow across boundaries.183 The diffuseness of boundaries heightens the dissonance of memory of those who are a collectivity comprised of Strangers, each of whom carries their own histories. We have seen different attempts at addressing this tension. Individuals are rendered invisible: their histories erased, and their bodies either banished or abstracted, defined as juridical subjects. The political rhetoric of constructing a wall coupled with the language of religious or ethnic origins is simply the most recent effort to resolve this tension as it seeks to freeze the founding myth, both securing a national space in the most concrete terms imaginable and defining some purer version of the past that is threatened by the present Stranger.184 Cato the Elder, Cicero, Varro, Webster, Washington, Du Bois, Eastman, and Horace are each engaged in constructing narratives of national identity – who we are and want to be as a community – that require locating oneself in space and time. Each of these individuals is struggling to maintain what John Milbank and Adrian Pabst call an “overarching psychic community” in which people see themselves as

183 184

Hor. Epist. 1.16.49; Hor. Odes 3.6.37–41; Livy 8.1.7; 10.19.20; Vir. G. 2.167–9; Aen. 7.665; 8.510–11; Strab. 5.4.12; Plin. HN 3.107; Juv. Sat. 3.168–70; Mart. Epigr. 4.46; 7.85; 9.19; 12.39; Sil. Pun. 4.219–21. See the collection in Munkelt, Stein, and Schmitz (eds.), Postcolonial. On conceptions of the wild Stranger in immigration debates, see P. P. Chock, “Remaking and Unmaking ‘Citizen’ in Policy-Making Talk about Immigration,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 17 (1994): 45–55.

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actors in their own history, connected to other actors in their histories, that collide with a founding narrative that calls for a dislocation from those histories.185 Both the Roman and American founding myths imagine a journey of Strangers who are dislocated from old genealogies and places. The Stranger persists as a way to assert, however paradoxically and untenably, the collective identity of a community comprised of Strangers. 185

J. Milbank and A. Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 31.

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chapter 4

Playing Culture Combat Spectacles and the Acting Body

They stood on tiptoes, holding their arms high up to the sky. Then [Dares and Entellus] bobbed around, keeping their heads out of range, feinting with their hands, sparring for an opening . . . The men threw many useless punches, but landed many too, hitting hollow flanks, thumping each other’s chests. Often their hands strayed to ears and heads. Their jaws rattled with the impact.

(Virg. Aen. 5.428–36)

The founding narratives of both Rome and the United States foreground the dislocation of individuals from their own past and place, celebrating their nations as an asylum for those exiled by misfortune. That dislocation is the paradoxical basis for a new history and national identity in which individuals can progress from misfortune to fortune, from poverty to wealth, and from powerlessness to power. But the diffuseness of the boundaries gives rise to a question of identity: If everyone can potentially be Us, then who are We? Thus far, I have explored several elite efforts to valorize a particular version of a Roman or American identity that imposed, or sought to impose, particular bodily practices. Cicero, the new man, like Webster in the United States, privileged a particular version of urban cultivation against the influx of provincialism. Habits of dress or styles of living served to contrast the wildness of the Stranger – the Samnite and Native American – with the promise of a new age. But exorcizing these lowly origins from a narrative premised on these origins – Romulus’ cesspool and Crèvecoeur’s wretches – is not so easy. The reason for that difficulty, as I have been suggesting throughout the book, is twofold. First, we inhabit lifeworlds that contain within them a vast array of assumptions, images, myths, and symbols that are not just ambiguous at points but may actually be in tension with each other. For every Cicero, there was a Cato the Elder or Marius who celebrated Roman 132

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rusticity. For every Webster, there was a Daniel Boone who could live and fight in the wilderness. Second, individuals are not just situated within a culture, embodying the enactment, internalization, and naturalization of imposed meanings. Rather, bodies are also what Simone de Beauvoir refers to as a situation: “It is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects.”1 As the body is “subjected to taboos and laws,” Beauvoir continues, “the subject gains consciousness of and accomplishes himself. He valorizes himself in the name of certain values.”2 The valorization could reference the dominant values of the culture; for example, the claims of privilege by patricians who inherited their auctoritas (an influence or authority derived from prestige). The valorization could be modifications of the dominant values, as we see with the self-conscious styling of Cicero as a new man with a patrician lineage making a claim for his own earned auctoritas. Or the valorization could arise from a resistance to, or recasting of, the taboos and laws, giving value to what had been devalued. We get a hint of this with Charles Eastman, whose own bodily memory leads him to reassess the judgment of his Native American beliefs and practices as taboo. The Stranger – the individual who is present within, but defined as a threat to, the culture – comes to valorize some of the Strangeness. In this chapter, I look at the combat spectacles of professional (or contract) gladiators (auctorati) and American bare-knuckle fighters in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Wiedemann, whose study remains the most important discussion of Roman gladiators, argues that the arena is the place “where the civilised world confronted lawless nature,” the ordered world juxtaposed to and in control of chaos.3 The gladiatorial arena, boxing ring, and the stage are interesting cultural spaces because they seem to provide a demarcated space in which spectators can watch just this sort of confrontation and resolution. The wild, violent bodies were banned: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections, and boxing matches outlawed through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. Both bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And both bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. 1 2 3

S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 46. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 47. T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992), 179.

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The problem is this. The boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body came to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

Interpreting the Combat Body My interpretive approach to combat spectacles stands in contrast to two other perspectives (I will discuss the scholarship on boxing later, but the argument I am making here applies). The first is a functional approach in which the institutional and ritual aspects of the contests are seen as fulfilling particular functional needs of a society. From this perspective, the spectacles are seen as enabling, demonstrating, reconfirming, or reasserting particular values or needs of the culture. We have already seen how Wiedemann views the gladiatorial contests as affirming the triumph of civilization over wildness. Wiedemann also joins others in interpreting the arena as a site of death and rebirth, “enabling individuals to come to terms with their mortality by reflecting on the unprecedented power and continuity of Rome’s universal rule.”4 A second approach views the contests as 4

T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 180; also T. Wiedemann, “Single Combat and Being Roman,” Ancient Society 27 (1996): 103: contests “as a demonstration of the power to overcome death.” The connection to death is not just that gladiators died; it is related back to the association of the contests, beginning with the funeral of Junius Brutus in 264 bce and extending to Augustus, with commemorating, by way of an offering, an individual who had died. Thus, the contest was called a munus, or funeral obligation, and spectators wore the pullum, a dark funeral garb rather than a toga. Functional arguments are also made by T. Bollinger, Theatralis licentia: Die Publikumsdemonstrationen an den öffentlichen Spielen im Rom der frèüheren Kaiserzeit und ihre Bedeutung im politischen Leben (Winterthur: Hans Schellenberg, 1969): provide forum for expression; R. Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), 24–30: nourishment for passions; G. Ville, La gladiature en Occident des origines à la mort de Domitien (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981), 17; P. Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism, O. Murray (ed.), trans. B. Pearce (London: Allen Lane, 1990): provide gifts and entertainment; M. Wistrand, Entertainment and Violence in Ancient Rome: The Attitudes of Roman Writers of the First Century A.D. (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1992), 322: form of social control in place of politics; C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993): response to loss of ability to gain honor; J. P. Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995), 3–4, 34–52: reflect idealized vision of social relations and identity; P. Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicide (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995): process violence; J. C. Edmondson, “Dynamic Arenas: Gladiatorial Presentations in the City of Rome and the Construction of Roman Society during the Early Empire,” in W. J. Slater (ed.), Roman Theater and Society: Salmon Conference Papers I (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 69–112: helps shape social order; A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The

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the site of inscribed material and social relations of power.5 The social agent unconsciously and unreflectively internalizes social dispositions. The male body, as one ancient historian writes, “was a surface upon which power relations were mapped.”6 From this perspective, the individual exists as a passive representation of, or site inscribed by, social norms and relations.7 There is a tidiness in these perspectives. In one, the parts contribute to the stability of a unified culture; in the other, the structures, whether material or social, impose themselves on an unreflective agent. I take seriously Foucault’s own cautionary statement against approaches premised on a unified cultural system. In describing the field of power relations, Foucault notes the “plurality of resistances” that “traverses social stratifications and individual unities.”8 There is for Foucault “no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial,” but all of them a part of the field of power relations.9 I look at one such source of

5

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8 9

Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997): expiation for changes; A. Yakobson, Elections and Electioneering in Rome: A Study in the Political System of the Late Republic (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999): part of electioneering. K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” The Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 72: reinforce penal system; E. Rawson, “Discrimina Ordinum: The Lex Julia Theatralis,” in E. Rawson (ed.), Roman Culture and Society: Collected Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 508–45: reinforce hierarchy; E. Gunderson, “The Ideology of the Arena,” Classical Antiquity 15 (1996): 116: organization of arena is a “mapping of a technology of power” that “reproduces the relations subsisting between observer and observed”; Futrell, Blood, 8, 170: tool of Roman control; K. M. Coleman, “Launching into History: Aquatic Displays in the Early Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993): 63, 86; E. Gebhard, “The Theater and the City,” in W. J. Slater (ed.), Roman Theater and Society, 113–27; C. Edwards, “Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome,” in J. P. Hallett and M. B. Skinner (eds.), Roman Sexualities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 85: gladiator subordinate to desires of the other through gaze; D. G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1998); D. G. Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 307: place of social control; S. Speriani, “The Spectacle of Gazes: Seeing and Being Seen in the First Book of Horace’s Epistles,” Classical Journal 113 (2018): 431: gladiator takes on “passive visualrole,” subject to “the penetration of the gaze of others.” D. Montserrat, “Experiencing the Male Body in Roman Egypt,” in L. Foxhall and J. Salmon (eds.), When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power, and Identity in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1998), 153. There are different theoretical antecedents, such as the social constructionism of M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), that viewed the body as a system of natural symbols that reproduces the organization and concerns of society or the influential Foucauldian view of the body as inscribed by relations of power and domination through disciplinary discourses and practices. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 95–96. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1.95–96.

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resistance, what one archaeologist describes as the “contributions of real bodies to their own experiences within the milieu of power.”10 The lived body plays a role in mediating between the self and the cultural world, not just as a cultural metonym but in awareness of the world and playing a part in constituting a relationship to that world. That lived body exists as both the gladiator and audience, the observed and observer. The gladiator is not just the signified body but a signifying body, able to interpret experiences by way of a range of cultural idioms, though not necessarily the idioms prescribed by the observer. But even the signified body does not remain fixed. The audience’s response is an ongoing process of signification that is neither uniform nor static, but draws from experiences and from the complex, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes inconsistent, sometimes reinterpreted, background assumptions that reside in that culture. What that constitutive role suggests is that the acting body is part of a culture, but less tidily contained within the functional needs or structural demands of that culture.

Gladiators The gladiator was the Stranger, marked as outside society. The gladiator took an oath to be under the control of a master (Petron. Sat. 117; Sen. Ep. 37.2): fed, conditioned, confined, subject to beatings, directed when to kill or be killed, controlled in their assembled numbers, and transported, as well as bearing the wounds of the contests. The gladiator was marked as infamis under Roman law for having sold his body – an indication of one’s disgraceful status that placed him outside the civic body. The definition of infamia is complicated, referring both to bearing a social stigma of disrepute and to legal prohibitions, such as exclusion from particular forms of civic participation or the denial of particular public rights (including corporal rights) (Cass. Dio 56.25.7; Just. Digest 28.3.6.5–6 from Ulp. Sabinus, bk. 10; 48.19.8.11–12 from Ulp. Duties of Proconsul, bk. 9).11 The civic exclusion of the infamis was reinforced by elite discussions of, or references to, gladiatorial contests, that drew a moral division between spectators and fighters, reputable and disreputable, slave and free, and virtuous and savage.12 The Romans marked the gladiator as the Stranger, 10 11

12

Meskell, “Somatization of Archaeology,” 8. B. Levick, “The Senatus Consultum from Larinum,” Journal of Roman Studies 73 (1983): 108–9; S. Bond, “Status, Violence, and Civic Exclusion in Late Antiquity: Altering Infamy,” Classical Antiquity 33 (2014): 6. Plin. Ep. 1.12.7–8; Tac. Agr. 40.3–4; 44.2–4; R. Alston, “Arms and the Man: Soldiers, Masculinity and Power in Republican and Imperial Rome,” in Foxhall and Salmon (eds.), When Men Were Men,

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attributing their origins to the Etruscans and dressing them in some contests in Samnite gear.13 Comparisons to gladiators as a term of denigration was a common trope for Cicero (Fam. 344.1; 346.1 Bailey; Phil. 3.18; 5.32; 6.4; 6.13: about Lucius Antonius; 7.17–18: comparing Antonius to Lucius; 13.21; 13.16: comparing Antonius to gladiator and brigands making war on res publica; 13.25; Rosc. Am. 8, 17; Pis. 28; Cat. 2.7, 9; also Vell. Pat. 2.91.3). Seneca reproaches the gladiator for appealing to the people at the point of death, unlike the man of virtue (Sen. Ep. 117.7). He elevates the virtue of the individual who could practice self-control even when surrounded by the frenzied crowd, watching the cruel spectacle (Sen. Ep. 18.4; also 7.10–12; 25.6–7). To further differentiate the gladiator from Roman values, Seneca notes that because of the poverty of language, we apply the word bravery (vir) to a gladiator and a slave (Ben. 2.34.3–4). And he characterizes citizens who fight as gladiators as an “indignity” to “manliness” by rendering themselves as a passive spectacle (Nat. Quaest. 7.31.3). But we get only a partial sense of the gladiatorial body if we understand it solely as juridically controlled or morally condemned. There were distinctions between gladiators who were executed as condemned criminals and those who entered into a contract or who may have been criminals sentenced to gladiatorial school for a specified period, often with an increasing payday and notoriety with each victory (Seneca recognizes this difference in Ep. 7.3–4).14 Ville suggests that by the end of the Republic, most gladiators were volunteers.15 There was the possibility of freedom for gladiators. There were elites who emulated gladiators. And there was both a cultural fascination with gladiators and anxiety about the danger they potentially posed to the community. Elites could moralize, legislation could proscribe, and the gladiator could be put on display, but the gladiatorial body, as an acting body that both signified and was signified, was not so neatly contained within the arena. From a strictly legal perspective, the gladiator did not have libertas because the gladiator was under the jurisdiction of another.16 To understand some of the ambiguities that surrounded the gladiatorial body,

13 14 15 16

215–16; M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 89–90, 92–95; C. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 123–36. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 32–33. On the criminal condemnation ad ludos, see Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 105. Ville, La gladiature, 227. See Gaius, Inst. 1.48; C. Nicolet, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); P. A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 283; Q. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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though, we need to foreground the experience of libertas. Libertas was connected to having some bodily control over one’s future, both individually and, to some extent, through decisions about the community in which one lived. The legal rights associated with libertas ultimately defined or limited what could be done legally to one’s body (see Cic. II Verr. 5.161– 63).17 In the visual culture of Rome, to be free also connoted a particular projection of the body that was contrary to the degrading and passive status of a slave. This projection was associated with the exercise of virtues (Sen. Vit. Beat. 15.3): as the daring and strength to stand one’s ground (rather than turning and running), which is associated with virtus (encompassing an array of characteristics connected to manliness); as displaying calmness in the face of misfortune, which is associated with temperantia; as exercising sternness and self-control that is associated with severitas; and as an ability to scan the situation and judge one’s movements, which is associated with prudentia. The new man, for example, was not just legally free; he projected that freedom by rising in position and exhibiting the demeanor of that position. The paradox that the gladiator posed for Roman culture was that his raw movements projected a version of liberty that was in conflict with his status as infamia. Sometimes the gladiatorial body spilled out of the arena, engaging in the physical movements of the free body not under the control of another. Sometimes the gladiator blurred the boundaries of infamia by approximating, and sometimes even obtaining, its opposite: the bodily projection of the cultural ideals associated with libertas. And sometimes the boundaries were blurred by the audience becoming the acting body who entered the arena and performed as the gladiator. I explore how these different expressions of freedom became entangled in claims of Roman identity. The Physicality of Freedom Before there were laws, there were only bodies, with power asserted by the strongest bodies. In the founding of societies, as Cicero writes, the body became regulated both by laws and norms (Inv. 1.2; Sest. 91–92). But the power of the individual body asserting its strength over another remained

17

Press, 1998), 39–41, 44–45; Q. Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 249. On limits on patronal authority, see F. Millar, “The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C,” Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 1–19; F. Millar, “Politics, Persuasion and the People before the Social War (150–90 B.C.),” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 1–11; Alston, “Arms,” 207.

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present in the Roman imagination. Rome’s founding stories – of Aeneas and then Romulus – valorized the rugged, acting body. Virgil’s founding proceeded through a series of individual battles, including a boxing match between Dares and Entellus (see Figure 4.1), culminating with Aeneas thrusting his sword into Turnus. Romulus was the image of the wild rustic: suckled by a wolf, killing his brother, capturing and raping the Sabine women, and controlling the surrounding tribes. Rome was founded in

Figure 4.1 Mosaic Floor with Combat between Dares and Entellus, 175–200 ce. Roman mosaic from a Gallo-Roman villa in Villelaure (France) depicting boxing scene in Virgil’s Aeneid between Dares and Entellus. 71.AH.106, J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. License through Getty’s Open Content Program. www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/6573/unknown-makermosaic-floor-with-combat-between-dares-and-entellus-gallo-roman-ad-175–200/?d z=0.5000,0.5000,0.51.

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these moments of individuals subduing others. That physicality – the ability to defeat another – was recognized in celebrations of hand-tohand combat.18 Elites were distinguished, and distinguished themselves, for being good fighters (Plin. NH 7.139–40: Quintus Metellus; also 7.101–6 that lists elites engaged in single combat; Livy 7.10.6: Titus Manlius in single combat with a Gaul “like gladiators”19). Regular soldiers, too, not only engaged in single combat but were awarded medals for individual acts of bravery: the corona muralis, for the first soldier to climb over a wall, or the corona civica, for a soldier who saved the lives of fellow citizens (Tac. Ann. 3.21.3: Helvius Rufus).20 The ability to exercise physical control over another was not confined to the battlefield but was also deeply intertwined in Roman conceptions of libertas. What distinguished the status of free from unfree was precisely the force that could be exercised over one’s body. Such demonstrations extended to public beatings, including of magistrates from noncompliant friendly states, which served as “a dramatic demonstration of the subjugation of the person to the power of another and an important symbol of the servility of the victim and his community.”21 This form of single combat changed, from its height in the Middle Republic to its decline in the final century of the Republic and its disappearance under the principate.22 Within the arena, the gladiator engaged in this nostalgic, though stylized, form of hand-to-hand combat. The name itself connected the gladiator to the gladius, or short sword, that was used earlier in the Republic by Roman soldiers, now as one of the weapons of the gladiator (see Figure 4.2).23 And in the late Republic and early principate, one type of gladiator, the provocator, usually the most experienced of gladiators, was outfitted to look like the typical Roman soldier. The outfits were part of the performance that included a ceremonial opening, music, costuming, warm-ups, an umpire, and rules.24 As Fagan notes, the 18

19

20 22 24

Wiedemann, “Single Combat,” 98. See W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327– 70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 38–39; S. P. Oakley, “Single Combat,” Classical Quarterly 35 (1985): 392–410, who compiles an extensive list of episodes of single combat by elites. On the episode, see M. Carter, “Livy, Titus Manlius Torquatus and the Gladiatorial Prolusio,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 151 (2008): 313–25, who argues that Livy is distinguishing between the gladiatorial actions of the Gaul and the discipline of a Roman soldier. Wiedemann, “Single Combat,” 95. 21 Alston, “Arms,” 208, 218–19. Oakley, “Single Combat,” 410. 23 Wiedemann, “Single Combat,” 98. See D. S. Potter, “Entertainers in the Roman Empire,” in D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly (eds.), Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 337–38; L. Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2003), 42–43; G. G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); G. G. Fagan, “Manipulating Space at the Roman Arena,” in G. G. Fagan and W. Riess (eds.), The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 349–53.

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Figure 4.2 Fragment of a Commemorative Relief Depicting a Standing Secutor against a Retiarius, third century ce. The secutor was a class of gladiator armed with a gladius (the standard weapon of the Roman soldier) and the retiarius fought with a trident and net. Inventory no. 125832, Roman National Museum. Prisma Archivo/ Alamy stock photo.

theatricality and artificiality told the audience that “what they are witnessing is not real in any quotidian sense but taking place in an artificial landscape that gives psychological cover for them to consume and enjoy

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violence.”25 The performances were akin to athletic competitions in which the appeal to the audience went beyond a repetition of skills.26 The performative aspects of the contests may have given the sense that the gladiatorial body could be confined to a place, as something to be watched and enjoyed in the arena. But the boundaries between fantasy and reality, between playing a soldier and being a soldier, and between slave and free, were continually blurred. Cicero comments on how learning to use arms “in mere sport” were valuable for both gladiators and soldiers. But Cicero is quick to differentiate the soldier from the gladiator by noting that acuteness and resourcefulness were also necessary to protect the soldier against defeat (De or. 2.84). The gladiator was a fighter whose physical skills – and acuteness and resourcefulness – would escape the arena. Most notably, Spartacus and his band of gladiators took the fight outside the arena in a revolt that lasted from 73 to 71 bce (see accounts in App. B Civ. 1.116–21; Livy, Per. 95–97; Vell. Pat. 2.30.5–6; Plut. Crass. 8–11; Flor. 2.8). Appian draws the connection between the physical blows administered by the gladiator and liberty when he describes Spartacus’ band as “strik[ing] for their own freedom rather than for the amusement of spectators” (App. B Civ. 1.116). The accounts emphasize how Spartacus’ band signified themselves as a “regular army” (Flor. 2.8.6): capturing horses to form a cavalry (2.8.7); displaying an insignia and fasces captured from the praetors (2.8.7–8); and replicating the Roman funerals for fallen officers, including now putting on gladiator shows as if “to wipe out all his past dishonor” (2.8.9). The image of the gladiatorial body breaking free again was an ongoing source of cultural anxiety (see Cic. Phil. 3.21; 4.15; 13.22; Flor. 1.47.5; 2.8.9; 2.8.14; App. B Civ. 1.118; Plut. Crass. 9.6; later in 21 ce gladiators join in support of the Gallic rebellion). Thus, there were efforts to physically contain the gladiatorial body. After the revolt, the res publica took greater control over the training of gladiators and the shows. The gladiatorial schools 25 26

Fagan, “Manipulating Space,” 373. On gladiatorial contests as a sport, see Ville, La gladiature (secularization and professionalization); Fagan, Lure, 189–96, with footnotes; and Fagan, “Manipulating Space,” 352–53. On the relationship between performers and spectators, see R. Schechner, “Performers and Spectators Transported and Transformed,” Kenyon Review 3 (1981): 83–113. There are mentions of the quality of contests (Cic. Att. 4.8.2), including the excitement that the contest would feature mostly freedmen (Petron. Sat. 45) and the disappointment of a gladiator simply fighting by the rules of the school with the audience, in response, shouting for him (along with other gladiators) to be punished with floggings (Petron. Sat. 45). There was also a sense of fairness. Cicero criticizes Lucius Antonius for slaughtering a companion he equipped with weapons of a Thracian as he tried to get away in a gladiator contest (Phil. 7.17).

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were careful to mix gladiators from different nationes to mitigate social cohesion.27 In 63 bce, the gladiatorial schools were moved out of Rome as a precaution against them allying with Catiline (Sall. Cat. 30.7; Cic. Sest. 9). And there were restrictions on the number of gladiators that could be kept at one time. In January 49 bce, for example, Pompey ordered that Caesar’s gladiators, some five thousand of them that Caesar had acquired for his games, be distributed to two per household as a precaution against their possible outbreak (Cic. Att. 7.14.2; Caes. B Civ. 1.14.4–5). The gladiators, as a collective body, were controlled. But the bodies of the gladiators, in their sheer physicality in asserting force, were not so easily contained. Gladiator trainers were used for military training (Val. Max. 2.3.2 by P. Rutilius; Cic. De or. 2.84) or for personal training of elites (Cic. Sest. 9: Gaius Marcellus; Apul. Apol. 98.7: Sicinius Pudens).28 As the Romans turned against each other, gladiators were assembled by politicians to project power, whether as bodyguards, in preparation for a show, or to inflict these beatings on rivals (Cic. Sest. 77–80; Dom. 6, 48; Cass. Dio 39.7.2: Clodius; Sest. 85; Milo: Asc. 31C, 39C; Cic. Vat. 40; Off. 2.58; Caes. BCiv. 3.21: Appius Claudius Pulcher; Asc. 20C: Faustus Sulla; Cic. Att. 2.1.1 [show]: Q. Metellus Nepos; Plut. Cat. Min. 27.1: used for violence in 62 bce; Asc. 30C, 43C: Metellus Scipio; Cic. Att. 7.14.2; 8.2.1; Caes. B Civ. 1.14.4–5: Caesar; Cic. Phil. 5.20: Marcus Antonius with his brother, who fought as a gladiator).29 And they fought in armies. Lentulus at first promised freedom to those of Caesar’s gladiators who would join up with Pompey’s forces to stop Caesar’s advance (Caes. B Civ. 1.14.4–5). Antony and Cleopatra’s army had largely abandoned them except for their gladiators. The historical accounts note the ambiguity of how to signify the gladiators: They “were among the most despised of people,” but they also displayed the utmost valor and fierce loyalty in fighting (Cass. Dio 51.7.2). There are even suggestions that gladiators supplied by Decimus waited in the theater of Pompey, ready to help the conspirators in 44 bce in their fight for libertas against the regal pretensions of Caesar (Cass. Dio 44.16.2). Elites did no better in clarifying the boundaries, blurring gladiatorial force with libertas. For example, Antonius compares Cicero to a gladiator trainer 27 28 29

Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 113. M. Carter, “Armorum Stadium: Gladiatorial Training and the Gladiatory Ludus,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 61 (2018): 122–23. I. A. N. Harrison, “Catiline, Clodius, and Popular Politics at Rome during the 60s and 50s BCE,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 51 (2008): 113n123, notes that it was more likely Milo than Clodius who engaged gladiators as political enforcers. P. A. Brunt, “The Roman Mob,” Past & Present 35 (1966): 3, suggests that in 57 bce Clodius brought gladiators into the senate building. Also A. W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 83–85.

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in marshaling his forces against Antonius. Cicero runs with the criticism, exclaiming that he is, indeed, like a trainer who wants the good ones to win and the bad ones to die in the battle over the survival of the res publica (Phil. 13.40). Cicero gives gladiatorial dimension to the fight over the res publica: If – may the gods avert the omen! – the final episode in the history of the Republic has arrived, let us behave like champion gladiators: they meet death honorably; let us, who stand foremost in the world and all its nations, see to it that we fall with dignity rather than serve with ignominy. Nothing is more abominable than disgrace, nothing is uglier than servitude. We were born for honor and freedom: let us either retain them or die with dignity. (Phil. 3.35–36)

The gladiator embodied the assertion of force – the stylized warfare of the arena, the training of bodies, the beatings in the street, even the overthrow of tyranny – that the Romans saw as accompanying power and freedom. Projecting Liberty Thus far I have suggested how the unfree body of the gladiator enacted a type of physical freedom in the arena that recalled a stylized military combat and was appended to a Roman association of freedom and power with the ability to assert bodily force. The imitation of libertas was also demonstrated through the attainment of fame and status (and potentially freedom) by embodying masculine vir: the ability to deliver and withstand punishment, to be both powerful and calm, and to exude both mastery and sexual power.30 As Alain Corbin writes: Roman virilitas, from which the word derives, remains one model [of virility as a virtue], with its characteristics clearly outlined: sexual traits – those of the ‘assertive’ husband, powerfully built, procreative but also levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained. The vir is not simply homo; the virile is not simply what is manly; it is more: an ideal of power and virtue, self-assurance and maturity, certitude and domination.31

Different qualities were connected: “sexual dominance mixed with psychological dominance, physical force with strength of character, courage and ‘greatness’ accompanied by strength and vigor.”32 Vir is associated with the demonstration of autonomy, which is at the heart of libertas.33 30 31 33

Preface to A. Corbin, J.-J. Courtine, and G. Vigarello (eds.), A History of Virility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), xii. Corbin, Courtine, and Vigarello, preface, xii. 32 Corbin, Courtine, and Vigarello, preface, xii. Alston, “Arms,” 206–7.

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The ideal by which Rome’s hierarchical society functioned was that there was a correspondence between status and virtue. For example, honos carried both the meaning of honor and office. The overlapping meanings were suggestive of a fit between the position as a form of honor given by the community and the qualities of the individual deserving of such honor (Cic. II Ver. 5.37). Of course, those of high status could be dishonorable (II Ver. 2.120: perversion of honos to own interest). But what of the person of low status? Seneca provides a window into the tension between rank and praise. If a man possess all other things, such as health, riches, pedigree, a crowded reception-hall, but is confessedly bad, you will disapprove of him. Likewise, if a man possess none of the things which I have mentioned, and lacks money, or an escort of clients, or rank and a line of grandfathers and greatgrandfathers, but is confessedly good, you will approve of him. Hence, this is man’s one peculiar good, and the possessor of it is to be praised even if he lacks other things; but he who does not possess it, though he possess everything else in abundance, is condemned and rejected. (Ep. 76.12–12)34

Seneca continues, “But when you wish to inquire into a man’s true worth, and to know what manner of man he is, look at him when he is naked; make him lay aside his inherited estate, his titles, and the other deceptions of fortune; let him even strip off his body” (Ep. 76.32). Seneca is talking about the soul. But he is expressing a tension in Roman values between earned virtus and the claims of status that derived from pedigree, and between refinement and its conflation with the embrace of luxury. Seneca may be critiquing the corruption of the nobility, but he is expressing a core aspect of Roman identity: that “virtus and a potential gloria [were conceived as] accessible to every Roman from the fourth century BC to the fourth century AD.”35 In Chapter 2, we got a glimpse into this tension with Cato the Elder’s association of Romanness with rugged simplicity. Marius’ speech in Sallust, which is an earlier version of Seneca’s claim, provides a valuable window into this contest of Roman images. In describing himself as a new man, Marius contrasts the elegance, laxness, and luxuriousness of the nobility to his coarseness, toil, and self-privation (Sall. Iug. 85.13). The language is striking. Virtus displays itself, as Marius states: I cannot display ancestral images and triumphs or consulships of my forefathers; but if occasion requires, I can display trophy spears, a distinguished-service 34 35

Translations are from Seneca, Epistles, vol. 2, Epistles 66–92, trans. R. M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920). Wiedemann, “Single Combat,” 103.

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In fact, the scars reference the prowess of Rome’s true ancestors, such as Lucius Siccius Dentatus, a tribune, who won eight single combats and had the distinction of forty-five scars on his front and none on his back (Plin. NH 7.102), or Marcus Sergius, who was wounded twenty-three times, suffered from crippled hands and feet, and still served in campaigns (NH 7.104). And they reference the courage of the common soldier who counts the scars from standing his ground (Sen. Vit. Beat. 15.5; Luc. Bell. Civ. 6.150, 160–61: sword against the breast). Even the loathsome band of Catilinarian conspirators are praised at the end of Sallust’s account for dying with “wounds in the front” (Cat. 61.3). Given his status of being born without senatorial ancestors, Marius must rely on himself (Sall. Cat. 85.4); he must learn through action (85.12, 14) how to “strike down the foe, to maintain defenses, to fear nothing except ill repute, to endure winter and summer alike, to sleep on the bare ground, to bear privation and toil at the same time” (85.33–34). He embraces views of him by others as “coarse and unrefined” because he does not know how to throw elegant dinners, preferring the toil, sweat, and dust associated with men to the elegance conferred on women (85.39, 41). In fact, Marius is the first to break from tradition and draw on the poor for his army (Val. Max 2.3.1). The image is given slightly more cultivation by Cicero. He contrasts the attribute of loveliness associated with women with dignity associated with men, suggesting that men should avoid too much finery and that their dignity can be enhanced from a complexion that is the result of physical exercise (Off. 1.130).37 It is the city version of Cato’s rusticity. Barton suggests that the gladiatorial contests were a descent into abasement; of reveling in a power over oneself and others that neither the citizen nor the slave had. I will suggest almost the exact opposite. The gladiatorial body recalled an image of rugged simplicity that was a part of both ancestral legends and the model of the new man. The irony, of course, is that the contests 36 37

Translations are from Sallust, The War with Catiline, The War with Jugurtha, J. T. Ramsey (ed.), trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). In his invective against Antony, Cicero describes his “robust physique befitting a gladiator” (Phil. 2.63).

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themselves were associated with lavishness. But that is not particularly surprising; we see this in the lavish ceremonies that surround contemporary boxing matches. More to the point is what is being celebrated. It is not the Hellenic sensibility toward athletic competitions, described, for example, in Dio Chrystostom’s tribute to the boxer Melancomas, who never struck a blow, but through his endurance “forced his opponent, although uninjured, to give up” (Or. 29.12; also 28.7).38 Horace mocks the daintiness of Greek athletics, contrasting it with the toil of Roman exercise (Sat. 2.2.10–15). More befitting a Roman aesthetic, Augustus “was especially given to watching boxers, particularly those of Latin birth, not merely such as were recognized and classed as professionals, whom he was wont to match even with Greeks, but the common untrained townspeople that fought rough and tumble and without skill in the narrow streets” (Suet. Aug. 45.2–3). It is possible that these street fights were somewhat organized and may have included betting.39 We do not know why Augustus was so attracted to these demonstrations of fighting, though, as we will see, a similar fascination attended the earliest version of boxing in America. What we do know is that the spectacle of certain death was less appealing without the possibility of a gladiator winning his freedom (see Figure 4.3). Thus, Augustus outlawed contests in which there was no possibility of the spectators granting freedom (Suet. Aug. 45). The culture that branded the gladiator with infamia for having sold his body found itself in the ambivalent position of being attracted to the gladiator precisely for his control over his body. Bodily movement, more than legal categories and status, justified the language of virtus. Martial pays homage to one gladiator, emphasizing the glory associated with skill, success, and formidable strength: Hermes, favorite fighter of the age; Hermes, skilled in all weaponry; Hermes, gladiator and trainer both; Hermes, tempest and tremor of his school; Hermes, who (but none other) makes Helius afraid; Hermes, before whom (but none other) Advolans falls; Hermes, taught to win without wounding; Hermes, himself his own substitute; Hermes, gold mine of seat-mongers; Hermes, darling and distress of gladiators’ women; Hermes, proud with battling spear; Hermes, menacing with marine trident; Hermes, formidable in drooping helmet; Hermes, glory [gloria] of Mars universal; Hermes, all things in one and thrice unique. (Epig. 5.24)40 38 39 40

Translation from Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 12–30, trans. J. W. Cohoon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). G. Fagan, “Urban Violence: Street, Forum, Bath, Circus, and Theater,” in Fagan and Riess (eds.), Topography of Violence, 234. Translation from Martial, Epigrams, vol. 1, Spectacles, bks. 1–5, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Figure 4.3 Relief Depicting Defeated Gladiator Awaiting Verdict of Spectators, ca. 30 bce. Two trumpet players proclaim the victor of the duel. The winner raises his sword and awaits the verdict of the spectators, who decide life or death for the loser. Inventory no. 364, Room 11, Glyptothek Museum, Munich, Germany. Purchased in Rome in 1899 from Bissing Collection. Photo by Bibi Saint-Pol, February 8, 2007. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Relief_gladiators_Glyptothek_Munic h_364.jpg.

The body imposes itself in the arena through the deliberate and skilled movements that menace its opponents. But the body also projects itself as an image of virtus: erotic, admired, even divine. Just how much gladiators blurred the categories of libertas and infamia can be seen in their use as illustrations of Roman virtues. In differentiating the Epicurean and Stoic approaches to responding to an injury, Seneca shows the two ways in which the gladiator is strong: when wounded, either

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stopping the wound and standing his ground because the injury is tolerable (like an Epicurean) or turning to the audience to wave off any interference because there is no injury (like a Stoic) (Constant. 16.2). The gladiator must be able to control his anger (Sen. Ir. 1.11.2). In summoning the courage of his troops, Curio recalls the gladiator who hates whomever he opposes rather than being paralyzed by indecision (Luc. Bell. Civ. 4.705–10). Cicero uses the example of gladiators, who he describes as either “ruined men or barbarians,” to illustrate how training, practice, and habit can prepare a man’s soul to endure pain or the prospect of death: like the gladiator who can endure blows and face death bravely without either crying out or changing his countenance (Tusc. 2.41; also Sen. Ep. 18.8; 117.25). Seneca compares steadfastness in the face of death to the courage (firmitas) of the defeated gladiator in directing the sword to his own throat (Ep. 30.8; also Ep. 70.23: as illustration that can be imitated; 70.2) and the ability of gladiators to endure what they are compelled by necessity to face (Ep. 37.2; Ep. 109.18: unterrified by the sword).41 Seneca draws on the example of gladiators to illustrate prudentia: “The physician cannot prescribe by letter the proper time for eating or bathing; he must feel the pulse. There is an old adage about gladiators, – that they plan their decision in the ring; as they intently watch, something in the adversary’s glance, some movement of his hand, even some slight bending of his body, gives a warning” (Ep. 22.1, trans. modified).42 He even suggests that the audience will judge two gladiators who leave the arena, one wounded more than the other, as evenly matched because of their unconquered spirit (Ben. 5.3.2–3). Gladiators know there must be danger for there to be gloria (Sen. Prov. 3.4). “If a man can behold with unflinching eyes the flash of a sword [gladius], if he knows that it makes no difference to him whether his soul takes flight through his mouth or through a wound in his throat, you may call him happy” (Sen. Ep. 76.33). The gladiator is the Stranger who recalls Roman virtus. Not only does the gladiator blur the boundaries of belonging but the grafting of the image of gladiator onto other Strangers transforms the Stranger into something familiar (and perhaps more menacing, as a result). In Livy’s account of Hannibal holding a gladiatorial contest as they march toward 41

42

P. Cagniart, “The Philosopher and the Gladiator,” Classical World 93 (2000): 618, suggests, “Certainly the tragic actors in the amphitheater served as catharsis for Seneca: they relieved his anxieties of suffering and dying through sympathetic identification with their ordeals and their scorn for adversity and death, cum artibus.” Translations from Seneca, Epistles, vol. 1, Epistles 1–65, trans. R. M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917).

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Rome, the prelude to that contest is a wordy speech by Scipio Africanus in which he characterizes Hannibal and the Carthaginians as slaves of the Romans (because of their subjugation to the Romans after their defeat in the First Punic War) (21.42.8–11). Moreover, they are the Stranger who cannot be trusted because of their abrogation of treaties (21.40.11). Scipio summons the troops to fight with “resentment and anger, as though you are looking at your own slaves who are suddenly shouldering arms against you” (21.41.10–11).43 Rather than a speech, Hannibal initially organizes an impromptu series of gladiatorial contests between captured soldiers, arming them with Gallic weapons. The potential combatants are not only promised libertas, horses and arms, but the losers also have the fortune of dying well rather than as slaves (21.42.1–4). The contests mirror both the Roman connection of gladiatorial combat to the potential libertas of the combatants and the role of these contests in inspiring virtus. In Hannibal’s words, the soldiers are like the gladiators. They must either “conquer or die” (21.43.5). And to conquer requires that they emulate the gladiator’s courage. The Stranger out-Romans the Romans precisely at the moment when acting most Roman by invading a Strange country. There are other examples, as well. Plutarch describes Spartacus as “possessed not only of great courage and strength, but also in sagacity and culture superior to his fortune” (Crass. 8.2; also Hor. Epod. 16.5: fierce Spartacus). Florus, too, describes Spartacus’ men as meeting “a death worthy of men” (2.8.14) and Spartacus as fighting like a Roman general, “most bravely in the front rank” (2.8.14). Even the novel appearance of women as gladiators could confirm the lessons of masculinity: a relief from the second century ce commemorates two women gladiators (named Amazon and Achillia) who were “released while standing,” a demonstration of “martial valor” in fighting to a tie (see Figure 4.4).44 We have less access to how gladiators understood their own acting bodies. What we do have comes by way of gravestones and graffiti. Not surprisingly, they identified themselves, or were identified, by way of particular fighting skills. 43 44

Translation from Livy, History of Rome, vol. 5, bks. 21–22, trans. J. C. Yardley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). S. Brunet, “Women with Swords: Female Gladiators in the Roman World,” in P. Christesen and D. G. Kyle (eds.), A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 482; also Mart. Spect. 8 (6b): women fight with the valor of Hercules (in the killing of the Nemean lion).

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Figure 4.4 Marble Relief from Halicarnassus Commemorating either the Release from Service or the Discharge after a Draw between Two Female Gladiators, Amazon and Achillia, second century ce. They are armed and advancing to attack, with swords and shields. Inventory no. 1847–0424–19, British Museum. Reproduced with permission.

The titles of retiarius, murmillo and Thracian are most common. In addition, the titles of contraretiarius, essedarius, eques, hastiarius, oplomachus, paegniarius, secutor and Samnite are also attested. These titles tended to follow immediately the name of the deceased. This designation of fighting skills was central to the man’s identity – it was like an epithet that followed his name; the two together were how fighters recognized the gladiator.45

The gravestones and graffiti also conveyed a wider set of associations, sometimes referencing ethnicity and family.46 They included their status as being a liber, a free man, further blurring the boundaries of infamia for having sold their bodies (CIL 6.33983; CIL 6.10196: also includes left handed; CIL 6.10180: also left handed; CIL 4.8056: left handed, fought 45 46

V. Hope, “Fighting for Identity: The Funerary Commemoration of Italian Gladiators,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 44, issue supplement 73 (2000): 102. See Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 114; Hope, “Fighting for Identity,” 100–5.

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nineteen times and beat Severus). And they valorized their actions. As Hope notes, “The most suitable and popular way of summarizing a gladiator’s virtues was bene merens: he was well deserving of his commemoration not because he was a good husband or father, but because he had been a good comrade who bravely faced his death in the arena.”47 When Cicero says that he liked the old days when gladiators were simply condemned criminals, he is referencing the cultural boundaries between infamia (disrepute) and existimatio (esteem) and the legal boundaries between slave and free that were now blurred (Tusc. 2.41). The gladiatorial body could be legally controlled; its meaning could not be. Augustus was careful to move women to the back rows of arenas, seeking to restore and display the male hierarchies of Roman society. Certainly, there was no intention that elite women become attracted to a gladiator’s sexual prowess; they were supposed to be turned off by such displays of violence.48 Even more confusing were the female gladiators (or venatores, since the sources are sometimes unclear) who were exciting to the crowd (Petron. Satyr. 45), displayed valor (Mart. Spect. 1.7 [6]; 1.8 [6b]; Statius Sylv. 1.6.44–45), but also threatened male hierarchies and social roles through their virility (Tac. Ann. 15.32; Cass. Dio 62 [61].17.3; 67.16.1; Juv. Sat. 6.252–67; Sen. Ep. 95.20–21; Mart. Epigr. 7.67). Nor could the arena have been conceived as a path to glory and celebrity.49 Yet, Pliny notes that portraits of gladiators had been of great interest in art for many years and, dating back to the Republic, were exhibited in public to advertise for a show (HN 35.52). Particular gladiators, with their wins and losses, were advertised.50 Programs were sold (Cic. Phil. 2.97). Children played gladiator.51 A gladiator 47 48

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Hope, “Fighting for Identity,” 105. See CIL 5.2884; 5.3466; 5.5933; 6.33983; 6.4334; 6.10176b; 6.10180; 6.7659; 6.10169; 6.10190; 6.10195; 6.10197; 10.7297; 10.7364. The sexual attraction was a ready source of satire. See Juv. Sat. 6.82–113, 268–313; Petron. Sat. 19, 21. Dio Cassius reports Messalina’s attraction to a gladiator (60.28.2). There is also graffiti, as discussed in Hope, “Fighting for Identity,” 104; R. Garraffoni, “Gladiators’ Daily Lives and Epigraphya: Social Archaeological Approach to the Roman Munera during the Early Principate,” Nikephoros: Zeitschrift für Sport und Kultur im Altertum 21 (2008): 230. On sexual attraction of elite women to gladiators, see S. H. Braund, “Juvenal–Misogynist or Misogamist?” Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 75–76; Edwards, “Unspeakable Professions,” 78–81. On their celebrity, see Sen. QNat. 4A.praef. 8 on Fidus Annaeus; Sen. Prov. 4.4 on Triumphus; Plin. HN 35.33; CIL 4.4342 and 4.4345 on Celadus; CIL 4.4299 on Florus. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 120–21: advertising and records of wins and losses; M. Carter, “Gladiatorial Ranking and the SC de Pretiis Gladiatorum Minuendis (CIL II 6278 = ILS 5163),” Phoenix 57 (2003): 83–114: rankings; CIL 4.1179: advertise popular gladiator; CIL 4.1183: advertise repeat performance; 4.2508: reproduces pamphlet; 4.9975: advertise popular gladiator; Cic. Fam. 80.1 Bailey: receives advertised pairing of gladiators; Sen. Brev. Vit. 16.3: advertising; Hist. Aug. Claud. 5.5; ILS 5086, 5088, 5102: freed after short career; ILS 5094, 5101, 5093, 5109, 5111: record long careers; K. Hopkins, Death and Renewal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 21–22; Hope, “Fighting for Identity”; Garraffoni, “Gladiators’ Daily Lives and Epigraphya,” 232–33. Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii, 52.

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could progress, not just within the gladiatorial ranks to trainers and umpires but also within the community at large.52 As one classicist writes, the recognition of one’s “strength, skill, daring, and victory over all rivals,” or virtus, “trumped even money and birth and education when it came to gaining awe.”53 The gladiator could be branded as infamia by law, but the body projected a cultural ideal of libertas that stole the show. The Citizen as Gladiator We assume a distance between the gladiator and the spectator, whether we talk about the audience’s gaze or refer to their bloodlust.54 But the boundaries were not so clear. The crowd could at times mirror the spectacle, devolving into frenzy or even spilling out into riots, as occurred at Pompeii in 59 ce.55 There was also a type of relationship in which the crowd imagines itself as participants in the contest.56 Seneca suggests how the audience becomes so involved that they react angrily to a gladiator not willing to die, as though transformed into enemies of the gladiator (Ir. 1.2.4: also Tranq. An. 11.4–6; see also Cic. Mil. 96). Horace derides spectators for arguing over which gladiator was best (Sat. 2.6.44). The audience could imagine themselves as the adversary. But the audience could also adopt the body of the gladiator and enter the arena. If legislation is any indication of attempts to address what is seen as a problem, then one sees continual attempts to restrict and punish elites appearing as gladiators, beginning in 46 bce.57 The senatus consultum from 52 53 54 55

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Carter, “Armorum Stadium,” 127–30. R. Knapp, Invisible Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 270–71. Barton, Sorrows, 46. K. Coleman, “‘The Contagion of the Throng’: Absorbing Violence in the Roman World,” Hermathena 164 (1998): 74: “frenzied ecstasy” of the crowd; on Pompeii, see Tac. Ann. 14.17 and W. O. Moeller, “The Riot of A.D. 59 at Pompeii,” Historia 19 (1970): 84–95. Fagan, Lure, 228, refers to “the excitement of self-substitution.” On appearances by the elite as gladiators, see Hopkins, Death and Renewal, 20; Cass. Dio 43.23 and Suet. Iul. 39.1: Caesar’s games in 46 bce, the son of a praetor fights, knights are allowed to fight, but a senator attempts to fight and is banned by Caesar; Cass. Dio 48.43: senator wants to perform as a gladiator; outlawed in 38 bce; 51.22: senator fights as a gladiator in 29 bce; 54.2: ban extended in 22 bce; disenfranchisement; 56.25: ban lifted for knights in 11 ce; 57.14: knights fight; 59.10: knights forced to fight as gladiators in 38 ce; Sen. QNat. 7.31.3: indignity to manliness; 7.32.3: perform in private homes; Suet. Aug. 43.3: used knights as gladiators until it was prohibited; Tib. 35.2: elites willing to be degraded in rank in order to participate as gladiators; Tac. Ann. 15.32: elites and women participate as gladiators; Petron. Sat. 45: perform as gladiator to support wasteful lifestyle; Juv. Sat. 11.3–20: to support wasteful lifestyle. Additional restrictions in a senatus consultum in 22 bce by Augustus banning equestrians and grandsons of senators from the arena, in 11 ce that banned women under twenty from entering the arena, and in a senatus consultum in 19 ce, including women, though, as Brunet, “Women with Swords,” 482–83, 486–87, and S. Brunet, “Female and

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Larinum appears as yet another attempt, likely as unsuccessful as earlier attempts, to punish elites who fought as gladiators since it was “contrary to the dignity of the order to which they belonged.”58 Legislation attempted to enforce the boundaries that the observing body, now enticed by the prospect of acting as a gladiator, continued to resist. Ancient sources suggest different motivations, including poverty (Ps.Quint. Declam. Min. 302.4; Lucian Tox. 59–60), the need of an impoverished elite to support their lifestyle (Cass. Dio 59.10.2; Juv. Sat. 11.3–20), the lust for battle in a time of peace (Manilius, Astronomica 4.225; Tert. Ad mart. 5), or the depravity of principes (emperors) to humiliate the elite (e.g., Tac. Ann. 15.32). Contemporary interpretations have similarly sought to solve the seeming paradox of the free, especially the elite, performing the acts of an infamis. Barton reads these actions against a portrait of the collective psychology of the Romans, seeing the choice to become (or watch) a gladiator as “a response to an intense and excruciating feeling of humiliation and insecurity and an attempt to find compensation, even exaltation, within a feeling of inescapable degradation,” adding, “It is a response to hopelessness without denying the hopelessness.” Guttmann follows suit in describing the “empathetic empowerment” in which spectators feel that the gladiators represent them, or they identify with the gladiators:59 “In the gladiator’s courageous death,” Guttmann asks, “did the Roman take proleptic pleasure in his own equally courageous demise?”60 I do not think we can, or need to, ascribe a single motivation or reference a collective psychology. In fact, when viewed against the history of sports, and in particular modern combat sports, the paradox may be less puzzling, or at least less surprising. To anticipate our upcoming discussion, the history of American boxing not only shows elites participating in the sport – including several presidents, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt – but also displays the constrained choices of a changing underclass to rise socio-economically, whether in the broader culture or within

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Dwarf Gladiators,” Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 4 (2004): 164–65, emphasize, it is unclear the extent to which elite women appeared as gladiators up to Nero’s reign, though it is likely there were some appearances. On restrictions, see Levick, “Senatus Consultum,” 101. On the famous case of Commodus, see Herodian 1.14–17; Cass. Dio 72.19–22. Also see A. McCullough, “Female Gladiators in Imperial Rome: Literary Context and Historical Fact,” Classical World 101 (2008): 197–209. Levick, “Senatus Consultum,” 99. See also Sen. Ep. 99.3: indignity of elite. C. A. Barton, “The Scandal of the Arena,” Representations 27 (1989): 23; A. Guttmann, “The Appeal of Violent Sports,” in J. H. Goldstein (ed.), Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23. Guttmann, “The Appeal of Violent Sports,” 24.

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their local communities.61 At the lower strata of Roman society there were few options. For these individuals, the body was marked like that of a gladiator by physical punishment, poverty, disease, and early death.62 Avenues for advancement were limited: There was the army with its long enlistment periods, low pay, filthy and dangerous conditions, physical punishment, and the surrender of control to another;63 or there was grueling labor, if one could even find it. The gladiator could actually advance in society. A gladiator could win his freedom in a contest. Earnings could also be sufficient to qualify for freedom or to sustain one’s lifestyle if already free (Livy 44.31.15: fees for gladiators; Suet. Tib. 7.1). And the legally free could find further advancement. As Levick notes, By the time the equestrian class was beginning to crystallize in the twenties of the second century B.C., only social stigma, in particular that of servile birth, prevented an enfranchised peregrine or freed slave from rising out of the plebs if he were a successful actor or gladiator. The fees must have been attracting freeborn Roman citizens too, if they were unable to make a living (or so good a one) in other ways, as they later attracted free men all over the Empire.64

The gladiator could move up in the subculture of the gladiatorial familia, as well, emulating a larger set of social values, but confining praise to this smaller community (see Figure 4.5). Gladiators lived together, ate together, and fought each other. There is some evidence for the organization of gladiators into collegia that may have provided for funerals (CIL 6.631; 6.632: collegium dedicated to Silvanus lists gladiator members).65 Other gladiators were mourned (CIL 6.10197: death of a novice gladiator). Professional gladiators, unlike the condemned, were able to receive the status of a funeral.66 Familia or sodalis may also have provided for commemorations (CIL 6.7659; 6.10168), 61

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Importantly, see S. K. Weinberg and H. Arond, “The Occupational Culture of the Boxer,” American Journal of Sociology 57 (1952): 460–69; S. A. Riess, “Sport and the American Dream: A Review Essay,” Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 295–303. On life expectancy, see R. Duncan-Jones, Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); B. Frier, “Roman Life Expectancy: Ulpian’s Evidence,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 86 (1982): 213–51; B. Frier, “Roman Life Expectancy: The Pannonian Evidence,” Phoenix 37 (1983): 328–44. On conditions and opportunities, generally, see Brunt, “The Roman Mob,” 12–18; Harrison, “Catiline, Clodius, and Popular Politics,” 104–7. Alston, “Arms,” 210, 212; Dio Chrys. Or. 14.1–6; Cic. Tusc. 2.48, on tension with libertas; L. J. F. Keppie, The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Levick, “Senatus Consultum,” 108. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 117–18; J. Patterson, “Patronage, Collegia and Burial in Imperial Rome,” in S. Bassett (ed.), Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100– 1600 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992), 15–27. Hope, “Fighting for Identity,” 97.

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Figure 4.5 Gravestone for the Gladiator Saturninus, Smyrna, third century ce. Set up by his familia in his memory. ISmyrna 409, inventory no. I 1901/7.10, National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden. Reproduced with permission.

as did friends (CIL 5.3466; 5.4511; 6.10169; 6.10180; 6.10190; 6.10197; 10.7297; 10.7364; 11.1070) and wives (CIL 5.1037; 5.2884; 5.3466; 5.3468; 5.4506; 5.5933; 6.10167; 6.10176b; 6.10177; 6.10178; 6.10193; 6.10195). There are mentions of wives and children (CIL 5.3468; 5.4506; 5.5933; 6.4335; 6.10176b; 6.10167; 6.10177; 6.10193; 6.10195). We see numerous references in graffiti to attitudes of gladiators toward each other, as well as ways in which gladiators portrayed themselves to others. A retired gladiator, Telephus, is praised as an instructor for being indispensable to preparation for a show (CIL 4.7991). Gladiators challenged the manliness of other gladiators (CIL 4.4287) or boasted of their sexual prowess.67 It is in the context of these subcommunities that gladiators appropriated the values of the larger culture. 67

CIL 4.4289: the beauty of girls; 4.4342: the one the girls sigh over; 4.4346: girls think he’s magnificent; 4.4353: net girls at night; 4.4356: the master of girls; 4.8590: popular among women; 4.8916: owner of girls.

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But what about the elites: the equestrians and senators? For all the reasons that the gladiator resonated with aspects of a Roman cultural image of itself, we should not necessarily be surprised by the desire of the Roman elite to recall those aspects of identity. It may well be that in a culture premised on display, especially as those opportunities for display dwindled,68 playing the gladiator returned the individual to the most basic, bodily experience of being Roman: not the quiet virtues of pietas that looked an awful lot like submissiveness, but the discipline of the body and the demonstration of one’s prowess. That is not the same as reveling in debasement. Livy provides some insight into the effect of gladiatorial contests in exciting military prowess. In introducing the contests to Hellenistic Syria, Antiochus IV describes the initial terror of the audience at seeing the exhibitions, but which in time “roused in many of the young men a joy in arms,” many in turn becoming gladiators (Livy 41.20.11–13; Polyb. 30.25.5).69 Whatever the religious aspects, the games invariably recalled some of the founding ideals of Rome, not just in the display of martial virtue but also in their association with other contemporaneous efforts to reclaim particular ancient virtues of moral and military discipline. There was the ludus Troiae, which was organized by Sulla in 80 bce (Plut. Cat. Min. 3.1), Caesar in 46 bce (Suet. Iul. 39.3; Cass. Dio 43.23.6), Agrippa in 40 bce (Cass. Dio 48.20.2) and 33 bce (Cass. Dio 49.43.3), then by Augustus, and portrayed in Virgil as an episode in Aeneas’ founding journey (Aen. 5.545–602). Augustus’ games, as Suetonius notes, were meant to instill in the aristocratic youth the nobility of ancient customs (Aug. 43.2). There were other efforts by Augustus to revive what Severy refers to as “public celebration of Roman young manhood.”70 Augustus institutionalized the Republican collegia iuvenum throughout Italy, which trained youth of equestrian and senatorial orders martial skills. There is some indication that these collegia included young females as well.71 Augustus reestablished and extended from one to two years the tirocinium, a form of premilitary training consisting of games and field exercises that may have been connected to the collegia.72 He reinstituted 68 69 70 71 72

R. Syme, The Augustan Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 68–74. Translations are from Livy, History of Rome, vol. 12, bks. 40–42, trans E. T. Sage and A. C. Schlesinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). B. Severy, Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 82. M. Vesley, “Gladiatorial Training for Girls in the Collegia Iuvenum of the Roman Empire,” Echos du monde classique: Classical views 42 (1998): 87–88. Discussions of these Augustan reforms can be found in M. I. Rostovtzeff, Römische Bleitesserae: ein Beitrag zur Social- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1905), 59–80; L. R. Taylor, “Seviri Equitum Romanorum and Municipal Seviri: A Study in Pre-Military Training among the Romans,” Journal of Roman Studies 14 (1924): 158–71; Severy, Augustus, 83.

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cavalry review – called the transvectio equitum (Suet. Aug. 38.3) – for the sons of senatorial families. There were circus games performed by older boys of high rank (Suet. Iul. 39.2; Aug. 43.2; Cass. Dio 53.1.4–5; 55.10.6). These displays were for the highest born, the most elite of the aristocracy under the principate. They served to consolidate military authority around the family of the princeps. But they dramatized an ideal of Romanness that could be taken up in quite unintended ways through imitation of the stylized discipline of the gladiator. Ulpian gives us some insight into what underlies the desire by some to appear as gladiators. He provides a legal discussion of the status (in applications to a magistrate) of those who chose to fight without pay in order to show their manliness (virtus) (Just. Dig. 3.1.1.6 from Ulp. Edict, Book 6). We have only the most limited access to the words of gladiators, and our imaginations are not powerful enough to place ourselves in the seats of the arenas and watch the slaughter. We cannot understand the totality of the experience. My interest here, instead, is more limited. It is to look at one type of gladiator, the professional gladiator, to suggest how the meanings associated with the acting body elude inscription because of the ambiguities that make up a culture. The gladiator remained a part of Rome’s own dissonance precisely because the culture could not contain how the image it had of itself found expression in the gladiatorial body.

Boxing In his rejection of comparisons between Rome and the United States, Smil contends there is no relationship between “modern spectator sports and the callousness, brutality, and casual killing that were on display in Roman amphitheaters.”73 We want to believe that, but the truth may be that we are simply better at disguising it. For years, the National Football League suppressed the growing evidence of the effects of concussions, eventually brought to light in a series of suicides by former players. The average length of a football career is only a couple of years. Players are discarded once they become too injured, leaving them with a lifetime of disability. The 73

Smil, America, 155. K. G. Sheard, “Aspects of Boxing in the Western ‘Civilizing Process’,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 32 (1997): 35, drawing on N. Elias and E. Dunning, “Folk Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain,” in N. Elias and E. Dunning (eds.), Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 189–202, argues that ancient Greek and Roman boxing cannot be compared to the contemporary sport because the ancient sport was governed by principles of honor and did not have strategies of movement whereas the contemporary version is governed by principles of fair play and employs defensive strategies.

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National Collegiate Athletic Association exploits young bodies under the guise of a college education, discarding them after their financial potential is exhausted. I have seen a man’s spine broken on the football field and a boxer killed in the ring. Broken orbital bones are common injuries in the popular and violent sport of mixed martial arts, where combatants, who recall the early days of bare-knuckled fighting but now with brawling on the mat, seek either knockouts or submissions. We see very little of these retired and broken bodies. The violence is more commercialized, more sanitized, and its longterm effects more hidden. But, as Joyce Carol Oates perceptively points out, peeling away the veneer of scientific or civilizing language, boxing is “the most spectacularly and pointedly cruel sport, the intention being to stun one’s opponent’s brain.”74 Heavy weight boxer Deontay Wilder punctuates the viciousness, exclaiming, “I want a body on my record.”75 When asked about a matchup with Dominic Breazeale, he said, “When it do happen, I’ma make sure he brings his son up on the stage to look the man in the eye that’s gonna cripple his daddy.” Wilder makes clear the stakes: “I didn’t go seek him, he [sought] me, so if [death] comes, it comes. This is a brutal sport, this is not a gentleman’s sport. I keep saying, this is not a gentleman’s sport. We don’t ask to hit each other in the face, but we does anyway.”76 More than comparing piles of bodies, their similarity lies in the unauthorized cultural valorization of the gladiator and the bare-knuckle boxer of the first half of the nineteenth century. By invoking the oxymoron of unauthorized valorization, I am emphasizing the unexpected role that two types of marginalized bodies play in the construction of citizen identity. I differentiate my approach from perspectives (much like those we saw in discussions of gladiators) that locate this authority in either functional explanations or structures of domination. Whatever functional role boxing plays in creating social bonds in marginal communities or in controlling violence,77 boxing in 74

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J. C. Oates, On Boxing (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 187–88. See the reports in T. N. N. Brennan and P. J. O’Connor, “Incidence of Boxing Injuries in the Royal Air Force in the United Kingdom 1953–66,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 25 (1968): 326–29; J. L. Blonstein and E. Clarke, “The Medical Aspects of Amateur Boxing,” British Medical Journal 2 (1954): 1523–25; M. Critchley, “Medical Aspects of Boxing, Particularly from a Neurological Standpoint,” British Medical Journal 1 (1957): 357–62; A. Whiteson and P. M. Lenten, “Boxers’ Brains,” critical research edition, British Medical Journal 288 (1984): 1007; J. A. N. Corsellis, “Boxing and the Brain,” British Medical Journal 298 (1989): 105–9; J. B. Foster and L. Breimer, “Boxing and the Brain,” British Medical Journal 298 (1989): 318–19. Deontay Wilder, posted Nov. 5, 2017, Fight Hub TV, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIGZVsH_Wpo. D. Bieler, “A Boxing Champion Says He Wants to Kill a Man in the Ring: ‘This is a Gladiator’s Sport’,” Washington Post, May 16, 2019. E. J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 171; W. Wright, “Keep It in the Ring: Using Boxing in Social Group Work with High-Risk and Offender Youth to Reduce Violence,” Social Work with Groups 29 (2006): 149–74;

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its origins in the United States was not only seen as culturally dangerous but also puts on display the ethnic fissures in American culture. Moreover, although I agree that the body is an object of cultural practices, if we confine the boxing body to the enactment, internalization, and naturalization of imposed meanings,78 it is hard to figure out where the fugitive meanings that valorized the violent bodies come from since, in almost every imaginable sense, the boxing body was the dominated and proscribed body, not unlike the infamia of the gladiator. In its earliest versions, the boxing body was the dominated and enslaved body. On slave plantations, slaves were matched against slaves.79 On the docks of Baltimore, Whites would organize fights among Black youth, often blindfolded.80 The enslaved body graduated to the marginalized body, flourishing where immigrant populations were highest and practiced by those either “cut adrift by increasing labor specialization and the rise of national markets” or engaged in such preindustrial trades as butchers, grocers, shoemakers, and blacksmiths.81

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A. Sampson, From NEET to ETE: An Evaluation of the Longer Term Outcomes of the Pathways Programme at Fight for Peace, UK, Centre for Social Justice and Change Research Report 8, University of East London, 2015; R. Meek, A Sporting Chance: An Independent Review of Sport in Youth and Adult Prisons (London: Ministry of Justice, 2018); and early statements in P. Knight, “Eulogy of Boxing and Cock Fighting,” Literary Magazine and American Register 6 (Oct. 1806): 366–67. N. Hare, “A Study of the Black Fighter,” Black Scholar 3 (1971): 2–8: site of domination; P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 100; L. J. D. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2008): unconscious internalization of social dispositions. Related are approaches that view boxing as a mirror of class struggle: J.-P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, J. Rée (ed.), trans. A. Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1976), 805–18. On Sartre, see B. Hutchens, “Organized Rifts in the Social Fabric: Sartre on the Phenomenon and Praxis of Boxing,” Sartre Studies International 16 (2010): 24–39. Attempts to give more openness to the play of power relations have been made by J. Beauchez and P. Hamilton, “The “Sweet Science” of Bruising: Boxing as a Paradigm of the Sociology of Domination,” English edition, Revue française de sociologie 58 (2017): 79–100; L. Trimbur, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); L. Trimbur, “‘Tough Love’: Mediation and Articulation in the Urban Boxing Gym,” Ethnography 12 (2011): 334–55. S. Lussana, “To See Who Was Best on the Plantation: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Journal of Southern History 76 (2010): 911, notes that on occasion a slave would be freed. G. R. Gems, Boxing: A Concise History of the Sweet Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 81. Gorn, Manly Art, 45–46. On the changing demographics of the cities, see S. Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 2004); B. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

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The boxing body was the banned body. Matches were outlawed and locations kept secret, and often moved as authorities closed in. The February 26, 1835, New Jersey legislation outlawing the “degrading practice of prize fighting” included those fighting for money or “to test the skill or bodily powers of the pugilists or combatants,” and extended punishments to steamboat owners (where fights were often held) and to spectators.82 The National Police Gazette, a magazine that reported on pop culture, commented sarcastically about the original choice of Pool Island as the site of the muchanticipated fight between Tom Hyer and “Yankee” Sullivan, noting how that virtuous city, which usually has a man a week killed in its streets, or two or three riots in the same period of time, became so indignant at the idea of making a hundred thousand dollars or so, by having a match of fisticuffs within electric distance of the borders, that it organized voluntary patrols to frown down the outrage, and stuffed a broken winded steamboat with crowds of infantry armed to the teeth.83

The boxing body was the morally proscribed body. A 1794 essay in the New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository describes a boxing match with such moral disapproval: Two naked men hammering each other, till their faces and bodies are covered with blood and contusions: the pertinacity of the man who is knocked down as fast as he can rise, gives us rather a proof of his baseness than of his courage, and should disgust every reasonable man; for he is animated to act this brutal part, from a desire of satisfying the connoisseurs of whom he is to receive the wages of sin.84

A later essay described “pugilism on a public stage” as “a prostitution of a manly and useful art,” a striking refrain of Seneca’s comment.85 In a replay of a Roman rhetorical exercise about the merits of a man becoming a gladiator to pay for his father’s funeral, a story in the New-Yorker tells of a boy who enters 82

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85

L. Elmer, A Digest of the Laws of New Jersey (Bridgeton, NJ: James M. Newell, 1838), 117. A Vermont court distinguished between “pugilistic exercise” and boxing that “degenerate[s] into a prize fight,” in E. Million, “The Enforceability of Prize Fight Statutes,” Kentucky Law Journal 27 (1939): 155. Similarly, Massachusetts Statute 1849, c. 49, with ensuing court decisions in E. Bennett, R. Gray, and H. Swift, Massachusetts Digest: A Digest of the Reported Decisions of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1881), 4423. National Police Gazette, Feb. 7, 1849, in P. Timony, The American Fistiana: Containing a History of Prize Fighting in the United States, with All the Principal Battles for the Last Forty Years, and a Full and Precise Account of All the Particulars of the Great (New York: H. Johnson, 1849), 22. “Of Boxing,” New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository, Nov. 1794. See also P. S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) on the response of moral reformers to this changing urban environment. “On Pugilism,” Literary Magazine and American Register 5 (June 1806): 469.

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a prize fight to prevent the foreclosure of his mother’s house and, against all odds, wins but suffers such injuries that he dies. The mother throws herself on the corpse of her son and goes mad. The author draws out the moral lesson: “Nothing is more disgusting than the description of a prize fight, where the most dreadful disfigurement and injuries done by man to man in a cool deliberate manner for the sake of lucre, are if possible, made worse by being recounted in a slang phrase and systematic form to minister to the worst appetite of the depraved.”86 The boxing body was the anti-republican body. Thomas Jefferson, in writing to John Bannister Jr. about the education of youth in England, expresses concern that there the students will learn “drinking, horse-racing and boxing,” becoming fascinated with the “luxury” and “privileges of the European aristocrats” and developing “a contempt for the simplicity of his own country.”87 The illusion of a harmonious republican community of yeoman farmers and shopkeepers was shattered by ethnic bodies in conflict with other ethnic bodies, foregrounding the residual identities and animosities that defied the promise of a new age. The boxing body was the unenlightened and unreasoning body. Not only did the violent body stand in sharp contrast to the deliberative, patrician bodies of Independence Hall, but the American version of boxing could not even muster the pretense of the science it had acquired in England. Even supporters of boxing as it began to develop in the first half of the nineteenth century recognized that the science was rarely taught. Where pugilism as a science flourished in England, it was, as noted at the time, “very slightly encouraged” in the United States.88 The boxing body was the raucous body that both confronted bourgeois standards of modesty, self-discipline, and propriety89 and confounded the hopes of working-class organizers for a disciplined, unified movement.90 It is against the backdrop of these proscriptions that the body is both defined and resists definition. As Stephanie Camp notes in her discussion of slavery, the body is a “contested terrain of struggle” because it is simultaneously “the most personal, intimate thing that people possess 86 87 88 89 90

“A Prize Fight,” New-Yorker, Oct. 6, 1838; see a similar story in the rhetorical exercise in Ps.-Quint. Declam. Min. 302.4. Oct. 15, 1785, in T. Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 8.636. Timony, American Fistiana, 1. For example, B. Franklin, Autobiography (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1895), 14–15, 44. See Wilentz, Chants, 256.

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and the most public.”91 The valorization of the boxing body – the raucousness, the ability to withstand pain, the ethos of honor and loyalty – is frequently seen as a reaction by an increasingly dispossessed immigrant, laboring, and bachelor subculture against the emasculating and impersonalizing forces of wage labor and bourgeois standards of decorum.92 There is a broader political terrain in which the boxing body was defined, though, one that did not exist simply in opposition to a bourgeois identity but that also connected itself to an American identity. The materiality of the boxing body – its form, disposition, and motion – emerged as a claim about an American founding identity.93 In Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological account, the bodily experience of founding lay in the realization by those assembled in Philadelphia of the power of action – the power to bring into existence through collective effort a new age, dislocated from the old. The boxing body in the ring and the related image of the gladiator as it was portrayed on the American stage challenged that image, grounding an American identity in the rugged, laboring body that blended America’s new urbanism with traditional rusticism. The reenactment of founding was not deliberation, but confrontation with violent wildness reexperienced by bodies in the ring – a confrontation that required, in turn, the incorporation of that wildness. It was not the power to begin, but to give and take a blow. It was not the powdered wig, but the naked chest that bore the marks of battle. It was not the refined English boxer or actor, but the unrefined, unsophisticated, almost anti-intellectual brawler that was joined with the image of the backwoodsman. It was not Jefferson, but Josey. It was not Cicero, but 91 92

93

S. M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861,” Journal of Southern History 68 (2002): 544, 538. Gorn, Manly Art, 96–97, 141, 146; J. T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 6, though also arguing that boxing exists because of human nature’s “fear of and need for violence” (251); G. L. Early, Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), 134: “a morality play about the very nature of capitalistic society”; R. B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 251–53; Gems, Boxing, 48–49; D. Jump, The Criminology of Boxing, Violence and Desistance (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2020), 1. J. J. Brent and P. B. Kraska, “‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’: Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic,” British Journal of Criminology 53 (2013): 357–77, sees boxing as a response more broadly to the mechanistic structures of modernity. On transformations in working-class culture in New York, see Wilentz, Chants, 263. Along these lines, S. J. Juengel, “Bare-Knuckle Boxing and the Pedagogy of National Manhood,” Studies in Popular Culture 25 (2003): 101, argues that in England, “the body of the pugilist becomes for Cobbett, Egan, Hazlitt, and other Regency sportsmen a form of consolidating and sublimating the tacit violence of national identification and a synecdoche for the discursive theatrics of gender and nation formation.”

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Marius, Spartacus, and Cato the Elder. In fact, to ratify this version of the body, Americans could and did look to a set of Roman images. Americanizing the Boxing Body Moreau de Saint-Méry, a French observer who spent several years in the United States, recounts vividly an early bare-knuckle match in Philadelphia in the 1790s. The description is interesting because it only hints at some of the values that would come to organize the experience. There were already some “rules and regulations” that came from England: The audience could not interfere, the combatant could not be hit once on the ground, though he could be hit the moment he tried to get up, and the fight concluded when one admits “that he is conquered.”94 But more than these norms, Méry conveys the brute physicality of the experience: At the signal “they run at each other and swing on chest, head, face and bellies blows whose noise can only be realized by those who have been present at such a spectacle”; when one falls, “the other showers him with fist blows the moment he tries to get up.” Méry describes the brutal effect on the body: “At the end of the fight the boxers are bruised, disfigured, and covered with blood, which they spit out, vomit out or drip from the nose. Teeth are broken, eyes are swollen shut, and sometimes sight is completely obliterated.” There is some distinction in decorum between boxing and brawling, though. “Boxing matches are always held in the late evening, by the light of the moon, unless the participants belong to the lowest orders or are drunk, in which case they fight in broad daylight where anyone can see.”95 The fight Méry describes was precipitated by a personal grudge, though the match was organized enough to suggest that there was interest in arranging the spectacle. The personal grudge would remain the stated impetus through the early nineteenth century (and actually remains a central part of combat sports to this day), which already signaled a departure from the organization of matches by English aristocrats (referred to as the Fancy, which Egan, in his classic book on pugilism, means “any person who is fond of a particular amusement”) who trained, financed, and often fixed the matches.96 As an early commentary on boxing 94

95 96

The fight between Jacob Hyer and Tom Beasley in New York in 1816 is seen as the first ring fight with “the public-at-large” as spectators and conducted according to the rules in England. N. Fleischer and S. Andre, A Pictorial History of Boxing (New York: Bonanza, 1981), 39. M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey [1793–1798], K. L. Roberts, A. M. Roberts, and S. L. Mims (eds.) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1947), 328. P. Egan, Boxiana, or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism (London: Sherwood, Jones & Co., 1823), 1.1.

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recognized, “Most of the contests which have been decided within a roped ring, on this side of the Atlantic, have proceeded from personal grudge, or sprung from sudden and heedless chaffing.”97 Even as a class emerged in the 1840s “who aspire to pugilism as a means of ambition or a source of profit,”98 the events continued to be fueled by personal animosities and ethnic divisions, which easily spilled out into the streets.99 What is seen as the first American championship came about from an encounter in a saloon between Tom Hyer and the Irish boxer James “Yankee” Sullivan. The brief physical altercation led Sullivan to post in the New York Herald that Hyer lacked “the courage to fight as a man,” with Hyer posting, in turn, that he had “chastised” Sullivan for his attack in the bar and then said he was willing to meet “anywhere,” adding, “however, I am his master.”100 The National Police Gazette suggested that the planned fight provided a “safety valve of a greater danger” in which they would have met “Philadelphia fashion” and “cost the census records some half a dozen lives.”101 What is striking in the early accounts of boxing is the emergence of a particular aesthetic, described as gladiatorial, with detailed descriptions of body and movement that stood in sharp contrast to not just standards of bourgeois modesty – the boxers fought without shirts – but also bourgeois bodies: the soft, “pampered” bodies of the elite102 or the “black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth.”103 Thomas McCoy’s skin, before his fight with Christopher Lilly in 1842, was described as “too fine,” given some eruptions on it.104 The Sporting Chronicle described John McCleester, leading up to his fight with Tom Hyer in 1841, as “soggy,” though possessing some fine “gladiatorial points.”105 In contrast, the Spirit of the Times noted “Yankee” Sullivan’s “small gladiatorial head” – which “from the boldness of its angles and the rightness of its flesh appeared to be a mask of bone” – and deep chest.106 97 99 100 101 102 103 105 106

98 Timony, American Fistiana, 1. Timony, American Fistiana, 1. “Tom Hyer’s First Fight,” Sporting Chronicle, Sept. 9, 1841, in Timony, American Fistiana, 8; “Fatal Prize Fight between Lilly and McCoy, for $200 a Side,” Spirit of the Times, Sept. 17, 1842, 339. “The Prize Fight, between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan,” New York Herald, Feb. 9, 1849 (correspondence originally published June 1, 2, 1848). “Sullivan’s Last Exhibition,” National Police Gazette, Dec. 30, 1848, in Timony, American Fistiana, 14. R. Waln, The Hermit in Philadelphia, second series (Philadelphia: Published for the author by J. Maxwell and Moses Thomas, 1821), 81. Holmes, “The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table,” 1.170. 104 “Fatal,” 339. “Tom Hyer’s First Fight,” 8. “Fight between Sullivan and Bell for $300 a Side,” Spirit of the Times, Sept. 3, 1842, 322.

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One contemporaneous account told of Christopher Lilly’s body, in his fight against Thomas McCoy (that resulted in McCoy’s death), as follows: On stripping, he presented a fine appearance. His skin was very clear and light in color, but firm in texture and healthy in tone. His form is round almost to perfection; his sides, instead of branching from the waist, gradually outwards to the armpits, circle concavely inwards like reversed crescents; his neck is strong and muscular in a high degree; his head – a fighting one, remarkably well set – small, round, boney, with a small featured dial, and his underworks, though at first somewhat light to the eye, are sufficiently strong for endurance.107

Where Lilly’s “appearance was fine, McCoy’s was beautiful”: His skin was a warmer glow than the former’s; his form was more elegantly proportioned, and his air and style more graceful and manlike. His swelling breast curved out like a cuirass [an armored breastplate]; his shoulders were deep, with a bold curved blade, and the muscular development of the arm large and finely brought out. His head was rather large and long, yet it indicated courage and a love for strife, and the manner in which it was set betokened strength.108

The National Police Gazette described the first famous American champion, Tom Hyer (see Figure 4.6), as “strikingly American” in his size and apparent strength in his encounter with the slighter framed, but more technical, Irish boxer, “Yankee” Sullivan.109 In his first fight, Hyer was characterized as less disciplined: “Irregular in his mode of living, and has indulged during the last two years in a life of leisure, but little conducive to the vigor which it was necessary for him, on this occasion, to possess.”110 But when they met to fight, They were as finely developed in every muscle as their physical capacity could reach, and the bounding confidence which sparkled fiercely in their eyes, showed that their spirits and courage were at their highest mark. Sullivan, with his round compact chest, formidable head, shelving flinty brows, fierce glaring eyes, and clean-turned shoulders, looked the very incarnation of the spirit of mischievous genius; while Hyer, with his broad, formidable chest, and long muscular limbs, seemed as if he could almost trample him out of life, at will.111 107 109 110 111

“Fatal,” 339. 108 “Fatal,” 339. “Excitement among the Fighting Crowd,” National Police Gazette, Sept. 30, 1848, in Timony, American Fistiana, 10. “Tom Hyer’s First Fight,” 8. “The Great Prize Fight, Between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan,” National Police Gazette, Feb. 7, 1849, in Timony, American Fistiana, 25.

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Figure 4.6 Lithograph of Tom Hyer by Eliphalet M. Brown, 1849. Reproduced with permission from the American Antiquarian Society.

There was great disappointment with the “wooden” encounter in the exhibition between Hyer and his trainer, George Thompson, in which the combatants moved like “a pair of automatons arranged on mechanical principles, and pulled to a set method by a string.”112 The fights combined 112

“Hyer’s Last Exhibition,” National Police Gazette, Jan. 13, 1849, in Timony, American Fistiana, 15.

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strict rules enforced by umpires, particular rituals of shaking hands, and the colors of each side displayed in the respective corners. The round-by-round reports detail each blow delivered with its effect on the weary bodies and the response of the crowd. Embedded in these reports were a set of norms: the ability to deliver a blow and to sustain one; the ability to inflict damage on the body; and in all of that, the spirit of the battered body returning to its feet. A contemporary account of a fight between the overmatched Tom Secor and Sullivan reflects these norms in its report of the sixty-fifth round: “Secor was now hopelessly weak, with good heart, however, he staggered up to his man and received his punishment with dogged game,” concluding, “The fight bears its own comment. The whole description may be summed up that Secor stood up and took his whipping like a man. With his inadequate science and superior size, he looked like a giant suffering the inflictions of some malicious spirit, impalpable to his attacks.”113 The Spirit of the Times captured the beginning of the fight between William “Billy” Bell and Sullivan: Time was called and both came cheerfully up to the scratch. They shook hands again slightly, Bell very cautiously, as if fearful of a rough return for his politeness, and then squared for the combat. The rude murmurs of the turbulent multitude were at once hushed as death. Not a breath was heard. Scarcely a leaf was seen to stir. The primeval silence of that solitary spot was never more profound. In the centre of that vast arena stood the combatants – two bold men – confronting each other in full position, with momentary awe, and gathering their energies for the terrific struggle.114

The Times describes a moment of liminality in which bodies are mutually constituted by violence. Hutchens gives us some insight into this role in his discussion of combat sports: “Properly speaking, the humanity of the opponent is not absent, lacking, over-ridden or merely unrepresentable; it is crossed out, bracketed, suspended wholly irrelevant to the feral behavior so violently intimate within the fighter’s life-world.”115 In the encounter, the self is constituted not as a stand-alone subject (exerting force, for example) but is constituted in its continual intertwining with the other embodied self (see Figure 4.7). Stated slightly differently, the body is not separated from, but is continually constituted by, the violence of which it is a part. The “fighting man,” as the Spirit of the Times wrote of Sullivan, is “light in the scale, and heavy in the field; strong, agile, quick, cunning, capable, 113 114

“The Great Fight between Yankee Sullivan and Thomas Secor, on Saturday the 24th January, 1842, at Statan Island,” Sporting Chronicle, Jan. 24, 1842, in Timony, American Fistiana, 6. “Fight Between Sullivan and Bell,” 322. 115 Hutchens, “Constitutive Inter-Corporeity,” 139.

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Figure 4.7 The John L. Sullivan-Jake Kilrain Boxing Match at Richburg, Miss., ca. 1889. Their last bare-knuckle championship fight. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. www.loc.gov/item/2002706358/.

a perfect master of his science, and, if the expression may be used, an intellectual fighter; for he is continually fighting in his head, and calculating the chances and results of every manoeuvre.”116 But constituting that identity – and we see this with Marius in ancient Rome, Josey’s band, and, as I will talk about below, Spartacus in the American play The Gladiator – were also the marks of battle. In the account of the deadly fight between McCoy and Lilly, McCoy’s appearance was described as “shocking” in the seventieth round (“both his eyes were black – the left one nearly closed, and indeed that whole cheek presented a shocking appearance. His very forehead was black and blue; his lips were swollen to an incredible size, and the blood streamed profusely down his chest. My heart sickened at the sorry sight”).117 Yet, even in the eighty-fourth round, he preserved “the dignity of unflinching resolution in his gait” and in the ninety-fifth round remained “stern and erect” in the face of the “violent struggle.”118 In the match between Sullivan and Hyer, the National Police Gazette describes the moment when Sullivan realized he was overmatched: “He [Sullivan] looked at [his] opponent with a sort of wild astonishment as he came up, but with a desperate courage, as if conscious nothing but the most reckless 116

“Fight Between Sullivan and Bell,” 322.

117

“Fatal,” 346.

118

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policy alone could help him,” he rushed up but then thought better of the recklessness.119 Hyer took Sullivan’s “blows without wincing or endeavoring.”120 Identity was so intimately bound up in the match that death was preferrable to losing, as the mother of McCoy expressed before his fight against Lilly in 1842 that “she would sooner have him return dead, than a loser.”121 McCoy fought to the death: by the 120th round, he “stood on his feet for the last time. He was led slowly to the mark, and took his position – a dying man – but as erect, as dignified, as game as ever.” The fight lasted two hours and forty-three minutes. And in the end, as McCoy lay dying, the reporter comments, “Never shall I forget the talismanic horror of that expression.”122 The horror loomed as a possibility in every match. But the compensatory image was of an almost heroic glory. In the Hyer-Sullivan match, which lasted sixteen rounds, the National Police Gazette concludes, “There never was, perhaps, a battle in which there was so much fighting in so short a space of time; none, certainly, in which more resolute punishment was given and taken, without flinching on either side.”123 The Gazette commented on the initial Hyer-Sullivan challenge, “In these days of wars, fighting, and fighting men, let all sorts of heroes have a chance.”124 The heroic language took a decidedly Roman turn when Plutarch’s Lives was invoked to compare Sullivan’s greatness to that of General (and later President) Zachery Taylor.125 And in celebrating Hyer’s victory, the Police Gazette commented that he “earned all the laurels which may be gathered from the brutal soil of the arena, and we trust that while he regards himself as the ‘Champion of America,’ he will deserve the title in the double sense, by striving henceforth to be the most peaceable and unoffending man.”126 The boxing body presented a particular version of American identity that, like so much happening culturally in the decades after the American Revolution, defined itself in juxtaposition to its English lineage. That is, it took up Noah Webster’s cause but posited a very different genealogy. That juxtaposition was often literal with the search for American contenders against the more practiced and technically skilled English opponents. But the Americanized boxing body was also seen as bigger, less artful, and more rugged, and the activity itself more egalitarian as it shed its English, 119 123 125 126

“Great Prize Fight,” 25. 120 “Great Prize Fight,” 26. 121 “Fatal,” 339. 122 “Fatal,” 346. “Great Prize Fight,” 28. 124 “Prize Fight,” 3. “Yankee Sullivan in His Training,” National Police Gazette, Dec. 16, 1848, in Timony, American Fistiana, 13. “Great Prize Fight,” 28.

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aristocratic associations. The “laurels” accorded by recognition were not premised on birth or education or artifacts of cultural refinement, but earned through toil in the ring. Certainly, the challenge to class order was not lost on Robert Waln, a self-styled aristocrat from Philadelphia, who advocated for an American aristocracy to learn the art of pugilism (like in England). The lower orders of society, by habits of labour and education, are comparatively gifted with a muscular strength, which cannot be obtained in the lap of luxury and indolence; to this corporeal superiority is too often joined a low-bred insolence, and a disposition to insult and abuse those who are their superiors in all other respects. The dissemination of the pugilistic art, not attainable by the lower classes, would in the course of time, gradually place the weak on a footing with the strong, and finally extirpate, by means of manual examples suited to the capacities of the delinquents, the overbearing impertinence of hack-drivers, wood-sawyers, carters, and draymen.127

In its American version, boxing instantiated a version of America’s myth of mobility: The art of boxing is of such mighty power, that it elevates the coal-heaver, the publican, the porter, or the negro, – who happen to possess muscular strength, large bones, and a thick skull – into the society of rank and fashion. [Tom] Crib and [Tom] Molineux, by virtue of this art, could ride in the coaches of nobility, and hang upon the arms of titled ‘Corinthians;’ yet Crib was a tavern-keeper, and Molineux a black-man! However, in some cases, it was very doubtful which party was most disgraced by the association.128 (See Figure 4.8)

In arguing for the aristocracy to take up the practice of pugilism, Waln specifically references the founding myth: The aristocracy of fashion and gentility would be more clearly recognised, and the farce of relative republican equality cease to ornament every ragged vagabond with the same attributes as a gentleman. Stump orators may persuade the outlaw or the renegade, that the moment he sets his foot upon our shores, he is made equal to the best blood of the land, but in all civilised societies, an aristocracy must and will exist.129

Pugilism in England was a sport of the aristocracy that was connected to the development of a national character – the sweet science, as Egan coined the term, that instilled character and fair play. American brawling did not 127

Waln, Hermit, 79.

128

Waln, Hermit, 187.

129

Waln, Hermit, 79–80.

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Figure 4.8 The Battle between Crib [Cribb] and Molineaux, issued October 3, 1811. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-bb84a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

achieve the stylized refinement practiced or organized by English elites.130 There was no such aristocratic tradition in the United States. Nor was there a national program promoting rugged sports until late in the nineteenth century. Egan draws out the distinction between the “fair fighting” of the English and gouging matches, an even more primitive form of bareknuckle fighting, that were part of the American landscape and in which “the combatants take advantage, pull, bite, and kick, and with hellish ferocity strive to gouge, or turn each other’s eyes out of their sockets!”131 In these early years though, the boxing body was already laying claim as an image of the founding body, a connection that continues to the current day: immigrants and marginalized groups who, through a violent confrontation with primeval nature, could imagine achieving nobility. 130

131

See Egan, Boxiana, 1.iii–vi, 2–4. B. Mee, Bare Fists (London: Collins Willow, 2000), 225, characterizes the days of bare-knuckle fighting as the “science of self defence,” in contrast to the violence of contemporary mixed martial arts. Science seems to be the term of choice, and one used with frequency as elites latched onto boxing, to endorse one preferred form of brawling over another. Egan, Boxiana, 3.566.

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Playing the Gladiator in the Early American Theater The valorization of the gladiatorial boxer did not emerge in a vacuum, nor did it remain confined to a subculture. The National Police Gazette reported that Hyer’s sparring exhibition attracted “spectators of every class.”132 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., for example, a physician, humorist, and professor at Harvard, frequented the gym of one prominent boxer, Benicia Boy (John Camel Heenan). Interestingly, Holmes prefaced his defense of boxing by recalling Cato the Elder, whose physical exertion kept him vigorous even in old age. Holmes characterizes boxing as providing “a sense of power in action” that combines the will, body, and intellect.133 In his description of watching a sparring match, which so invigorated Holmes that he thought about putting on the gloves, Holmes states, “Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter puddings against the big one’s ribs, and bang goes the other into the big one’s face and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous bundle.”134 Holmes continues: “Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all tend.”135 Others also made a connection between this sort of physical exertion and an American identity, including the transcendentalist minister William Ellery Channing. Although advocating for the moral improvement of the laboring class in two lectures delivered to the Mechanic Apprentices’ Library Association in 1840, his target, as well, is an aristocracy clinging to the “Old World” that subverts progress to a new age by imagining that their superiority rests on wearing “a garter or a riband.”136 Speaking about the exertion necessary for moral improvement, he draws a comparison to the physicality of the laboring classes: “Does not the child 132

133 134 135 136

“Grand Meeting of the Fancy,” National Police Gazette, Nov. 23, 1848, commenting on the sparring exhibition by Hyer, in Timony, American Fistiana, 11. The New York Sun, Feb. 9, 1849, editorialized after the fight, “Not alone were the ‘fancies’ in a glow of intense suspense, but staid citizens have speculated upon the probable results, men have wagered fortunes,” quoted in P. Gammie, “Pugilists and Politicians in Antebellum New York: The Life and Times of Tom Hyer,” New York History 75 (1994): 282. After Hyer’s win, he was not only received by huge crowds in Philadelphia and New York but was also sought after by “politicians and statesmen as well as the theatrical, circus and sporting element.” Contemporaneous article in E. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer (New York: Ed. James, 1879), 20. Holmes, “The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table,” 1.170. Holmes, “The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table,” 1.172. Holmes, “The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table,” 1.171. W. E. Channing, On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes (Hoboken, NJ: Generic NL Freebook Publisher), 17.

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grow and get strength by throwing a degree of hardship and vehemence and conflict into his very sports?”137 Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, expresses his enthusiasm for “boys, the masters of the playground and of the street.”138 But these images received a wider cultural validation in a second arena that was, in ways, every bit as raucous as the ring: the early American theater. Theaters were not upper-class affairs. In Méry’s description of the playhouse in Philadelphia, there were tiers of seating for the wealthier, the pit where both men and women of lower social standing congregated, and an upper gallery of even less expensive admission for women and African Americans who could not sit anywhere else. Even in the 1790s, Méry was struck by the “boisterous” and “coarse” performances and “indecent” interludes: it was “not unusual to hear such words as Goddamn, Bastard, Rascal, Son of a Bitch. Women turn their backs to the performance during the interlude.”139 Some confirmation of the connection between the ring and the stage as arenas of identity is suggested by the change in the theater in the second half of the nineteenth century. As the theater became less the “arena of manliness,”140 its raucousness replaced with more restrained standards of behavior that could attract a growing female consumer market, boxing experienced a resurgence, now including a larger segment of middle-class men.141 Butsch notes how the Spirit of the Times and other gentlemen magazines shifted the focus of their coverage from theater news to boxing.142 There was an overlapping demographic of the crowd for the ring and the stage. But there was also the elevation of a type of body. In two early American plays that departed from the typical European repertoire staged in American playhouses, two images were taken from Roman sources. One was Marius, portrayed in Richard Penn Smith’s popular play Caius Marius, which opened in Philadelphia in 1831 and spread to Boston and New York. The second was Spartacus, in Robert Montgomery Bird’s widely popular 137 138

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140 141 142

Channing, Elevation, 9. R. W. Emerson, “Education,” in E. Emerson (ed.), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 138. See J. C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 271, on the emergence of “muscular Christianity” after 1850. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey [1793–1798], 347. On the Broadway Theater, see B. A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 93–94. R. Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,” American Quarterly 46 (1994): 387. Gorn, Manly Art, 158–59, 194–206; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 272–75. Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys,” 392.

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play The Gladiator, which premiered in New York in 1831 and spread to Philadelphia and Boston, playing until 1872.143 Both plays were commissioned by Edwin Forrest, the most prominent American actor of the time, who played the lead parts. The heroes were uneducated, almost antiintellectual, but imposing in their strength and courage. The plays would resonate with this mixed and raucous crowd. Charles Durang, a contemporaneous actor, described Marius as a “humble rustic” who rose to the positions of general and consul and then must flee as a “fugitive.”144 More popular was The Gladiator that pitted the “the patrician monger” and “tyrants” who had deserted Rome in pursuit of wealth against Spartacus, the “scurvy gladiator, with no brains,” in Crassus’ words, who is portrayed as rising up “for wrath and liberty.”145 Spartacus had made other appearances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bernard-Joseph Saurin’s play Spartacus, Tragedie, written in 1760, was organized around a tension between Spartacus’ private commitments and public choices that he had to make in his fight against corrupt tyranny.146 In a multivolume work written in 1770, Abbé G. T. F Raynal used Spartacus to argue against the slave system.147 Gotthold Lessing never completed his Spartacus (ca. 1770), in which he armed Spartacus with both philosophy and weapons in his fight for natural rights.148 Franz Grillparzer’s uncompleted work Spartakus took aim at justifications for Austrian state sovereignty.149 The British writer Susannah Strickland saw Spartacus as defending freedom for himself and his homeland, Thrace.150 In his Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire described Spartacus’ 143 144

145 146

147 148 149

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The New-York Mirror, Sept. 25, 1831, vol. 9, no. 12, 93, provided an extensive discussion of the manuscript of The Gladiator, including an extended passage from Plutarch. Charles Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage, vol. 3, Between the Years 1749 and 1855, Thomas Westcott Scrapbooks of the Philadelphia Stage (n.p., 1818), 268. See also B. McCullough, The Life and Writings of Richard Penn Smith, with a Reprint of His Play “The Deformed” 1830 (Menasha, WI: Banta, 1917), 20. C. Foust, “The Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1919), 302, 355, 357. B.-J. Saurin, Spartacus (Paris: Chez Louis, 1792); also A. Futrell, “Seeing Red: Spartacus as Domestic Economist,” in D. T. McGuire, S. R. Joshel, and M. Malamud (eds.), Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 84. A. Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond (London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1776), 3.466. A. W. T. Stahr, The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1866), 2.403–5. In H. Keidel, Die dramatischen Versuche des jungen Grillparzer: Auf ihre Entstehung geprüft und in Zusammenhang gebracht mit der inneren Entwickelung des Dichters (Münster: Theissingsche Buchhandlung, 1911). S. Strickland, Spartacus, a Roman Story (London: A. K. Newman and Co., 1822).

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revolt as the only just war in history.151 Bird’s play drew on some of these same anti-elite and anti-regal strands. But its resonance lay in a claim it made about the true founding bodies of America. And these bodies carried with them some of the same tensions as Rome’s valorization of the gladiator. Bird’s play met with immediate success. The reviewer of the opening of The Gladiator at the Park Theater in New York described the pit as so full “that a number of persons were literally forced upon the stage by the pressure of the throng.”152 The reviewer portrayed Spartacus’ last speech as “utterly inaudible by reason of the clamorous applause” and “when the curtain fell, the theater was literally shaken with the energetic demonstrations of pleasure given by the spectators.”153 The audience burst with “electric force and muscle from perhaps 2,000 full-sinew’d men,” as Walt Whitman describes the entrance of America’s most famous actor, Edwin Forrest, as Spartacus.154 Phrases found their way into the streets, just as Roman boys played gladiator. As Charles Durang writes, “The lines ‘We will make Rome howl for this’ became a catch phrase with boys in the street.”155 The play has been read variously as “rehears[ing] emergent class identities”156 and as providing “a utopian vision of an Arcadian past.”157 As has been noted with some despair by those who read The Gladiator as part of a proletarian manifesto, the play is pessimistic about the possibility of forming a labor movement, if for no other reasons than because Spartacus is betrayed by his brethren,158 and because the figure of Forrest himself was caught in the “antagonistic traditions of republican and liberal ideology.”159 I suggest a different reading, one in which both The Gladiator and Forrest embodied a broader narrative of the American founding that included, but also extended beyond, the urban streets. The image of founding that is recalled is neither an idyllic fantasy nor a yeoman utopia, nor does it fit republican or liberal narratives, but is a story of people after the Fall (an image of human community reminiscent of Virgil). The city on a hill, to recall Winthrop’s Puritan founding, had become “a palace upon these hills” 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, (Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1789), 4.227. New York Evening Post, Sept. 27, 1831, in Foust, “Life,” 41. New York Evening Post, Sept. 27, 1831, in Foust, “Life,” 42. W. Whitman, The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, R. M. Bucke, T. B. Harned, H. Traubel, and O. L. Triggs (eds.) (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 6.190. Durang, quoted in A. W. Bloom, Edwin Forrest: A Biography and Performance History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2019), 35. P. P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 154. McConachie, Melodramatic, 100. McConachie, Melodramatic, 105–6; Reed, Rogue Performances, 156–59. McConachie, Melodramatic, 105–6.

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built with “the lives of a thousand innocent men” for the wealth of the patricians.160 There is “no deed of greatness ye can boast.”161 These anti-elite sentiments run throughout the different versions of Spartacus. More striking, though, is the portrayal of the body. Like Cato the Elder shedding the cultural refinement of Greece, Forrest, as Spartacus, broke from the expectations of European theater, embracing an image of American ruggedness (see Figure 4.9). It is a particular Americanized version of the body, one we saw with the boxer, that thrusts itself into view, contrasting to elite standards of decorum. Alger, in his biography, writes about Forrest, As he stepped upon the stage in his naked fighting-trim, his muscular coating unified all over him and quivering with vital power, his skin polished by exercise and friction to a smooth and marble hardness, conscious of his potency, fearless of anything on the earth, proudly aware of the impression he knew his mere appearance, backed by his fame, would make on the audience who impatiently awaited him, – he used to stand and receive the long, tumultuous cheering that greeted him, as immovable as a planted statue of Hercules.162

In Forrest’s first performances in England, the Western Times (Exeter) noted: “We have no such figure on the stage. His legs are so totally unlike those spindleshanks we are accustomed to see on our boards, as to appear padded.”163 The London Athanaeum described Forrest as having “a pair of shoulders on which the weight of Drury Lane theatre might rest.”164 But the body bore the marks of dislocation. In an image played in the Aeneid and replayed in Josey, Spartacus looks back at his home, consumed by Roman fire. “No wife sat sobbing by the wreck; no child / Wept on the sward; not even the watchdog howled: / There was no life there.”165 Describing his grief, which evokes the permeability of the boundaries of identity by the trauma of dislocation, Spartacus announces, “I was a man no more.”166 Bird associates the founding cry of liberty and the American myth of rising “from poverty, to wealth and honours” not with the powdered wigs 160 162 163 164 166

Foust, “Life,” 316. 161 Foust, “Life,” 316. W. R. Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1877), 1.251–52. Oct. 29, 1836, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Forrest, 51. Oct. 22, 1836, 755, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Forrest, 51. 165 Foust, “Life,” 318. Foust, “Life,” 319. G. Strand, “‘My Noble Spartacus’: Edwin Forrest and Masculinity on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” in R. Schanke and K. Marra (eds.), Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 36, argues that Forrest, as the “spectacular male,” is “feminized” by being subject to the gaze of others, an association, incidentally, that Ovid also makes with gladiators (Pont. 4.16.51– 52), as do Horace (Epist. 1.1) and Seneca (QNat. 7.31.3).

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Figure 4.9 Mr. Edwin Forrest (The American Tragedian,) as Spartacus, The Gladiator. Lithograph by George Edward Madeley. Cage 430, Butler Collection of Theatrical Illustrations, Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections. Reproduced with permission.

of Philadelphia but with “fugitives” and “dregs” from “various nations” who are seen as “ignorant savage[s],” and whose mark of “toil” is the “cuts” on their bodies. Spartacus’ band replays the founding journey.167 167

Foust, “Life,” 305, 329, 355, 357, 363, 367.

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The English press seemed, more than anything else, to confirm the American identification with Spartacus’ dregs, fugitives, and savages. Forrest appears more rustic than urban. The Morning Post (London) wrote of Forrest, “There is some peculiarity and harshness of pronunciation which gives the impression of provincialism.”168 The London Morning Herald noted that his language and voice has the “flavor” of the “backwoods.”169 That characterization is also made in the Irish Drogheda Journal, describing Forrest as “replete with a rough music befitting one who, in his youth, has dwelt a free barbarian among the mountains.”170 In his review of Forrest’s role as Macbeth, John Forster describes Forrest as like “a savage newly-caught from out of the American back-woods.”171 The American audience took their cue from English reviews that bemoaned a “want of intellectuality” and “refinement.”172 As one American reviewer wrote, “Whether rugged or refined, he is upon a large scale: expansive; bold; gothic in his style; and it is not therefore matter of wonder that he should have encountered, both at home and abroad, the hostility of simpering elegance and dainty imbecility.”173 He is described as an “American every inch,” beginning with his appearances on the Bowery stage, “a rugged, heady, self-cultured mass of strength and energy.”174 Forrest appears not as the constitutional actor but the laboring body. “It is no painted shadow you see in Mr. Forrest; no piece of costume; no sword or buckler moving along the line of light as in a procession; but a man, there to do his four hours’ work; brawinly [sic] it may be, sturdily, and with great outlay of muscular power, but there’s a big heart thrown in.”175 Forrest’s image was only heightened with the news of a street brawl in which he confronted a man he thought was seducing his wife. And the nationalistic overtones associated with Forrest culminated in the 1849 Astor Place riot where twenty-one were killed. The riot had its origins in 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175

Oct. 18, 1836, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Forrest, 53. Oct. 18, 1836, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Forrest, 53. Drogheda Journal, or Meath & Louth Advertiser (Ireland), Oct. 25, 1836, 4, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Forrest, 52. London Examiner, Mar. 5, 1837, 5, 6, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Forrest, 55n22. T. S. Fay, “Forrest in London,” New-York Mirror, 1836, defends Forrest against these criticisms. “Mr. Forrest’s Second Reception in England,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Apr. 1845. “Mr. Forrest’s Second Reception in England,” 385. “Mr. Forrest’s Second Reception in England,” 386. Also, Fay, “Forrest in London,” 190, describes Forrest’s appearance in Britain: “His simplicity, sincerity and energy are particularly liked, and they think he possesses nature unenervated by artifice; in short, that his style resembles a full and bounding river, sweeping on its course through an American forest, and carrying away the obstacles which lie in its path, rather than the graceful streams that wind through lovely England, or the straight canals and studied fountains of la belle France.”

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Forrest’s poor reception in England and perceived slight by the English actor William Macready. One American correspondent commented that he felt “patriotically savage” at how Forrest’s acting was mocked as a burlesque for the “Bowery grimaces,” the way he “piled up the agony,” and the long pauses.176 The rivalry heightened as Forrest published letters detailing his grievances and then acted in rival theaters as Macready toured. Audiences were already taking sides in Philadelphia. By the time Macready was to perform at the Astor Place Theater (and Forrest at the Broadway Theater), placards were distributed with the statement, “Workingmen, Shall Americans or English Rule in This City?” The first performance had to be stopped; the second ended with a riot. Although Forrest had circulated with the elites of Philadelphia (but for four years in Cincinnati, Louisville, and New Orleans), the actor’s style was attributed by Joe Cowell, an English actor recounting the rise of American theater, to American rusticity, as bridging the gap between America’s rural origins and the new urban landscape. Forrest’s genealogy is read as an American genealogy in which identity is shaped by an encounter with wild nature. He had the advantage of some useful practice in the South and West, to which almost ‘undiscovered country’ in that day but few foreigners had dared to venture. He possessed a fine, untaught face, and good, manly figure, and, though unpolished in his deportment, his manners were frank and honest, and his uncultivated taste, speaking the language of truth and Nature, could be readily understood; and yet so intrinsically superior to the minds of the class of persons among whom his fortunes had thrown him.177

The ruggedness required for survival in turn shapes the character that makes possible Forrest’s ascent from rags-to-riches: raised by a widowed mother, deprived of an education, yet “with unwearied industry he labored to remove this obstacle in his path to fame, and may now compare in acquirements with those whose early life was cradled in ease, and learning made a toy.”178 The Democratic Review, a magazine sympathetic to the aspirations of Jacksonian democracy, would further develop this narrative.

176

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“The Alleghanian Actors in England,” New York Herald, Apr. 12, 1845. A collection of articles can be found in Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849), www.merrycoz.org/voices/astor/articles.xhtml#1. See also R. Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958). J. Cowell, Thirty Years Passed among the Players in England and America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1844), 74. Cowell, Thirty Years, 74.

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Forrest, the magazine writes, was not trained as an actor but “shot up like the wild mountain pine and spontaneous growths of the west.”179 Nature exists in simplicity, a simplicity that Forrest, in his oration delivered at the Democratic-Republican Fourth of July celebration, associates with the American experiment that grew out of fundamental principles of equality and free expression and contrasts with the “hazy labyrinths of subtlety,”180 “chartered privileges,” and the “artificial intangibility” of the Old World.181 An enduring refrain of the American founding ideal is the desire to be free of entanglements. That freedom allows for the transformation of a narrative of dislocation into the promise of a new age that is unencumbered by the habits, traditions, prejudices, and class barriers that close off that future in the Old World. One even hears this contrast of new and old in a response to the negative reception of Forrest in England. Forrest is depicted as “the very heart and nature of American life.” Like Forrest, America “is free of all old entanglements: aloof from schools and theories and sects; and when once it towers before us in the stature that belongs to it, we shall say, Beautiful indeed; and dear to our hearts, is this spirit so long made alien to our sight, and led away from us by blind guides and charts that belong to another world!”182 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the ring and the stage became the arenas in which a particular version of the founding body was celebrated, one that stood in stark contrast to the republican imagination. Forrest’s gladiatorial body was the boxing body: imposing, unnuanced, brash, and wild. In those bodies, segments of America could affirm the contours of their own identity.

Arenas of Identity The gladiatorial arena, boxing ring, and stage are, indeed, arenas of identity, though not in the ways that are often assumed. The distinctions between lawless nature and civilization do not resolve themselves within these spaces because of the same ambiguities that lurk in the backgrounds of these cultures. Moreover, these blurred meanings (and sometimes the bodies themselves) cannot be contained within these defined spaces. Lawless nature is at the heart of Roman conquest: imagined by Virgil in 179 180

181

“Mr. Forrest’s Second Reception in England,” 386. E. Forrest, Oration Delivered at the Democratic Republican Celebration of the Sixty-Second Anniversary of the Independence of the United States in the City of New-York, Fourth July, 1838 (New York: Jared W. Bell, 1838), 8. 182 Forrest, Oration, 21. “Mr. Forrest’s Second Reception in England,” 387.

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Rome’s founding and reiterated as a justification for Rome’s expansion, notably in the conquest of the wild Samnites. The gladiator, dressed as a Samnite, replayed the violence of the confrontation. So, too, female gladiators dressed as Amazons recalled Virgil’s depictions of Amazonian women who were both wild and manly (Stat. Sylv. 1.6.53–54; also dressed [perhaps] as Venus performing Hercules’ work in battling the Nemean lion [Mart. Spect. 7[6]; 8[6b]]). There were even depictions of female gladiators as Samnites (Juv. Sat. 6.252–67). The gladiator was wild nature, but so was Romulus. So, in fact, were the Romans as seen through Greek eyes. Thus, to Cicero’s chagrin, the wild gladiatorial body was both conquered and conqueror, valorized as it recalled images of rustic virtus. So, too, the female athlete (for Seneca and Martial) and the female gladiator were a threat to social order precisely because they displayed virtus (Cass. Dio 67.16.1; Juv. Sat. 6.252–67; Stat. Sylv. 1.6.44–45, 51–56).183 A sense of lawless nature is similarly in the forefront of the founding myths of the United States, serving as a justification for conquest in the name of civilization. The story America wanted to tell about the birth of the republic was about the men who assembled in Philadelphia. That is also the story Forrest tells in his Oration, connecting the appeal of the Revolutionary principles to reason rather than the passions, and to nature rather than artifice.184 But the founding could never shake its origins (so to speak) of a different version of nature; one just as elemental in its truths but wild and potentially dangerous. Conquering that nature required a type of body, one that displayed rugged virtus. The boxing ring displayed the impossibility of standing apart from the wildness of the founding body. That was certainly the connection imagined by the July 4th crowd as they anticipated hearing the Spartacan Forrest. That they got a version of Daniel Webster, instead, may be attributed to the stylistic restraints of the occasion, a conscious mediation of the tension in early America’s “investment in and fear of provocative eloquence,”185 or perhaps Forrest’s own interest in connecting the rugged body to the reasoning one, the gladiator to the American “experiment.”186 The elemental truths of nature 183

184 185 186

Gunderson, “The Ideology of the Arena,” 143, sees the use of women as gladiators as “parodies” of male “prowess.” Gunderson premises his claim on the view that women fought dwarves and that the women in the Halicarnassus were without helmets. Both views are rejected convincingly by Brunet, “Female and Dwarf Gladiators”; Brunet, “Women with Swords”; Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 112. Ancient commentary does not support Gunderson’s characterization. Forrest, Oration, 6, 11. L. L. Mielke, “Edwin Forrest’s July 4th Oration and the Specters of Provocative Eloquence,” American Literature 86 (2014): 4. Forrest, Oration, 6.

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may be confirmed by philosophers,187 but they were known by Spartacus and enacted in the equality of the ring. The appeal of a rough version of equality forged in violence, one of mutual vulnerability and embodied presence, had resonance. The implications of The Gladiator celebrating a slave revolt were uncomfortable, even as both Forrest and the audience suppressed the dissonance.188 Boxing was seen as a path to mobility; the ranks of boxing mirrored the immigrant communities of Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American, and Hispanic groups.189 And the appeal could extend to women, both in choosing to fight and in others watching them fight. Oates’ claim that a woman has “no natural place in the spectacle” other than to “surprise, alarm, amuse,” or perform other “stereotypical functions” echoes Gunderson’s claim about female gladiators.190 Such claims limit our ability to understand the positive reception, indeed, its elevation to spectacle. Although criticisms abounded, Egan portrays women pugilists in England in the eighteenth century as showing “the nationality of boxing.”191 A report of an English bout between two women ran in US newspapers in 1852. “I saw the winner led back in triumph by men.”192 Mischa Merz, a Golden Gloves masters champion, describes her first time seeing women in Gleason’s Gym: “And here they were, neither subverting masculinity or femininity, nor bringing the sport into disrepute. The women inhabited Gleason’s as if they’d always been there. And any questions about their right to be there would be met with bewildered silence from the men I asked, as if the suggestion were weird, like asking if 187 188

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190 191 192

Forrest, Oration, 10–11. See, especially, P. Reed, “Slave Revolt and Classical Blackness in The Gladiator,” in P. Reed (ed.), Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theater Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Note W. Whitman, The Gathering of the Forces, C. Rodgers and J. Black (eds.) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 2.331, in his 1846 review of The Gladiator: “The play is as full of ‘Abolitionism’ as an egg is of meat.” Weinberg and Arond, “The Occupational Culture of the Boxer”; Riess, “Sport”; A. Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); B. Heiskanen, The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring (New York: Routledge, 2012); G. R. Gems, Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). The haunting aspects of boxing’s appeal show up in Clifford Odets’ 1937 play, Golden Boy, which was made into a movie in 1939 with William Holden, a 1964 musical with Sammy Davis Jr., and then revived at the Lincoln Center Theater at the Belasco in 2012, where it first ran. The story is about Joe Bonaparte, a twenty-one-year-old Italian immigrant and promising violinist who seeks the fame and fortune (but succumbs to the brutality and corruption) of boxing because “he’s ashamed to be poor” (act 1, scene 5). Script from www.archive.org/stream/threedramasofame00mers/threedramasofame00 mers_djvu.txt. Oates, On Boxing, 70–71; Gunderson, “The Ideology of the Arena,” 143. Egan, Boxiana, 1.300. Quoted in M. Smith, A History of Women’s Boxing (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 17.

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women should be allowed to wear trousers.”193 Women are featured and celebrated (alongside commercials for testosterone supplements) in the much more violent sport of mixed martial arts. And if movies that gross $217 million are any measure of popular attitudes, we see the portrayal of the struggle and triumph of a female boxer in Million Dollar Baby (another Eastwood movie). If the founding ideal imagines a people dislocated from their past to create a new history, its replay on the stage and the ring exposed how old identities and attachments were not so easily left behind and participation in the new man and the new history attained. Boxing displayed how each new group was faced with the prospect of having to literally fight for a place in this new space, facing enduring animosities and the persistence of ethnic, racial, nationalist, and even regional prejudices. Women were banned from boxing until long after it became legal for men. Fights continually pitted one ethnic group against the other, the animus frequently spilling out into the streets. The 1837 fight in New Orleans between James “Deaf” Burke from England and Sam O’Rourke, an immigrant from Ireland, advertised as a fight between the new and Old World, degenerated into a brawl between ethnic groups.194 The earliest American champion, Tom Hyer, was a street enforcer (like the gladiator bodyguards in ancient Rome) for the “Native Americans,” an anti-immigration gang who worked for the Whigs and the Know Nothing Party. Hyer, along with William “Bill the Butcher” Poole (leader of the Bowery Boys), stole and protected ballot boxes or muscled votes against the Irish-supported Tammany Hall.195 Hyer was celebrated as the first American champion when he defeated the Irish-born Sullivan. The 1863 fight between Joseph Coburn and Mike McCoole was billed as a fight between the North and South. The African American boxer Jack Johnson defeated the “Great White Hope” James Jeffries on July 4, 1910, leading to attacks by Whites on African Americans as they celebrated. That would spawn more Great White Hopes, right up to Jerry Quarry’s matches against Muhammad Ali. What boxing exposed, as did the Roman gladiators, were the tensions that lie in the respective founding myths between an ideal of a new age and the violent undercurrent and appeal of the “dregs” and “fugitives” who acted out the struggle. 193

194 195

Quoted in Smith, A History of Women’s Boxing, xviii; also S. K. Fields, Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 129, on the positive reception of female amateur boxers. Gorn, Manly Art, 44. On the relationship of Hyer and other boxers to politicians, see Gammie, “Pugilists and Politicians,” 268–72.

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chapter 5

The Experience of Politics and the Crises of Two Republics

My sons, don’t warm to war, don’t turn your sword against your country’s heart.

(Virg. Aen. 6.832–33)

There is a fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of the slow demise of the Roman Republic: Why does the system collapse when, as many scholars have noted, there is nothing that suggests that there was ever an intention by anyone to overthrow the Republic?1 There were crises, but that was true throughout Rome’s history. And well before Julius Caesar’s march on Rome that precipitated civil war, there were leaders who inflicted their own damage on Rome. But the Republic, as Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx contend, was “for the most part transformed incrementally and for the most part imperceptibly into the res publica over which Augustus presided as Princeps.”2 There is not a clearly observable moment when the Republic stops being the Republic, nor of an event that dooms the system. But understanding the paradox of the transformation of the Republic into the principate is key to identifying what Rome might say about American politics today. There have been two primary approaches to addressing this paradox. One view identifies particular objective conditions that are seen as causing or determining political outcomes. In the case of Rome, scholars have largely focused on the structural inability of its institutions to address the issues caused by imperial expansion.3 From this perspective, the resolution 1 2

3

For example, E. S. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Brunt, Fall, 77. N. S. Rosenstein and R. Morstein-Marx, “The Transformation of the Republic,” in N. S. Rosenstein and R. Morstein-Marx (eds.), A Companion to the Roman Republic (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 626; also H. I. Flower, Roman Republics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Those identifying outmoded institutions that were ill-equipped to address issues of empire include T. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1861); C. Meier, Res publica amissa: eine Studie zu Verfassung und Geschichte der späten römischen Republik (Frankfurt am

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to the paradox of how the Republic falls without anyone intending for it to happen is that conditions overwhelm any decisions that could be made. A second approach, and one developed largely in response to the first, sees politics as a contingent affair dominated by elites. From this perspective, the Republic collapses because of miscalculations by a few powerful individuals who violate norms or outright break the law in otherwise functioning institutions. Most prominent is the perspective of Erich Gruen, who argues that the “institutions remained intact” and that it was error and chance that led to the civil war.4 Although there are elements of truth in these different arguments, neither approach is entirely satisfactory. In one, decisions by political actors are subordinated to structural exigencies. But why are actors able to respond to periods of crisis at one time and not another: why does the Republic survive the 80s but not the 40s, for example, or to push the potential crisis back even further, why does the Republic survive the numerous conflicts between the patricians and plebs? That is, what incapacitates the system? Yet, the alternative of focusing on contingency is no more satisfactory. This approach simply locates the cause in the actor in the moment when everything appears contingent. But actions occur in a context. While individuals may capitalize on, exacerbate, or mitigate conditions, they do not themselves create the conditions that make particular decisions possible, viable, or impactful. These positions overlap. In the widely accepted view that blends these approaches, Peter Brunt traces the failure of political institutions, notably the senate, to address the different constituency interests arising from

4

Main: Suhrkamp, 1980); R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 387; J. von Ungern-Sternberg, “The Crisis of the Republic,” in H. Flower (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 91; D. C. A. Shotter, The Fall of the Roman Republic, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005); Brunt, Fall, 62–83. Overlapping with these approaches are others that place more emphasis on economic conditions, including G. E. M. De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981), and M. Duncan, The Storm before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017). Others identify moral failure, linking it to particular structural changes or systemic incentives in the Republic. See B. Levick, “Morals, Politics, and the Fall of the Roman Republic,” Greece & Rome 29 (1982): 53–62, and A. W. Lintott, “The Crisis of the Republic: Sources and Source Problems,” in J. A. Crook, A. W. Lintott, and E. Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 B.C., 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–15. Gruen, Last, 500. Those emphasizing the importance of contingency in an otherwise functioning system include K. Girardet, “Politische Verantwortung im Ernstfall: Cicero, die Diktatur und der Diktator Caesar,” in C. Meller-Goldingen and K. Sier (eds.), Lenaika: Festschrift für Carl Werner Müller (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1996), 217–52; K.-W. Welwei, “Caesars Diktatur, der Prinzipat des Augustus und die Fiktion der historischen Notwendigkeit,” Gymnasium 103 (1996): 477–96; F. Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Yakobson, Elections; Lintott, Violence, 207.

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Roman expansion until, ultimately, there was no one left to defend the institutions against dynastic competitors.5 Underlying Brunt’s analysis, and it is shared by these different approaches, is a view of politics and political institutions as inert sites of interest articulation and mediation. This association of politics with interest is classically defined by Harold Lasswell in the title to his book Who Gets What, When, How.6 The institutions either are unable to answer to particular resource demands of different groups or they give way to the interests of powerful individuals. Interests are certainly involved but to view human action entirely through the lens of interest reduces human motivation and political outcomes to issues of material rewards. This view transforms politics into something more like a transactional market than the locus of community expression. We can better place these interests in a larger context, one in which politics can be understood as an arena of identity contestation. In doing this, we can identify both a pattern of decisions and the effect of those decisions on incapacitating institutions. My approach draws on phenomenology, with emphasis on the lived experience of politics.7 I characterized earlier the gladiatorial contests and boxing matches as arenas of identity in which particular cultural values are played out. To extend the metaphor, politics can be understood as the arena in which the values that will organize the future of the community 5 6 7

Brunt, Fall. H. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936). Although there have been attempts to use phenomenology to theorize more abstractly about the political, there has been much less use of phenomenology to analyze the practice of politics. That reluctance arises, at least in part, from a view in phenomenology of the mediating institutions of politics as obstructing the individual’s apprehension of either the immediacy of experience or the realization of the absolute. Hannah Arendt remains a notable exception, though I find her emphasis on display limiting because it minimizes the importance of politics in projecting the community into the future. A helpful discussion of the relationship of phenomenology to politics can be found in M. A. Gillespie, “The Search for Immediacy and the Problem of Political Life in Existentialism and Phenomenology,” in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 531–44. Examples of phenomenological discussions of the political include H. Yol Jung, Rethinking Political Theory: Essays in Phenomenology and the Study of Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993); K. Thompson and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Political (Cham: Springer, 2000); N. Swazo, Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); M. Eldred, Social Ontology: Recasting Political Philosophy Through a Phenomenology of Whoness (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2008); S. W. Gurley and G. Pfeifer (eds.), Phenomenology and the Political (Landham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016); H. Yol Jung and L. Embree (eds.), Political Phenomenology: Essays in Memory of Petee Jung (Cham: Springer, 2016); V. Fóti and P. Kontos (eds.), Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political (Cham: Springer, 2017); M. Marder, Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); T. Bedorf and S. Herrmann (eds.), Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2020).

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are contested and implemented. There are three dimensions that organize the experience of the political arena. First is the spatial dimension. We can imagine different spatial configurations that correspond to different political forms, including Arendt’s provocative suggestion that, by way of totalitarian terror, humans are pressed against each other into “One Man” so that there is no space for movement.8 Participatory forms of politics are ultimately citizen arenas. As Fergus Millar and others have demonstrated, in the Republic there is a theatricality to political display, both in how the buildings are situated around the Forum to create a bounded space and in how participants – tribunes, consuls, senators, and the crowd – visibly, verbally, and sometimes physically interact.9 The Romans saw played out in full view the disarray of the final century of the Republic, culminating in the collapse of a citizen arena with the rise of the principate and the exchange of the arena for the theater as the only mode of assembly and expression left.10 Although much of American politics occurs in hidden spaces, such as closed committee rooms where bills are modified (or marked up), the spatial dimensions invariably assert themselves; for example, the 1963 March on Washington, led by Martin Luther King Jr., or the women’s march that occurred across America in 2017. There are also televised hearings, impeachment proceedings, debates, rallies, and town hall meetings. In the American imagination, there are such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), where, in a famous scene, Jefferson Smith, an idealistic youth leader appointed to a Senate seat, engages in open verbal battle on the Senate floor to the point of physical collapse against the hidden forces of corruption.11 Less uplifting is the crowd that assembled on January 6, 2021, and then stormed the Capitol, claiming the legislative arena as theirs. Second, politics is organized by a temporal dimension of experience, or how we situate ourselves in time. Politics is the realm in which a community actualizes itself, projecting itself into the future. One’s sense of what needs to be done or should be done is not objectively defined but acquires salience and meaning against a larger cultural narrative of identity: Who are We and Who do We want to be? That narrative in a Roman and American context, as I have explored throughout the book,

8 9 10 11

H. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), 466. Millar, Crowd. See Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 176–77; Edmondson, “Dynamic,” 72. Frank Capra (director), Sidney Buchman (screen play), Lewis Foster (story), Myles Connolly (contributing writer), released by Columbia Pictures.

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contains within it the dissonance of origins that confounds a unifying sense of either the past or future. Finally, there is a realm of sociality, or what I referred to in the Introduction as the lifeworld, in which participants orient themselves in relationship to larger, and often unstated, cultural understandings. From a lifeworld perspective, politics consists of interactions by individuals who are “subjects of experience.”12 There are certainly institutional frameworks that provide particular rules. But institutions are not a thing; they are formalized patterns of action. Although institutions can buttress particular decisions, their existence ultimately depends on the background context of its participants. Actors, as subjects of experience, bring with them their own interests, dispositions, and motivations. How institutions function, however, depends on a shared sense of the different formal and informal norms that not only guide interactions within the framework but also give a common sense of why those norms are important. Politics as an arena of identity contestation exists as an encounter of individuals within a framework, guided by implicit and shared orientations of how to work within the framework, in which questions about the future of the community arise and are decided. In the final decades of the Roman Republic, political institutions were less-and-less able to project the community into the future.13 This change was not attributable to the emergence of a set of issues that the institutions were structurally incapable of addressing. For example, there was sufficient institutional and resource capacity to enact land reform in 133 bce, which, as we will see, turns out to be a formative moment in how politics is experienced in Rome. Nor was this inability caused by individuals making contingent decisions. In fact, those decisions were more a symptom than a cause of the changing experience of politics. Rather, this change was because of alterations in the defining experience of politics. Even in one of the most significant moments of political crisis – the prolonged conflict between patricians and plebs (referred to as the Conflict of the Orders) – the fight 12 13

D. Carr, “Experience and History,” in D. Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 489. For an overview of changes in this orientation in the late Republic, see A. Wallace-Hadrill, “Mutatio morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution,” in T. N. Habinek and A. Schiesaro (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–22. For discussions of different conceptions of politics in understanding the ancient world, see D. Hammer, “What is Politics in the Ancient World?” in R. K. Balot (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 20–36; D. Hammer, “Cicero’s Legacy in Contemporary Political Thought,” in D. Kapust and G. Remer (eds.), The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 447–505.

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was for inclusion. That is, it was an argument about how to craft norms and institutions to foster a narrative of belonging. What changes in the final century of the Republic is that participants came to see each other as Strangers – depicted at times as corrosive, at times as wild, and ultimately subversive. The idea is captured in naming a citizen a hostis, a foreign enemy. Citizens no longer saw themselves as sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, or the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things done turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice. Read this way, the crisis of the Roman Republic haunts contemporary American democracy. Like in Rome, the American political world has divided into Strangers who are incomprehensible to, and distrustful of, each other. Neither citizens nor elites share the same background assumptions or the same vision of identity. In fact, the Stranger is seen as posing a threat to the survival of who We are. The result is not just the slow incapacitating of political institutions but also the search for individuals apart from these institutions who can articulate these fears, combat the Stranger, and project a particular vision of the community into the future. Like in Rome, safety lies not in the diffuseness of democratic processes but in a singular will.14 From this perspective, Donald Trump is not the cause but the symptom of a democracy divided into Strangers.

The Crisis of the Roman Republic One of the important insights of Roman political thought emerges not in its analysis of formal institutional or constitutional arrangements but in the recognition of the norms by which these institutions functioned. In this sense, I depart from Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg’s claim that the reason 14

This is also reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s embrace of Hitler, on phenomenological grounds, as a leader possessing the will to realize a true national community. See R. Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 49–52.

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for the crisis of the Republic was the lack of a constitution by which legal power could have been employed.15 This sort of constitutionalist argument assumes that societies are bound, and conflict resolved, by legality. To some extent that is true. Laws can provide some temporary safeguards. Courts can serve as a last resort for addressing certain issues. But it is only part of the picture of how politics works. Laws and institutions provide a framework within which individuals operate. But we easily forget that these structures do not have an existence apart from the actual practice. Institutions depend on a background context of norms that guide how these formalized practices are viewed and how individuals interact. Laws require enforcement; constitutions require interpretation; and their durability depends on their public salience. These norms are not static, but change in response to events and experiences, new concerns, and differing ambitions. The Normative Landscape of Roman Politics In the Roman case, their politics was forged in a long and historically contentious process, notably between patricians and plebeians, that put in place a set of institutional functions and relations governed as much by informal norms as any formal attributes: a senate whose official functions were few, but whose informal powers were enormous; assemblies that lacked the power of initiative or amendment but whose importance even Cicero would acknowledge; and the tribunes that served, in a sense, as the people’s magistrates, able to propose as well as veto legislation. Of particular interest were the rules and norms that regulated the relationship of the tribunate to the assembly, consuls, and the senate since these relationships are the key to understanding Rome as a republic. We can identify several critical norms. First, the tribunate existed to serve the people, which was a legacy of its origins as a response to large-scale public strikes (Polyb. 6.16.5; Livy 2.33.1; Asc. Corn. 71C-72C; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 15.1–6). Second, a tribune’s body was considered sacrosanct, protected by a plebeian pledge to kill any person who harmed or interfered with a tribune (Cic. Sest. 79; Livy 2.33.1; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 6.89.2–4; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 14.5–8; 15.1–2; C. Gracch. 3.3–4). Third, the tribunes normally introduced laws with the approval of (or not in outright opposition to) the senate (Livy 32.7.8–12: tribunes acceding only with approval of senate; 36.3.4–5: refer appeal to senate; 42.21.5–8: tribunes 15

von Ungern-Sternberg, “The Crisis of the Republic,” 91.

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confer with senate).16 Fourth, the tribunes had the power to veto proposed legislation (an ability to intercede that derived from their sacrosanctity) (Polyb. 6.16.4). Finally, a veto was not exercised to kill a bill before discussion had been allowed both for and against the bill (Asc. Corn. 58C; Plut. Cato Min. 28.1).17 These norms worked for several hundred years (though not always smoothly), not only giving people voice in the political system but also mediating some of the conflict between the patricians and the plebeians.18 The most consequential, long-term development in the Republic was the increasing attack on both the informal norms and formal rules that regulated these political relationships. What emerged was a strategy of obstruction, and then strategies of circumventing this obstruction, that ultimately undermined the integrity of these political institutions to, in essence, get things done. A significant moment in this story occurred in 133 bce: a tribune, Marcus Octavius, threatened a veto against the agrarian legislation of another tribune and one-time companion, Tiberius Gracchus, before it was debated (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The actions violated two norms: the norm of the tribune as plebeian representative and the normative understanding that a veto could not be used to prevent a bill from being read. These violations were precipitated in part by the violation of a third norm, that of introducing legislation without some prior agreement of the senate. Tiberius in turn threatened to depose the tribune, or to have the crowd physically drive him away, thus undermining another norm, sacrosanctity (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 11.3; 12.4–5; App. B Civ. 1.12). The events of 133 were neither a blip nor a cause, but an indicator of the growing dissensus surrounding fundamental policy questions and the methods by which (and from whom) support was sought (see App. B Civ. 1.10). There is no single term that defines this division (nor, as I will discuss later, is there a single term that defines the deep divisions in American contemporary politics). Some locate the conflict in the language of optimates and populares that began to emerge around 133, though the case is complicated. Leaders were not consistently one or the other.19 Senators, 16

17 18 19

Truth be told, I am not sure if this is not a more romanticized image of the middle Republic since Livy continually refers to concord in these moments. But I take the references as an ideal that, regardless of how idealized, is no longer even a consideration in the final century of the Republic. R. Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 125. See Meier, Res publica amissa, 7–23, on what he describes as regelmässige Politick (routine or regular politics). See C. Steel, The End of the Roman Republic, 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 236.

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who held their positions for life, had no necessary allegiance or affiliation to any one position. They could be divided at times by personal rivalries or personal interests but joined together to defend interests held in common, whether senatorial authority, landholdings (legal or illegal), or wealth. Furthermore, many scholars argue that these terms did not correspond to political parties or even ideologically consistent groupings in any modern sense of the word.20 But the terms were not neutral or arbitrary names, either, even if they carried “a multiplicity of meanings.”21 Generally, the terms referred to a conflict among the elite over two different sources of support – one from the senate, the other from the people – and two different methods of acquiring that support: one by preserving inequalities in private property, the other by distributing material benefits (notably land and food).22 But more to my point, Brunt sees the terms as referring to “deep divisions” within the political system.23 In responding to the view that the terms are not laden with meaning, Wiseman notes that partes, which “is normal Latin for a political or ideological grouping,” was used with reference to optimates and populares.24 Even in Henrik Mouritsen’s rejection of the meaningfulness of the terms as referring to ideological groupings, we quickly encounter a problem. Mouritsen, drawing on Maggie Robb, argues that the only time in which these terms are used to differentiate political groupings is in Cicero’s Pro Sestio. Mouritsen contends that Cicero is not explaining “an observable phenomenon” but, rather, “has reified what would otherwise have remained discrete, difficult to classify events and individuals and turned them into manifestations of a single political movement.”25 Exactly. Mouritsen has identified the sense of the uncanny – the unease with what is also familiar – that is characteristic of the Stranger and underlies the emotional (more than consistently logical) force of these terms. The Stranger is not an observable 20

21 22

23 24

25

See Gruen, Last, 50; Brunt, Fall, 36–39, 448; M. A. Robb, Beyond Populares and Optimates: Political Language in the Late Republic, Historia Einzelschriften 213 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010); M. A. Robb, “Optimates, Populares,” in R. S. Bagnall, K. Broderson, C. B. Champion, A. Erskine, and S. Huebne (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 4911–14; H. Mouritsen, Politics in the Roman Republic (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2017), 112–23. Mouritsen, Politics, 120. See H. Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 68–89; Steel, End, 55; V. Arena, Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), on the emergence of the populares. Brunt, Fall, 448. T. P. Wiseman, Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2002), 286–87. See Cic. Rosc. Am. 137; Quinct. 69–70; II Verr. 1.35; Cat. 4.13; Att. 1.13.2; Sall. Cat. 4.2; Iug. 40.3; 73.4. Mouritsen, Politics, 122.

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phenomenon; the Stranger, who is perceived as not quite like Us, is reified, and that reification depends on there being a cultural reservoir of background meanings and experiences that could be labeled. Cicero’s demonization of the populares as sowing the seeds of unrest is well-known (Rep. 4.11; Sest. 96, 103; Offic. 2.78). But other sources use different terms in these final decades of the Republic when characterizing an increasing polarization in how the other side was viewed.26 We are not just talking about differences in priorities or policies or what Brunt refers to as “divergencies of interest and sentiment.”27 We are talking about a community divided between Strangers who do not want to work together. Cicero describes how after the death of Tiberius Gracchus “we have almost reached the point where there are two senates and two separate peoples” (Rep. 1.31; also De or. 3.5–8 and Val. Max. 6.2.2 on divisions within the senate).28 Sallust condemns the nobilitas for their arrogance (Sall. Iug. 41.3). Underlying all of this was an increasingly stratified social fabric, reflected in both increasingly entrenched wealth inequalities and spatially separated living arrangements.29 I doubt if 133 bce was the moment when norms began to collapse. But it altered the background assumptions about what was possible and permissible, inaugurating a strategy of obstruction and increasingly questionable means of overcoming that obstruction. Appian sees 133 as marking a change from earlier struggles between the plebeians and patricians that were constrained by laws and norms and later conflicts that were restrained by neither (B Civ. 1.1–2). The system made obstruction easy. There was the increasing employment of senate-friendly tribunes to veto acts: in 122 bce against Gaius Gracchus’ citizenship bill by Livius Drusus (App. B Civ. 26

27 28 29

The term “polarization” is a complicated one in political science and sociological literature, referring variously to elite partisan behavior or mass partisan attachments that may involve a few significant issues or a more general alignment of opposing beliefs on a broad range of issues. There is also contentious debate about how to measure it, an issue made even more problematic when assessing the Roman Republic. Polarization needs to be viewed in the context of a system: Polarization in a majoritarian democracy will appear differently than it does in a system that requires groups to work together, such as both the Roman and American system. I follow T. E. Mann and N. J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2016), xxi, in viewing polarization as a breakdown in the willingness of groups to work together. Brunt, Fall, 386. Translations are from Cicero, On the Republic. On the Laws, trans. C. W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics, 136–37. For example, Plut. C. Gracch. 12.1, on the development of separate neighborhoods for the rich. Objective measures of wealth inequalities are not the issue; it is the aristocracy’s understanding of their wealth. The problem is that the nobility came to see wealth, even what was not technically theirs, as theirs (App. B Civ. 1.7–10).

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1.33); in 103 against Saturninus’ grain bill (Rhet. ad Herr. 1.12.21); in 67 by Globulus against Cornelius (Asc. Corn. 58C; 71C–72C); a threatened veto in 63 that led Rullus to withdraw his agrarian legislation; and in 62 by Cato and Minucius Thermus, who physically blocked the reading of a bill proposed by Nepos to engineer Pompey’s return (Plut. Cato Mi. 28.1). Nepos also used his veto to prevent Cicero from giving the customary speech upon leaving office as consul. The use of senatorial allies in the tribunate to block action was compounded by other mechanisms of obstruction. One could filibuster, as Cato did to block Caesar’s request to run for consul even while absent (Caes. BCiv. 1.32; App. B Civ. 2.8). Religious omens could be employed to block legislation, especially after the lex Caecilia Didia of 98 bce, which authorized the senate to declare that the people could not be bound by a law passed improperly:30 Bibulus famously attempted to stop the lawmaking sessions of Caesar by continually looking to the skies in 59.31 The senate could withhold funds, as they did to thwart Tiberius Gracchus’ agrarian legislation. The senate could declare legislation to be against the interests of the res publica, as they did against Saturninus’ grain bill (Rhet. ad Her. 1.12.21). One also sees earlier legislation overturned, as happened with the agrarian law of Gracchus (App. B Civ. 1.27), and annulments that declared a law to be null and void, often based on a religious or procedural violation: against an agrarian bill by Sextus Titius in 99, Marcus Livius Drusus in 91 (Cic. Dom. 16.41–42; Asc. Corn. 68C–69C), Sulpicius in 88 (Cic. Phil. 8.2.7; App. B Civ. 1.56, 59; Asc. Corn. 64C), Marcus Junius Brutus in 83 (possibly), Manilius’ law to enroll freedmen into rural tribes in 67 (Cass. Dio 36.42.2–3; Asc. Mil. 45C), and laws passed by Antonius and his tribunes in 44 (Cic. Phil. 5.3.7–4.10; 13.3.5). There were also attempts to annul legislation passed by Caesar and Vatinius in 59 (Cic. Att. 8.3.3; Vat. 6.14–9.23; Cic. Prov. cons. 19.45–46; Dom. 15.39–40; Suet. Iul. 23) and accusations against the legitimacy of Clodius’ legislation in 58 (Cic. Dom. 16.42; 18.48; 19.50; Sest. 24.53). The annulment of legislation played a subtle but significant role in these final decades since it undermined a belief near and dear to the Romans of the authorizing role of the past in guiding future decisions.32 30 31 32

A. W. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 62. Clodius addresses the use of omens to block legislation in legislation introduced as tribune in 58 bce. See T. N. Mitchell, “The Leges Clodiae and Obnuntiatio,” Classical Quarterly 36 (1986): 172–76. This authorizing role extended to both the senate and the people (see Sall. Hist. 3.34.1; 3.34.14 McGushin). On the increasing use of laws to annul earlier laws, see C. Williamson, The Laws of the Roman People: Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman Republic (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 389.

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More visible was political violence.33 Scholars have often focused on the escalating violence of the late Republic as a turning point in its politics,34 but I situate this violence in a more pervasive alteration of political norms by which conflict was mediated and decisions made. Violence in Rome had such political significance because it was an outcome of the breakdown of norms carried out within and by these political institutions, both to obstruct and to overcome obstruction. For example, in response to Tiberius Gracchus’ attempt to stand for reelection as tribune in violation of the norm of annual political office, he and his followers were murdered by a senatorial mob in 133 bce (App. B Civ. 1.15–16). The violence was given an institutional guise later with the creation of the “last decree,” or senatus consultum ultimum, which was an order by senatorial authority for the consul to take the necessary measures to protect the Republic. It was used in 121 bce to order the murder of the tribune Gaius Gracchus and his supporters (Cic. Part. or. 30.106); in 100 against Saturninus (App. B Civ. 1.32–33); and in 63 against Catiline. Although not state sanctioned, there were also the murders of Aulus Nonius in 100 (App. B Civ. 1.28) and Drusus in 91, which only added to the agitation of the Italians on the eve of the Social War (App. B Civ. 1.36, 38). Tribunes also acted violently. Saturninus and Servilius Glaucia organized gangs to take a variety of offices by violent means in 100 bce, with the goal of implementing policy. Marius employed soldiers to intimidate voters and assemblies. Sulla’s proscriptions marked the first time in which a citizen could be deemed a hostis, a term that means both a Stranger and an enemy, and one used subsequently against other citizens in the final decades of the Republic (App. B Civ. 1.95).35 Clodius managed to organize citizens who were “loosely attached to the larger society” – primarily former slaves and impoverished and disenfranchised Romans – into what amounted to an urban army.36 As Appian writes, “Freedom, democracy, laws, reputation, official position, were no longer of any use to anybody, since even the office of tribune, which had been devised for the 33

34 35 36

Lintott, Violence, 176, sees the violence of the late Republic more as an “imitation of precedents,” in which violence was a regular mechanism of politics, than as “a new and virulent disease.” Flower, Roman Republics, 83, on the other hand, sees violence as “a basic breach of republican principles” that weakened republican norms because it was an expression of “the accepted political system to resolve conflict or even to manage some of the regular functions of government.” For example, M. Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015), 216, focuses on Tiberius’ murder as one of the key “tipping points.” See W. Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66–70. Williamson, Laws, 381.

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restraint of wrongdoers and the protection of the plebeians, and was sacred and inviolable, now was guilty of such outrages and suffered such indignities” (App. B Civ. 1.33). Violations of norms became the pretext for more violations. Famously, Caesar justified leaving his province and crossing into Italy in order to restore the tribunes (Crassus and Antony) who had been forced to flee after imposing a veto to block the senate from calling for Caesar to lay down his arms (BCiv. 1.7.7; 1.7.2; 1.22.5–6; Livy, Per. 109). In his speech to his troops, Caesar attributed Pompey’s actions in assuming command against Caesar as motivated by jealousy of his renown (BCiv. 1.7.7). Of course, we should take Caesar’s justifications with a grain of salt, especially when he would treat two tribunes, Flavus and Marullus, similarly in 44 bce (Cic. Phil. 13.31; Livy, Per. 116; App. B Civ. 2.108, 122, 138; Vell. Pat. 2.68.4–5; Val. Max. 5.7.2; Suet. Iul. 79.1; 80.3; Cass. Dio 44.9.2–10.4; 46.49.2; Plut. Caes. 61.4–6; Plut. Ant. 12.4). But the claim was plausible to some because of decades of intrusions on tribunician sacrosanctity. The upshot of this ongoing obstruction and extra-institutional mechanisms for overcoming that obstruction was a loss of belief in traditional institutions as mechanisms for mediating division and solving problems. Stated slightly differently, traditional politics became less and less the arena in which the community could decide what it wanted to be. The tribunate had turned against itself. Consuls, too, clashed with tribunes. The senate was not perceived as any better. Sallust’s description of the senate dithering as a way of disguising its own complicity with Jugurtha, who tortured and murdered his brother and then massacred Numidians and Romans, is revealing (Iug. 27.1–2). The ensuing decades read as accumulating attacks on the viability of these institutions. The Social War (91–88 bce), the gutting of the powers of the tribunate and senior senators by Sulla in 81 bce, the insurrection by Lepidus in 78, Spartacus’ revolt (73–71 bce) that took years for the Republic to suppress, the failure to deal with piracy, the resulting inflation and food riots in 67 aimed at the senate for hesitating to give Pompey an expanded command to secure grain supplies, corruption, the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63, the angry demonstrations against the senate in 56 (Cass. Dio 39.29), the riots in 52, and the growing problem of landless soldiers all undermined confidence in Rome’s institutions. Sulla gutted the senate, putting in place loyalists who had little political experience. Cicero bemoaned the scarcity of good men at all ranks to run for office (Cic. QFr. 3.11.3). Referring to the events of 53 bce, Appian claims, “For these reasons good men abstained from office altogether, and the disorder was such that at one time the republic was without consuls for

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eight months, Pompey conniving at the state of affairs in order that there might be need of a dictator” (App. B Civ. 2.19). No statistic captures these changes. And the senate and assemblies did not stop functioning. In fact, it is often more revealing of the dysfunction when something was actually done. When Caesar proposed a law for some land redistribution in April of 59, he was met with the silence of the senate (App. B Civ. 2.10; Suet. Iul. 23). Caesar then chose to forego the practice of informal senate approval, refusing to call it together for the remainder of the year (App. B Civ. 2.10–11; Cass. Dio 38.4.1–2). He took the legislation directly to the people, at which point Bibulus, the other consul, attempted to suspend all public discussion for the year by declaring a sacred period (employing the religious institution of obnuntiatio) (Cass. Dio 38.6.1). Caesar ignored that, as well, calling for an assembly even though three tribunes had threatened a veto. Bibulus was pushed down the stairs, the three tribunes beaten, and a vote taken (App. B Civ. 2.11; Cass. Dio 38.6.2–3). Caesar then oversaw the passage of several more laws that the senate had earlier obstructed (App. B Civ. 2.9, 13), including remitting some tax payment to tax farmers in Asia, ratifying Pompey’s arrangement in the east, and confirming Ptolemy as King of Egypt – all while Bibulus continued to look to the skies for omens (Cic. Dom. 15.39–40; App. B Civ. 2.13; Cass. Dio 38.6.5–6).37 Even when the senate tried later to strike a compromise by offering to take up Caesar’s legislation without the obstacle of obnuntiatio, Caesar declined. There may be any number of reasons why Caesar refused, whether out of distrust of the offer or his own ambition.38 We do not need to ascribe autocratic intentions; rather, the conflict – the obstruction, the refusal to compromise, and the flouting of rules – further “poisoned politics,” as Kurt Raaflaub characterizes the effect, increasingly pushing both sides to bypass institutions and processes in pursuit of solutions.39 37 38

39

See F. Pina Polo, The Consul at Rome: The Civil Functions of the Consuls in the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 299–300. M. Jehne, “Why the Anti-Caesarians Failed: Political Communication on the Eve of Civil War (51 to 49 BC),” in C. Rosillo-López (ed.), Political Communication in the Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 211–13. K. A. Raaflaub, “Between Tradition and Innovation: Shifts in Caesar’s Political Propaganda and Self-Presentation,” in G. Urso (ed.), Cesare: Precursore o Visionario? (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2010), 145. In several pieces, Raaflaub advances the interpretation that Caesar saw himself as having to resort to extraconstitutional and ultimately violent measures as a response to an intransigent and obstructionist faction. See K. A. Raaflaub, Poker um Macht und Freiheit: Caesars Bürgerkrieg als Wendepunkt im Übergang von der Republik zur Monarchie (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010); K. A. Raaflaub, “Creating a Grand Coalition of True Roman Citizens: On Caesar’s Political Strategy in the Civil War,” in B. Breed, C. Damon, and A. Rossi (eds.), Citizens of Discord: Rome and Its Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 159–70.

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The Search for Alternatives Deprived of norms that allowed institutions to get things done, we see initially a decades-long shift in the focus of legislation, from maintaining the conditions for the exercise of the collective will of the Roman people to increasing attempts to address deviations from conventions (including bribery, the rise of clubs, and violence).40 That this legislation largely failed to curb deviance shows the near impossibility of formalizing and enforcing the subtle, informal norms that operate in the background of political interactions. And, thus, we see a casting about for solutions outside institutions: extended commands, consecutive consulships (of Cinna and Carbo), interreges because of election delays (in 55 bce, 54, and 53), consulship without holding any previous elected office (Pompey), consulships without a colleague (Pompey in 53, see App. B Civ. 2.20), the bypassing of the senate by the consul (by Caesar), triumvirates, and dictatorships (Sulla, App. B Civ. 1.99, and Caesar).41 Yet, just to punctuate the paradox of the slow collapse of the Republic without anyone intending to overthrow it, the idea of a king was anathema to both elites and the people to the end. Caesar refused the title when it was proposed (App. B Civ. 2.107; Suet. Iul. 79.2–3; Cass. Dio 44.11.2–3; Plut. Ant. 12.2–3; Plut. Caes. 61.4). Instead, claims by all sides could be couched in terms of defending the res publica, though the term carried its own ambiguities about what form of government that meant.42 In the midst of the standoff between Pompey and Caesar, Cicero reported Pompey’s words to Atticus: If Caesar is made consul it will mean the “subversion of the constitution” (Cic. Att. 7.8.4). Caesar, too, argued that throughout his career he had successfully carried out the business of the res publica and was now seeking to restore the unprecedented change in the tribune’s veto (e.g., Caes. BCiv. 1.7.7; 1.7.2; 1.22.5–6; Cass. Dio 41.17.3 on both Pompey and Caesar). Cicero’s language arguing for Pompey’s appointment in 66 bce to what was considered an extraordinary command reveals the search for solutions detached from traditional institutions. The speech was Cicero’s public splash; 40

41

On attempts to institute laws to address different breaches of norms, see Brunt, Fall, 425; Lintott, Constitution, 107–24; Pina Polo, Consul, 292–300; Williamson, Laws, 387. We see Marius tried for ambitu under an unknown law in 116 bce (Plut. Mar. 5), the lex Lutatia in 78, the lex Plautia dated somewhere in the next decade, the lex Calpurnia de ambitu of 67, an attempt by the senate in 64 (vetoed by a tribune) and then enacted by Cicero in 63, a failed effort in 61 by the senate, another decree by the senate in 56 to control sodalitates that were increasingly used as organizations of violence (marshaled by Clodius), the lex de sodaliciis enacted by Crassus in 55 also against these groups (possibly taking up the senatorial decree the previous year), and the lex Pompeia de vi and lex Pompeia de ambitu introduced by Pompey (as sole consul) in 52. Steel, End, 248–49. 42 Brunt, Fall, 52.

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his support meant to align him with the majority of the people, knights, senators, and the powerful Pompey. But the speech also reveals the unintentional ways in which political actors could undermine republican norms and, in this case, work against Cicero’s own devotion to the res publica. First, Cicero states that the normal succession of command would not solve the problem of Mithridates, one of Rome’s foremost enemies; rather, “One man is universally desired and demanded by citizens and allies alike as the commander for this war; one and the same commander is feared by the enemy, and they fear none but him” (De imp. 5; also 28).43 Second, Cicero characterizes Pompey in the language of Hellenistic kingships, describing Pompey as a “superhuman genius of a single man” (De imp. 33; also 36), an “angel from heaven” (41), and having miraculous power. Cicero gushes about how Pompey’s “name alone and the hopes which it inspired caused a sudden fall in the price of wheat, after a time of extreme dearth and scarcity in the corn supply, to as low a level as could possibly have been reached after a long period of peace and agricultural prosperity” (44). I cannot emphasize enough how much of a departure this language is from republican norms that for centuries were suspicious of kings. Finally, Cicero emphasizes the plebiscitary, or unmediated, acclaim for Pompey. As Cicero states, “Think you indeed that there was anywhere a coast so desolate that no tidings reached it of that great day on which the entire Roman People, thronging into the Forum and filling every temple that commands a view of this platform, demanded the appointment of Gnaeus Pompeius alone to be their general in a world-war?” (44). The importance of the plebiscitary aspects, made before the popular assembly, was that authority could legitimately and out of necessity bypass institutions, suggesting a direct and unmediated relationship between the leader and the people. That is what Caesar would do, as well. The weakening attachment to these institutions as they became less-and-less important as avenues of public recognition reinforced this search for solutions apart from traditional institutions. Traditionally, the path to prestige and distinction lay in competition for electoral offices as one advanced up the cursus honorum (course of honors, or succession of offices), received triumphs, and acquired membership in priestly colleges. But elites began to develop their own power through extra-institutional means: raising their own armies and providing largesse to loyalists (App. B Civ. 2.17), which required the formation of interlocking networks of wealth and connections: Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, for example, or Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus after that. The creation 43

Translations are from Cicero, Pro Lege Manilia. Pro Caecina. Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo, trans. H. Grose Hodge (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1927).

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of extraordinary commands provided a way for individuals like Pompey, rather than the Roman people, to give gloria to his legates.44 We might recall Sallust’s description of how triumphs were stolen, a suggestion of how these forms of recognition departed from traditional norms of recognition (Iug. 31.10). It is not that these institutions were irrelevant; rather, their role was increasingly to accede to, even celebrate, the extraordinary individual. Caesar would end chapters of the Gallic War with acclamations for his largely unauthorized achievements (always in the third person) (e.g., 2.35; 4.38; 7.90). In an extraordinary break from custom, the senate in 45 bce honored Caesar with the means to publicly display his greatness: He “wore the clothes of a triumphator at all times, and his 24 lictors carried laurel wreaths. In addition, special seating marked his distinctiveness at public gatherings, and statues commemorated his presence.”45 Shut out of real power by dynastic competition, lesser officials vied for individual gain through bribery and corruption despite efforts to rein it in (App. B Civ. 2.19). I do not want to abbreviate history too much here, but by the time Octavian seized power and became Augustus, the only viable political language available was that of individuals, not institutions. Politics, once an arena of discussion about what the future of the community would be, had become a hollow form. Its substance would be embodied in something more tangible: a single person. Caesar quipped that the res publica is nothing, a name without a body (Suet. Iul. 76).46 Augustus seemed quite willing to become that body, embracing in his Res gestae his role as restorer and protector of the res publica that was beset by corruption and factional strife (RG 1, 2, 8), his authorization by universal acclaim for extraconstitutional or nonnormative behavior (RG 5, 6, 9, 25, 34, 35), and his view of political rule as an extension of household rule (RG 5, 15, 17, 18).47 I think Tacitus is absolutely correct, and deeply insightful, when he noted the absence of opposition to the slow rise of the principate: The populace was happy for cheap corn; the boldest had died; and the rest of the nobility found ease in servility as the way to wealth and honor (Ann. 1.2.1). The senate (in 50 bce) could only sit by after Pompey and Caesar ignored their overwhelming vote for them to simultaneously give up their commands. Cicero could only sputter at Antonius bypassing the senate and turning to the 44 46 47

Steel, End, 242. 45 Cass. Dio 44.4.2; 44.6.3; Steel, End, 208. On this passage, see L. Morgan, “‘Levi Quidem de re . . . ’: Julius Caesar as Tyrant and Pedant,” Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997): 23–40. See D. Hammer, “Between Sovereignty and Non-Sovereignty: The maiestas populi Romani and Foundational Authority in the Roman Republic?,” in C. Smith (ed.), Sovereignty: A Global Perspective, Proceedings of the British Academy 253 (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2022), 58–77.

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empty popular assemblies (Phil. 1.6). Cato the Younger could only kill himself. It was not abrupt; it was not a violent takeover or revolution; it was a slow depletion of the norms that sustained a Roman participatory system until, in the end, there was nothing to animate a republican spirit.

The Crisis of American Democracy This narrative has echoes in America’s republic. I depart from comparisons that identify particular structural similarities – wealth inequalities, immigration, or imperialism, to name a few – as bearing the same political implications.48 Moreover, just as I did with the Roman Republic, I situate my discussion of the crisis of American politics between two approaches. On the one side are those who identify broader structural factors: economic issues, such as the wealth inequalities created by global capitalism;49 the systemic inability of institutions to answer to the interests of citizens;50 or the distinctive absence of memory in the collective psyche of the American polity.51 On the other side are those who emphasize the contingent actions of individuals, such as the impact of personality (especially that of Donald Trump)52 or the decisions of elites.53 48 49

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Notably, Murphy, Rome, makes an argument for comparisons based on structural similarities and Smil, America, rejects such arguments based on structural differences. N. Dasandi, Is Democracy Failing? A Primer for the 21st Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018); Y. Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); C. Fuchs, Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter (London: Pluto Press, 2018); A. Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020). A. C. Grayling, Democracy and Its Crisis, updated edition (London: Oneworld, 2018); M. Haas, Why Democracies Flounder and Fail: Remedying Mass Society Politics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Dasandi, Democracy. T. Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), suggests the absence of history in American political consciousness, leading either to a politics of inevitability about the ineluctability of democracy’s survival or the politics of eternity that mythologizes the past in order to call for its return. I am pointing to a more complicated relationship to memory, one in which questions of democracy are tied to narratives of belonging in a community of Strangers. B. X. Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017); E. J. Dionne, N. J. Ornstein, and T. E. Mann, One Nation after Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017); B. Woodward, Fear (New York: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2018); Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump under Fire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019); Anonymous, A Warning (New York: Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, 2019); S. Hennessey and B. Wittes, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); J. Dean and B. Altemeyer, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2020). S. Levitsky and D. Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future (New York: Crown, 2018); Haas, Democracies; Y. Mounk, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (New York: Penguin, 2022).

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These different arguments are not necessarily incorrect; they are incomplete because they mask the embodied aspects of politics, resolving politics into matters of either material interests or elite actions. From these perspectives, political health can be restored through particular institutional reforms that better align outcomes with interests54 or a recommitment to such civic ideals as discourse, toleration, and restraint. Yascha Mounk seeks to foster an “inclusive patriotism.”55 Amitai Etzioni calls similarly for “reclaiming patriotism,” the title of his book, by bringing citizens together to “decide among each other which direction their country is to follow and what values are to be advanced.”56 Etzioni’s view of politics overlaps with my claim that politics is an arena of identity formation, contestation, and articulation. Where I depart from Etzioni is in the communitarian faith in citizens willing and able to come together in order to decide the direction of the community. Discourse occurs between bodies that recognize themselves and interpret themselves and others by way of a culturally mediated narrative in which the present is viewed by way of one’s connection to the past and anticipation of the future. The difficulty (and it is the same problem in Rome) with getting everyone together to talk about the future of the community arises when the participants, whether elites or the populus, have become abstract Strangers to each other. They neither trust nor comprehend the other. They talk in separate discourses. And they see each other as subverting their own identity, as being un-American. What we need to account for to understand the crisis of democracy are not particular conditions, whether economic inequality or the incrementalism that has always been a structural feature of American politics, but how participants understand themselves and the place of politics in relationship to a larger narrative of belonging. Rome and the United States share a starting point. They both possessed fairly stable participatory systems and political institutions designed to frustrate quick action. Under the best of circumstances, passing legislation is complicated. Like in Rome, the Senate functions by way of a variety of traditions: the senatorial courtesy that allows one senator to block a judicial appointment from that senator’s home state, for example, or the filibuster 54

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J. Johannes, Thinking about Political Reform: How to Fix, or Not Fix, American Government and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Grayling, Democracy; Haas, Democracies; L. Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (New York: Dey St., 2019); G. Sitaraman, The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America (New York: Basic Books, 2019). Mounk, The People vs. Democracy, 208; also F. Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). A. Etzioni, Reclaiming Patriotism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 13.

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in which one-third of the Senate can block action. Probably the most significant norm in the Senate is some level of bipartisanship. Senators like to see themselves as statesmen and stateswomen: as acting on behalf of some public good (even if that is often not the case).57 Norms also govern the oversight functions of the executive branch by both the House and the Senate: an interest in failures in the execution of policy, for example, or concerns with corruption or threats to the nation. And the executive branch, which is only vaguely defined in the Constitution, has evolved through the often tacit relinquishment of roles from Congress to the presidency, the assumption of other roles, and the acceptance of particular norms: internal oversight through the inspectors general; nonpartisanship of civil servants; executing the laws; responding to oversight requests from Congress; avoiding conflict of interest or individual enrichment; and prohibiting civil service employees from engaging in certain forms of political activity. In some of these cases, there are actually constitutional provisions or laws, but they are either so vague or so circumscribed by the courts that the laws are almost helpless absent an acceptance of the norms. But that acceptance of norms has changed, and it has changed for some of the same reasons that we saw in Rome: a growing dissensus.58 It deserves emphasizing that the nature of the polarization is different in the United States than in Rome. In particular, the dissensus in Rome did not express itself along party lines. What they share is a deep cultural division that impacts the functioning and perception of political institutions. There is no shortage of dire warnings about polarization.59 These warnings often focus on the gradual loss of moderates in Congress. But the polarization 57 58

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On the development of these traditions, see N. MacNeil and R. A. Baker, The American Senate: An Insider’s History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On ideological division, see Pew Research Center, Political Polarization in the American Public, June 2014, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-americanpublic/; D. Desilver, “The Polarized Congress of Today Has Its Roots in the 1970s,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/polarized-politic; Z. Neal, “A Sign of the Times? Weak and Strong Polarization in the U.S. Congress, 1973– 2016,” Social Networks 60: 103–12. On the long-term changes in the functioning of the Senate, see B. Sinclair, The Transformation of the U.S. Senate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), and of Congress, see D. W. Brady and M. D. McCubbins, Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, vol. 1, New Perspectives on the History of Congress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), and D. W. Brady and M. D. McCubbins, Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, vol. 2, Further New Perspectives on the History of Congress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). N. M. McCarty, K. T. Poole, and H. Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); R. Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin Press,

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goes beyond policy disagreements into deeper animosities that divide along an alignment of ideology, race, geography, demography, and religion.60 In 2020, about eight in ten voters believe that the other supporters of the other party do not share “a fundamental commitment to the same core American values.” Ninety percent of voters see lasting harm if the other party wins.61 Hatred of the other party is now a stronger force than love of one’s own party in orienting attitudes.62 The polarization extends well beyond politics into life choices: “Compared to a few decades ago, Americans today are much more opposed to dating or marrying an opposing partisan; they are also wary of living near or working for one.”63 Republicans and Democrats now occupy two mutually incomprehensible and antagonistic worlds that diverge on what even counts as reality: whether rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021; whether Joe Biden actually won the presidency; whether scientists can be trusted; whether the coronavirus outbreak is a health crisis; and whether vaccines should be taken and masks worn.64 What has emerged across the electorate, and it magnifies what happened in Rome at the elite level, is negative partisanship: a division born of a distrust of and dislike for the other side. The result of this distrust is a change in orientation toward political institutions, from seeing them as mechanisms for mediating disagreement to using them to stop the other side – to obstruct action. One prominent example will make the point. President Obama proposed a healthcare plan that was originally proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented earlier by the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

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2007); T. Mann and N. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse; E. Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020). Tempering of some of these claims include M. P. Fiorina, S. J. Abrams, and J. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Pearson Education, 2006); C. Farina, “Congressional Polarization: Terminal Constitutional Dysfunction?,” Columbia Law Review 115 (2015): 1689–1738; M. Saeki, The Phantom of a Polarized America: Myths and Truths of an Ideological Divide (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); J. E. Campbell, Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). T. Carothers and A. O’Donohue, “How Americans Were Driven to Extremes: In the United States, Polarization Runs Particularly Deep,” Foreign Affairs, Sept. 25, 2019, www.foreignaffairs.com/art icles/united-states/2019-09-25/how-americans-were-driven-extremes; E. J. Finkel, C. A. Bail, M. Cikara, P. H. Ditto, S. Iyengar, S. Klar, L. Mason, et al., “Political Sectarianism in America: A Poisonous Cocktail of Othering, Aversion, and Moralization Poses a Threat to Democracy,” Science 370 (2020): 533–36. Pew Research Center, Amid Campaign Turmoil, Biden Holds Wide Leads on Coronavirus, Unifying the Country, Oct. 2020, 7, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/10/09/amid-campaign-turmoilbiden-holds-wide-leads-on-coronavirus-unifying-the-country/. Finkel et al., “Political Sectarianism,” 534. Finkel et al., “Political Sectarianism,” 535; also Pew, Political Polarization, 12. M. Dimock and R. Wike, “America Is Exceptional in the Nature of Its Political Divide,” Pew Research Center, Nov. 13, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/13/america-isexceptional-in-the-nature-of-its-political-divide/.

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No Republican voted for the plan. And opposition to Obama’s healthcare plan became a cause of the Republican electorate in the next election cycle. Philip Wallach and James Wallner argue that polarization is not the reason for gridlock; rather, it can be attributed to significant policy disagreement within each party: the primary evidence of polarization, roll-call votes, actually reflects decisions by congressional leaders to avoid division within their caucuses by bringing to vote only those bills that display the unity of the caucus.65 More the problem. The argument here is not that there are deeply entrenched policy differences but to suggest that there is a much deeper cultural polarization built on mutual incomprehension and dislike that drives decisions to act and, as often, not act. As Michael Dimock and Richard Wike note, what is distinctive about the current environment is that the different divisions “have collapsed onto a singular axis where we find no toehold for common cause or collective national identity.”66 An essay authored by fifteen scholars described the current climate of political sectarianism in the United States as “a poisonous cocktail” of “othering – the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion – the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans; and moralization – the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous.”67 Like 133 bce in Rome, 2008 was a watershed moment in the United States. On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Republican leadership met and agreed that they would block everything, not because they agreed or disagreed with particular proposals but for the explicit purpose of rendering the president ineffective. And they held to their word. The Republican Senate over the eight years of his term delayed appointments, refused to fill appointments, prevented hearings for appointments, and stopped legislation from ever coming up for a vote. And similar to 133 bce in Rome, 2008 reflected an acceleration of a set of trends already in motion. For example, the use of the filibuster by a minority to block legislation had been steadily creeping up in the 1980s, topping off at around sixty cloture votes per year in 2002 (cloture is a way to measure filibusters). But that number jumped to over 100 when Obama became president. The trend toward obstruction is significant. According to the political scientist Barbara Sinclair, in the 1960s, threatened or actual filibusters affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 65

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P. Wallach and J. Wallner, “Congress Is Broken; But Don’t Blame Polarization,” RealClear Policy, June 8, 2018, www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/06/08/congress_is_broken_but_dont_blame_ polarization_110662.html. Dimock and Wike, “American Is Exceptional.” 67 Finkel et al., “Political Sectarianism,” 533.

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1980s, that number had increased to 28 percent. When the Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and the Republicans were in the minority, that number rose to 70 percent.68 We need to take some measure of that statistic: 70 percent of major legislation was affected by minority obstruction. Once the Republicans won back the Senate, they no longer had to filibuster; they simply stopped legislation from coming forward. Substantive legislation dropped from 144 bills in 2003–4 to just over 60 in 2011–12 and 2013–14.69 That number remains about the same through 2021 despite a looming set of important issues facing the country.70 What has increased as a proportion of legislation, and it mirrors the final decades of the Roman Republic, are ceremonial actions: awarding medals, renaming buildings, and memorializing historical events.71 In addition, the Senate slowed confirmations of appointments to a trickle. For example, the average number of days to confirm uncontroversial circuit court nominees rose from 64.5 days during the Reagan presidency to 113.1 days under Bush, to 161.5 days under Clinton, then 201.7 days under the second Bush, and 227.3 days for Obama. Almost 80 percent of circuit court nominees were approved within 100 days of nomination under Reagan. Zero percent accomplished that feat under Obama.72 And the architect of the plan, Mitch McConnell, would continue to boast long after Obama was out of office about blocking his judicial appointments.73 The United States has faced a polarized electorate and deadlocked Congress before. In fact, those who do not see a crisis identify historical precedents for ideological division and congressional inaction. In a carefully argued review of political science literature, Cynthia Farina points to a number of factors that minimize the crisis: historical moments of animus between parties, dating back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; inconsistent ideological and policy preferences among voters in each party; the disapproval by voters of 68 69 70

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B. Sinclair, “The New World of U.S. Senators,” in L. C. Dodd and B. I. Oppenheimer (eds.), Congress Reconsidered (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2009), 11. D. Desilver, “Congress’ Productivity Improves Somewhat in 2015,” Pew Research Center, Dec. 29, 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/29/congress-productivity-improves-somewhat-in-2015/. D. Desilver, “A Productivity Scorecard for the 115th Congress: More Laws Than Before, but Not More Substance,” Pew Research Center, Jan. 25, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/25/ a-productivity-scorecard-for-115th-congress/; D. Desilver, “Congress Is Off to a Slow Start in 2021, Much as It Has Been in Previous Years,” Pew Research Center, Aug. 13, 2021, www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2021/08/13/congress-is-off-to-a-slow-start-in-2021-much-as-it-has-been-in-previous-years/. Desilver, “Productivity Scorecard.” B. McMillion, Length of Time from Nomination to Confirmation for “Uncontroversial” U.S. Circuit and District Court Nominees: Detailed Analysis, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Sept. 18, 2012, 7, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43316/3. M. McConnell, interview by S. Hannity, Hannity, Fox News, Dec. 13, 2019, https://video .foxnews.com/v/6115454801001#sp=show-clips.

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gridlock; examples of bipartisan action; and the past self-correcting mechanisms of Congress.74 Part of what is missed in these different measures of polarization are the divisions that arise over issues that once found widespread agreement. For example, in 2006, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized by a Senate vote of 98–0. In 2021, every Republican except one voted against even advancing the amended act to the Senate floor, thereby blocking the legislation. The inconsistent ideological views of voters actually point to the nature of the polarization. If there is anything voters have been willing to do, it is to oppose their own abstract policy preferences with sufficient partisan prompting.75 Moreover, despite popular dismay with congressional gridlock and partisan ugliness, politicians are not punished electorally. But Farina makes two telling points that add to my argument here. One is that current polarization, however measured, is at its highest level since the Civil War.76 The similarity of the current environment to the political climate leading up to the Civil War is that the division revealed a deep cultural cleavage that remains to this day. The other point is that the “rhetoric around congressional polarization” is “far more negative than the existing evidence can justify.”77 Even if we accept the second part of the claim, my argument is that the rhetoric itself plays a critical role in structuring how we understand the experience of our political institutions. For example, only 19 percent of Americans trust the government always or most of the time.78 Twenty-two percent of the public say that most officials put the country’s interests ahead of their own; 74 percent say that officials put their interests first.79 Sixty-nine percent of people have an unfavorable opinion of Congress.80 And an increasing percentage of citizens perceive growing public corruption.81 74 75 76 78

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Notably, Farina, “Congressional Polarization,” 1702–5. For a discussion of the scholarship, see A. Agadjanian, “Why They Follow,” Washington Post, Aug. 28, 2020. 77 Farina, “Congressional Polarization,” 1705. Farina, “Congressional Polarization,” 1689. Pew Research Center, Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government, Nov. 2015, 4, www .pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/beyond-distrust-how-americans-view-their-government/. The 2018 Edleman Trust Barometer reports that the 9 percent decline of trust in institutions in the United States over the last year is the steepest decline ever measured in any country. Edelman, 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report, 6, www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2018-10/ 2018_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report_FEB.pdf. See also Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2022,” June 6, 2022, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/pub lic-trust-in-government-1958-2022/. Pew, Beyond Distrust, 12. Pew, Beyond Distrust, 58; also L. Rainie, S. Keeter, and A. Perrin, Trust and Distrust in America, Pew Research Center, July 2019, 6, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-distrust-inamerica/. Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2018, 2019, https://images.transparencycdn .org/images/CPI_2018_Executive_Summary_EN.pdf.

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Striking, and important for my argument, is people’s sense of the future: “When asked to look five years ahead, 78% say that either the country will be just as politically divided as it is now (42%), or more divided (36%).”82 This last statistic is important because it points to how people imagine their institutions as able (or unable) to project the community into the future. Moreover, 75 percent of respondents believe that trust in government is decreasing; 64 percent believe that trust in each other is decreasing; and similar proportions believe this loss of trust in government (64 percent) and each other (70 percent) makes it harder to solve problems.83 The Democracy Index 2016 downgraded American democracy from a full democracy to a flawed one because of a trust deficit that was years in the making.84 The sense that institutions cannot answer to the future has implications for where people and the elite look for solutions. The rhetoric is not about working within these institutions, but of either dropping out of them or bypassing the norms by which they functioned. The last several decades have seen increasing numbers of moderate legislators simply leaving the legislative arena, expressing their own frustration with the inability to get anything done. As Sam Johnson, a Republican Congressman from Texas, who had served since 1991, said, “What I will miss least is the current polarization and common refusal to listen to or respect others’ ideas. It is possible to find common ground.”85 Johnson unintentionally speaks to the paradox I am describing here, bemoaning the inability of an institution to function absent the norms he helped dismantle. Moreover, within institutions, rules get changed either out of frustration or out of a sense that the norms are just not that important. For example, the Senate Democrats momentarily suspended the filibuster rule to finally get some of Obama’s blocked judicial appointments through. Out of exasperation, President Obama resorted to executive orders, including conferring legal status on millions of undocumented immigrants. In the final years of the Obama presidency, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, without any Republican opposition, did what everyone used to think was unthinkable: block a hearing and a vote on a president’s Supreme Court Justice appointee. To compound the erosion of norms, McConnell then suspended the filibuster twice in order to confirm Trump’s nominees to the court. And as evidence of 82 84 85

83 Pew, Beyond Distrust, 92. Rainie, Keeter, and Perrin, Trust and Distrust in America, 3. The Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2016: Revenge of the “Deplorables,” The Economist Group, 2017, 3–4, 12–24. E.-I. Dovere and B. Baker, “Two Dozen Members of Congress Can’t Wait to Leave D.C. Here’s Why,” Politico Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2018, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/04/retiringmembers-congress-2018-216209/.

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the contortions necessary to perform the simplest routine obligation of paying the bills, at the end of 2021 congressional leadership agreed to legislation that would bypass the Republican blockade on raising the debt ceiling by effectively eliminating the filibuster for this one occasion. To be clear, Republicans will still not vote to pay for the debt already incurred, even with the specter of default and economic collapse, but Republican leaders did agree to allow Democrats to perform the normally bipartisan task of raising the ceiling. The abnormal became the path to the normal. The willingness to toss away norms extends to the general populace. Both Republicans and Democrats have expressed increasing willingness to accept some violence as justifiable. Like I suggested in the Roman case, the violence appears more as an outgrowth of a decreasing belief in the ability of institutions to mediate the conflicting visions of community life. When asked if it would be “justified for your party to use violence in advancing political goals,” there is a steady rise from 2017 to 2020 from 8 percent for both parties to 33 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans saying violence might be justified a little, a moderate amount, a lot, or a great deal.86 Another study confirmed these trends: Over 50 percent of Republican identifiers and Republicanleaning independents agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it” and over 40 percent agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”87 These polls reflect the reality of violent encounters. In one 2022 survey, over three-fourths of local election officials felt that threats against local officials had increased and one-third of local election workers knew someone who had left the job “because of fears for their safety, increased threats, or intimidation.”88 According to data from the Capitol Police, threats against members of Congress have risen from 3,939 in 2017, to 5,206 (2018), 6,955 (2019), 8,613 (2020), and approximately 9,600 in 2021.89 86

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L. Diamond, L. Drutman, T. Lindberg, N. P. Kalmoe, and L. Mason, “Americans Increasingly Believe Violence Is Justified If the Other Side Wins,” Politico Magazine, Oct. 1, 2020, www .politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-violence-424157. L. M. Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republicans’ Commitment to Democracy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (2020): 22752. Brennan Center for Justice, Local Election Officials Survey: March 2022, Benenson Strategy Group, 2022, 3–4, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/local-election-officials-surveymarch-2022; also Brennan Center for Justice and the Bipartisan Policy Center, Election Officials under Attack: How to Protect Administrators and Safeguard Democracy, June 2021, www .brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/election-officials-under-attack. S. Manning and C. Frazier, “Reported Threats against Members of Congress Skyrocket Following 5-year Upward Trend,” WFTV, May 6, 2021, www.wftv.com/news/reported-threats-againstmembers-congress-skyrocket-following-5-year-upward-trend/CPNCWXBCYBEIFFUMH2GD65 EV3M/; Chris Marquette, “Capitol Security Officials Acutely Focused on Bolstering Protections for

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What is particularly striking is when this violence, or the threat of violence, is connected to the failure (or perceived failure) of institutions: the outbreaks of violence following not just incidents of police violence against African Americans, but the cover up and failure to prosecute these incidents; and the endorsement by Donald Trump of white supremacist terrorist groups to engage in forms of voter intimidation at the polls (“monitor”) and to “stand by” if Trump loses what he calls a rigged election.90 What seemed impossible before, but was called into doubt in the 2020 public conversation, was the possibility that there would not be a peaceful transfer of power. The possibility turned into an actuality when a mob violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, during the counting of the votes of the Electoral College. There are other signs of a willingness by the electorate to forego norms of constitutional governance. Only about 10 to 15 percent of the American electorate would vote against a co-partisan candidate because of undemocratic behavior.91 A 2019 study shows an increasing number of Republicans, from 14 percent in 2016 to 43 percent in 2019, who believe that the country’s problems could be better addressed if presidents “didn’t have to worry about Congress or the courts.”92 In another survey in 2020, 47.3 percent of Republican identifiers and Republican-leaning independents agreed that “strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.”93 That there would be such a dramatic change among Republicans is significant since the party had for decades resisted, at least rhetorically, the growth of the imperial president as both Congress and the courts ceded increasing power to the executive branch. This desire for a Pompey or Caesar is not just a vague yearning of the general populace. Trump has his Cicero’s who are willing to make the argument for autocracy. As one conservative intellectual wrote, in rather ominous language that speaks directly to an apocalyptic future: “Every republic eventually faces what might be called the Weimar problem. Has

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Members,” Roll Call, Jan. 11, 2022, https://rollcall.com/2022/01/11/capitol-security-officials-acutelyfocused-on-bolstering-protections-for-members/. Staff, “Read the Full Transcript from the First Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, ” USA Today, Sept. 30, 2020. M. Graham and M. Svolik, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” American Political Science Review 114 (May 2020): 392–409. Pew Research Center, Republicans Now Are More Open to the Idea of Expanding Presidential Power, Aug. 2019, 2, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/08/07/republicans-now-are-more-open-to-theidea-of-expanding-presidential-power/. Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism,” 22752.

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the national culture, popular and elite, deteriorated so much that the virtues necessary to sustain republican government are no longer viable?”94 Kesler translates the question into a deeper statement about the future of republican governance: If relimiting the government by constitutional means was not an option, said, in effect, a lot of indignant Republican and independent voters, then what is left but to use the system as it is, and try placing a strong leader, one of our own, someone who can get something done in our interest, at the head of it? After the Tea Party, the next stop on the populist train was Trump Tower.95

What Kesler imagines is “the ideal chief executive” with “high energy, toughness, and strength.”96 What Kesler’s language points to is a loss of belief in the system and, thus, the willingness to undermine aspects of that system. Conceptualizing Autocracy and the Unitary Executive The yearnings of some scholars and the diffuse opinions of the citizenry do not necessarily translate into changes in norms. But these autocratic sentiments have been given conceptual form and constitutional guise in the notion of the unitary executive that began to emerge in conservative circles in the 1970s and has its prominent defenders in government (including the attorney general under Trump), in the Supreme Court, among congressional defenders, and among White House advisors. In his speech to the Federalist Society in defense of a unitary executive, Attorney General Barr decried “a steady grinding down of the Executive branch’s authority.”97 The unitary executive theory grew out of the frustration of conservatives, who developed an electoral strategy to hold the presidency, of advancing an agenda in a system meant to be limiting and divided.98 Barr speaks to this frustration, noting the same trends that I am describing here: concerted 94 95 96 97

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C. Kesler, “Trump and the Conservative Cause,” Claremont Review of Books 16 (Spring 2016), 12. Kesler, “Trump and the Conservative Cause,” 11. Kesler, “Trump and the Conservative Cause,” 14. W. Barr, 19th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture (Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention, Washington, DC, Nov. 15, 2019), www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorneygeneral-william-p-barr-delivers-19th-annual-barbara-k-olson-memorial-lecture. S. Skowronek, “The Conservative Insurgency and Presidential Power: A Developmental Perspective on the Unitary Executive,” Harvard Law Review 122 (2009): 2096–97. An early statement of this frustration can be seen in L. G. Crovitz and J. A. Rabkin (eds.), The Fettered Presidency: Legal Constraints on the Executive Branch, American Enterprise Institute Studies (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1989).

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attempts to stifle action. The solution lies in a particular reading of the Constitution: the president “alone is the Executive” and is the “sole repository of all Executive powers conferred by the Constitution.”99 Proponents draw several implications from this language: the president has complete discretion to act on cases that involve his own interests and, in fact, cannot engage in conflicts of interest;100 has “virtually unchecked discretion to prosecute individuals for suspected federal crimes”;101 has “absolute immunity” from congressional oversight, and by extension, this includes former aides;102 has unilateral war-making powers; has absolute authority to implement and execute laws; and has authority to reject any legislative attempts to create independent administrators. Early policy statements of unitarianism appeared in the famous torture memos under George W. Bush in which John Yoo argued for a more absolutist position that no administration official can be held in contempt for carrying out a claim of executive privilege (including, apparently, to cover up a crime); that Congress can have no role in regulating the president’s power “to detain and interrogate enemy combatants”; and that no official can be prosecuted for carrying out the president’s “exclusive constitutional authorities.”103 Signing statements also became assertions of the unitary approach. In such statements, the president signs the legislation into law, but also issues a statement that rejects or limits what are seen as legislative infringements on the executive. Signing statements were first used as a political tool under Ronald Reagan, but under George W. Bush the number of challenges to laws because they encroached on the unitary executive doubled all the previous challenges combined.104 So, in signing the Defense Appropriation Bill in 2005, Bush included a signing statement rejecting the McCain Amendment prohibiting torture, saying that the amendment would be interpreted “in a manner consistent with the 99

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W. Barr to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steve Engel, “Mueller’s ‘Obstruction’ Theory,” June 8, 2018, italics in original, https://int.nyt.com/data/docu menthelper/549-june-2018-barr-memo-to-doj-mue/b4c05e39318dd2d136b3/optimized/full.pdf. Barr, “Mueller’s ‘Obstruction’ Theory.” W. Barr, “Remarks” (Hillsdale College Constitution Day event, Hillsdale, MI, Sept. 16, 2020), www .justice.gov/opa/speech/remarks-attorney-general-william-p-barr-hillsdale-college-constitution-dayevent. See opinion in Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives v. Donald F. McGahn II, Civ. No. 19-cv-2379 KBJ 1 (Dist. of Col., Nov. 25, 2019). J. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, to A. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, Aug. 1, 2002, www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/legacy/2010/08/05/memo-gonzales-aug1.pdf. C. S. Kelley, “Rhetoric and Reality? Unilateralism and the Obama Administration,” Social Science Quarterly 93 (2012): 1149. The extensive use of signing statements was first revealed in Charlie Savage, “Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws,” Boston Globe, Apr. 30, 2006.

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constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief.”105 Claims of unitarianism, especially in an era of increasing partisanship, continued unabated in the Obama administration, despite campaigning against Bush’s signing statements.106 Under the Trump administration, claims of executive authority became full throated and unabashed in spelling out the range of powers, as I will develop below. The issue here is not that the unitary executive theory is absolutist; Barr and others note the existence of political checks, including impeachment and election. The problem is that if the executive is conceived as a single individual, then the unifying ethos of all those who make up the unitary executive is not public integrity (which can lead individuals in the executive branch to dissent from the president) but personal loyalty or obedience. As Skowronek notes, the unitary executive marginalizes the extra-constitutional mechanisms that the progressives had relied upon to surround and regulate their presidency-centered system. Public opinion, pluralism, publicity, openness, empiricism, science, technical expertise, professionalism, administrative independence, freedom of information – all the operating norms and intermediary authorities on which the progressives pegged their faith in a ‘modern’ presidency – are short-circuited by this appeal back to the formalities of the Constitution.107

Skowronek continues, “Or, to put it another way, when all extraconstitutional interventions are rendered superfluous, the expanded resources of the modern presidency are redeployed on behalf of the 105

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G. W. Bush, “Statement on Signing the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006,” Dec. 30, 2005, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051 230-8.html. Also, C. Bradley and E. Posner, “Presidential Signing Statements and Executive Power,” Constitutional Commentary 23 (2006): 307–64; S. G. Calabresi and D. Lev, “The Legal Significance of Presidential Signing Statements,” Forum 4 (2006), https://doi.org/10.2202/1540-8 884.1131; J. P. Pfiffner, “The Power to Ignore the Law: Signing Statements,” in Power Play (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008); R. S. Conley, “The Harbinger of the Unitary Executive? An Analysis of Presidential Signing Statements from Truman to Carter,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 41 (2011): 546–69. Kelley, “Rhetoric and Reality?,” 1154–57. Skowronek, “The Conservative Insurgency,” 2095. Discussions of the unitary executive theory can be found in S. G. Calabresi and C. S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), which attempts to identify unitary claims in each presidential administration; J. D. Bailey, “The New Unitary Executive and Democratic Theory: The Problem of Alexander Hamilton,” American Political Science Review 102 (2008): 453–65; S. A. Barber and J. E. Fleming, “Constitutional Theory, the Unitary Executive, and the Rule of Law,” Nomos 50 (2011): 156–66; J. MacKenzie, Absolute Power: How the Unitary Executive Theory Is Undermining the Constitution (New York: Century Foundation, 2008).

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personal form of rule which the institutional innovations of all previous reformers were at pains to qualify.”108 Thus, Barr can dismiss the use of public office for personal gain as “trivializing” impeachment by employing it as a “political tool.”109 And Alan Dershowitz can argue in Trump’s first impeachment trial, though later claim to be misinterpreted, “If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”110 I have pointed to some trends in how political institutions and norms are experienced by both political actors and the electorate. Institutional actors do not trust each other, and thus undermine the capacity of institutions to get things done; citizens do not trust the institutions with the future of the community, and, thus, look for solutions outside these institutions; citizens do not trust each other,111 and thus locate these extrainstitutional solutions in extraordinary measures or individuals. These solutions are given constitutional guise through, among other things, the notion of the unitary executive that is embraced in fact, if not always in theory, by both parties. Read this way, Trump’s campaign and actions appear as a continuation, certainly an acceleration, of trends. Or stated slightly differently, Trump is not a cause but a symptom of a deeper crisis in American democracy. Trumpism grows out of these anti-institutional trends, representing an experiment with one form of autocracy, which I will describe as a new Caesarism. In using this phrase, I am not equating Trump with Caesar nor am I suggesting that there is an ineluctable, irreversible path toward autocracy, any more in the United States than there was in Rome. Rather, I am seeking to characterize a political movement that blends populist and autocratic impulses. My interest is to show how the characteristics of this new Caesarism – the authorization by acclamation of individuals who seek not to save political institutions but to surpass or bypass them – grow out of the loss of norms by which political 108 109

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Skowronek, “The Conservative Insurgency,” 2095. R. Blitzer, “AG Barr Warns against ‘Political’ Impeachment, Hits Back at Comey in Fox News Interview,” Fox News, Dec. 18, 2019, www.foxnews.com/politics/ag-barr-warns-against-politicalimpeachment-hits-back-at-comey-fox-news-interview. A. Dershowitz, speaking at the Senate trial of President Trump, US Senate, Jan. 29, 2020, aired on PBS News Hour, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-dershowitz-argues-that-a-desire-to-winreelection-would-not-be-impeachable. Just 34 percent of Americans say they generally have a very great deal or a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions. Sixty-three percent say they do not have very much confidence or none at all. Confidence in the public’s political wisdom has fallen twenty-three points from 2007 and thirty points since 1997 (Pew, Beyond Distrust, 102). On Rome, see Brunt, Fall, 51.

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institutions can get things done. In Trump, supporters personified their distrust of democratic politics and saw his singular will as the path to an imagined future. The Institutions Are the Enemy Dio Cassius reported that the people declared Caesar to be the “savior of the citizens” (Cass. Dio 44.4.5). Less relevant for us here is the association of a leader with the divine. The notion of a savior does not have the same cultural resonance in the United States as it did in Rome, though the language is surprisingly prevalent in celebrations of Trump.112 What I am more interested in thinking through is the political context that gives credence to this language of the exceptional individual. The rise of Caesar (like Pompey before him) occurred in a context in which traditional institutions were perceived (even by those in these institutions) as unable to address a future that was seen in some sense as apocalyptic. For Rome, that perspective was forged in economic crisis and tumultuous violence, which included a three-year war over civic inclusion; for the United States it is grounded in both economic dislocation and a cultural schism with a long history – fostered in a variety of media outlets – of a country perceived by one side of the schism as under siege by an array of Strangers: minorities, immigrants, internationalists, the financial elite, and the deep state.113 At issue is an existential question that has always accompanied the founding myth, though one that now sharply divides the country: Who are We and What have We become? As one study reported, such antidemocratic sentiments as support for violence, a willingness to circumvent the law, and a lack of respect for the outcome of elections among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are grounded in “ethnocentric concerns about the political and social role of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos in a context of significant demographic 112 113

See K. Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). On the history of nativism, see R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); D. S. King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); E. P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For example, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 created immigration quotas to keep the different nationalities of the population at 1890 levels. In a 2017 ABC/Washington Post poll, the concept of a deep state is regarded as credible by 48 percent of Americans, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. See G. Langer, “Lies, Damn Lies and the Deep State: Plenty of Americans See Them All,” a discussion of the ABC News/Washington Post poll: Deep State and Fake News, Apr. 27, 2017, www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1186a4DeepStateFakeNews.pdf.

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and cultural change.”114 That anxiety has found new expression in what is referred to as the great replacement theory. That theory holds that there is an orchestrated conspiracy (usually attributed to Jews, but also Democrats sometimes in conjunction with Jews, sometimes acting on their own) to replace the “legacy Americans,” a term used with frequency by Fox host Tucker Carlson, with more compliant immigrants.115 The language of “legacy” or “replacement” is an attempt to resolve the founding myth’s complicated relationship to origins. In the myth, the community is comprised of, and continually infused with, disparate wanderers who leave their origins. And those wanderers invariably encounter other inhabitants who precede them. The myth, though, does not view new wanderers as replacing previous ones; it envisions a community as continually reshaped through the infusion and incorporation of groups. But the permeability of boundaries continually unsettles notions of identity, leading individuals to define a We that is set against the perceived Stranger. In current politics, that Stranger is seen as part of a larger subversive effort by the Democratic party. One in three Americans believe there is an effort to replace “native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.”116 Political leaders and right-wing commentators, albeit in more subtle ways than fringe groups, speak to this unsettledness as they invoke the language of familiarity, recognition, and bodily danger. The immediacy and intimacy of the fear is sufficient to provoke mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, that was aimed at African Americans (2022), in El Paso that targeted Latinos (2019), in Pittsburgh that murdered Jewish people (2018), and to stoke a right-wing, neofascist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville, VA (2017). Trump’s virtue is to clear away the underbrush of nuance and take aim at the founding myth that generates these questions of identity. The dislocating journey of immigrants now becomes an “invasion,” dramatized in images of a “caravan” coming up from Mexico.117 Trump claimed in the announcement of his candidacy: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best – they’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing 114 115 116

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Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism,” 22752. N. Confessore, “America Nationalist: Part 1 – How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable,” New York Times, Apr. 30, 2022. The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Immigration Attitudes and Conspiratorial Thinkers: A Study Issued on the 10th Anniversary of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, May 2022, https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Im migration-Report_V15.pdf. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Oct. 29, 2018.

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those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”118 Criticism of the statement focused on the final several sentences. But there is a telling statement that gets lost: “They’re not sending you” (my emphasis). The United States appears not as a melting pot, a term with its own problematic history, or as a beacon, but as a “dumping ground.”119 The immigrant is a Stranger, not “you.” Not only do other countries give us their “worst,”120 but the hidden, undocumented Stranger dilutes, reapportioning resources through the census (a replay of similar controversies in Rome). Thus, Trump issued an executive order and a memorandum to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census.121 Moreover, residing within the United States is the menacing Stranger who retains old histories and identities. Trump often told the story during his campaign rallies, as he said in a rally in Alabama, that on September 11: “[I] watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, NJ, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”122 He repeated the comments on ABC News: “It was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.”123 In talking about Syrian refugees at an Iowa rally in 2016, Trump also read the lyrics to Al Wilson’s 1968 song “The Snake,” the story of a “tender woman” who nursed a sickly snake back to health but then was attacked by the “vicious” snake, to which the snake responds to her cry, “Oh shut up silly woman . . . you knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”124 On Fox News 118 119 120

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A. Burns, “Choice Words from Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate,” New York Times, June 16, 2015. S. Peoples, “Trump: US ‘a Dumping Ground for the Rest of the World’,” Business Insider, Sept. 14, 2015. D. Trump, “Remarks” (address, FBI National Academy Graduation Ceremony, Quantico, VA, Dec. 15, 2017), www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-fbi-nationalacademy-graduation-ceremony/ (page removed). “Collecting Information about Citizenship Status in Connection with the Decennial Census,” Exec. Order No. 13880, 84 Fed. Reg. 33821 (July 11, 2019); “Excluding Illegal Aliens from the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census,” memorandum for the secretary of commerce, 85 Fed. Reg. 44679 (July 21, 2020). Quoted in M. Tani, “Trump: I Saw ‘Thousands and Thousands’ of People in New Jersey Cheer the 9/11 Attacks,” Nov. 22, 2015, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-saw-thousands-thousandspeople-164537580.html. D. Trump, interview by George Stephanopolous, This Week, ABC News, Nov. 22, 2015, www .abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-donald-trump-ben-carson/story?id=35336008. Rally address at University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Jan. 12, 2016, aired on NBC News, www .nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/snake-trump-poetry-slams-syrian-refugees-allegorical-songn495311.

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with Sean Hannity, he said of Muslims who immigrate to the United States: “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost – I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation. They come – they don’t – for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”125 He campaigned on what he openly referred to as the Muslim ban. And he issued a statement, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”126 He then issued the first executive order on January 27, 2017.127 It is not just the threat raised by the permeable boundaries of incorporation as groups journey to the new land; it is also the danger of the mobility of those groups, who threaten to transform place into wild space. In the 2020 reelection campaign, the most prominent Stranger was the urban one, associated with “low income,”128 Black Lives Matter, and Antifa.129 These groups tear at the fabric of the nation, not just through “rampant . . . crime,”130 “violence,”131 and “Treason, Sedition, [and] Insurrection,”132 but also as they move out of the city, threatening “Suburban Women”133 and “their Suburban Lifestyle Dream.”134 In one of the more striking inversions of the myth of American mobility, Trump tweeted: “Suburban voters are pouring into the Republican Party because of the violence in Democrat run cities and states. If Biden gets in, this violence is ‘coming to the Suburbs’, and FAST. You could say goodbye to your American Dream!”135 Employing language suggesting an existential connection between identity, community, and bodily survival, Trump exclaimed at one campaign rally, “This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me.” The language invariably expresses urgency: “And this will be our last chance to save it on November 8th, remember that.”136 In his acceptance speech, he asserted that when he takes office in January, “safety will be 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

J. Johnson and A. Hauslohner, “‘I Think Islam Hates Us’: A Timeline of Trump’s Comments about Islam and Muslims,” Washington Post, May 20, 2017. Campaign statement read by D. Trump at a rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Dec. 7, 2015, aired on C-Span, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sz0KY-3PbQ. “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” Exec. Order No. 13769, 82 Fed. Reg. 8977 (Jan. 27, 2017). D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, July 29, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, June 25, 2020; Aug. 30, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Aug. 22, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Sept. 8, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, June 25, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Aug. 22, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, July 29, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Sept. 8, 2020. K. Reilly, “Read Donald Trump’s Speech Addressing Sexual Assault Accusations,” Time, Oct. 13, 2016.

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restored.”137 That restoration is imagined as decidedly anti-institutional. Institutions are not seen simply as ineffective in addressing these crises; they are portrayed as the enemy. Voter fraud prevents the voice of true citizens from being heard;138 through their propagation of “fake news,” the media is an “enemy of American people”;139 the Washington establishment has created a “rigged system”;140 Hillary Clinton and the international banks “plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty”;141 the intelligence community and military are incompetent; the FBI was involved in a “conspiracy”142 and an attempted coup;143 the Centers for Disease Control were engaged in “sedition” in addressing Covid-19 because they wanted Americans to die so that Trump would not be reelected;144 and the Food and Drug Administration performed a “political hit job” by releasing standards on vaccines.145 In one poll, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that unelected government and military leaders (aka, the deep state) “secretly manipulate or direct national policy.”146 Over half of Republican voters believe the 2020 election was rigged (discussed below). In the apocalyptic vision offered by Trump, salvation lies not in these institutions but in the exemplary individual willing to take strong action. He claimed, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”147 Speaking in a language of superlatives that recalls Cicero’s praise of 137

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D. Trump, presidential nomination acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, Cleveland, OH, July 21, 2016, aired on CNN, www.cnn.com/2016/07/22/politics/donald-trumprnc-speech-text/index.html. G. Kessler, “Stephen Miller’s Bushels of Pinocchios for False Voter-Fraud Claims,” Washington Post, Feb. 12, 2017. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Feb. 17, 2017. D. Trump, rally address, Greenville, NC, Sept. 6, 2016, aired on ABC15 Arizona, posted with transcript on RealClear Politics by Tim Hains, www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/09/06/full_replaytran script_donald_trump_speaks_in_greenville_nc.html. Repeated in 2020: Fox News, early July 2020; D. Trump, rally address, Oshkosh, WI, Aug. 17, 2020, in M. Chalfant, “Trump: ‘The only Way We’re Going to Lose This Election Is If the Election is Rigged’,” The Hill, Aug. 17, 2020, https://thehill.com /homenews/administration/512424-trump-the-only-way-we-are-going-to-lose-this-election-is-if-the/. D. Trump, rally address, West Palm Beach, Oct. 13, 2016, in Reilly, “Read Donald Trump’s Speech.” D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, June 26, 2018. Staff, “Read the Full Transcript.” S. LaFraniere, “Trump Health Aide Pushes Bizarre Conspiracies and Warns of Armed Revolt,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 2020. J. Fabian, “Trump Says FDA Pulled ‘Political Hit Job’ with Vaccine Rules,” Bloomberg, Oct. 7, 2020, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-07/trump-says-fda-pulled-political-hit-jobwith-vaccine-rules#xj4y7vzkg. Monmouth University Poll, “National: Public Troubled by ‘Deep State’,” Mar. 19, 2018, www .monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_031918.pdf/. D. Trump, presidential nomination acceptance speech, July 21, 2016.

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Pompey (and Caesar’s praise of himself), Trump has said, among seemingly unending self-attributions of his greatness, that he went to the “best school in the country,”148 the “best business school in the world,”149 has “one of the great memories of all time,”150 and will be “the greatest jobs president God has ever created.”151 He had his doctor report that he will be the healthiest president ever.152 Referring to a speech made in Poland, Trump said: “I have had the best reviews on foreign land. So I go to Poland and make a speech. Enemies of mine in the media, enemies of mine are saying it was the greatest speech ever made on foreign soil by a president.”153 Whatever the psychological needs that drive these claims, they have political traction because they speak to a public desire to find someone who possesses particular attributes that allow the person to do battle with these subversive forces. Thus, these exemplary characteristics play a decidedly anti-institutional role. He stated that he did not need intelligence briefings, saying, “You know, I’m, like, a smart person,” an expression repeated frequently.154 That impulse extends to the rejection of any role by State and Defense Department career officials in preparing for or conducting foreign meetings, such as in Trump’s private meetings with Vladimir Putin without other officials or transcribers present. The most dramatically publicized rupture from his own intelligence community came when Trump sided with Putin in 2018 at Helsinki over the assessment of intelligence agencies about Russian involvement in the US election. So, too, Trump is his own advisor on such domestic issues as the coronavirus pandemic. At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, Trump said before others at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” adding, “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”155 In an interview with Bob Woodward in March 2020, 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

D. Trump, interview by A. Banfield, Good Morning America, ABC News, Mar. 17, 2011, https:// youtu.be/Ol7oyiLzBBY. D. Trump, interview by A. Qazi, Late Edition, CNN, Mar. 21, 2004, http://edition.cnn.com/TR ANSCRIPTS/0403/21/le.00.html. A. Smith, “Trump: I Remember Call to Gold Star Widow Better Than She Does Because I Have ‘One of the Great Memories of All-Time’,” Business Insider, Oct. 25, 2017. Press Conference, Jan. 11, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-press-conferencetranscript.html. J. Byrnes, “Doctor: Trump Would Be Healthiest President Ever,” The Hill, Oct. 14, 2015, https://thehill .com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/263146-doctor-trump-will-be-healthiest-president-ever/. P. Baker, M. S. Schmidt, and M. Haberman, “Excerpts from the Times’s Interview with Trump,” New York Times, July 19, 2017. D. Trump, interview by C. Wallace, Fox News Sunday, Fox News, Dec. 11, 2016. Also D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Jan. 6, 2018: stable genius. D. Nakamura, “‘Maybe I Have a Natural Ability’: Trump plays Medical Expert on Coronavirus by Second-Guessing the Professionals,” Washington Post, Mar. 6, 2020.

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Trump stated (in explaining why he does not have time to meet with Anthony Fauci, the chief expert on epidemics working on the coronavirus outbreak), “And in one day, this thing came in and we had a choice to make,” whether to “close everything up and save potentially millions of lives” or “don’t do anything and watch – and look at body bags every day being taken out of apartment buildings.” When Woodward asked, “Who told you that?” Trump responds: “It was me,” adding, “I told me that.”156 He does not need advisors or advice; he can stand outside the corrupt institutions and, as he stated in one interview, consult his own brain.157 What replaces the institutional mediation of decisions is a single, unmediated voice. This is not an idiosyncratic feature of Trump. Other presidents have similarly talked about the presidency as the only nationally elected office. What is different, especially as it is joined with a notion of the unitary executive, is that the populist sentiment is used as justification for the autocratic impulse to bypass democratic institutions and norms. We do not see a seizure of power; rather, one sees an obsession with demonstrations of public acclamation – an unmediated connection to the people that bypasses institutions. Trump’s use of Twitter is telling: It is direct, unrehearsed, and unfiltered – specifically invoked as a mechanism to avoid what he describes tirelessly as the unfair or fake media. It is an updated version of Caesar’s decision to bypass the senate and speak directly to the people. In his campaign speech in West Palm Beach, Trump proclaimed: “They’ve never seen a movement like this in our country before. Yesterday in Florida, massive crowds, people lined up outside of big arenas, not able to get in. Never happened before. It’s one of the phenomenas [sic] – it’s one of the great political phenomenas [sic].” Trump’s language speaks always to his direct authorization by the people: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt – now, when I say ‘corrupt,’ I’m talking about totally corrupt – political establishment, with a new government controlled by you, the American people.”158 In fact, what Trump is speaking to is authorization by those who perceive themselves as disenfranchised by current institutions. And the authorization exists apart from any formal electoral authorization, which is seen as corrupt. Thus, Trump tweeted shortly after the 2016 election that he had in fact “won the popular vote if 156 157 158

B. Woodward, Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 288. D. Trump, interview by J. Scarborough and M. Brzezinski, Morning Joe, MSNBC, Mar. 16, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEWZdFZPxPo. D. Trump, rally address, West Palm Beach, Oct. 13, 2016, in Reilly, “Read Donald Trump’s Speech.”

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you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”159 Trump reiterated the separation of authorization from the formal vote in his reelection campaign. He called for a delay in the 2020 election160 and announced frequently that the only way he would lose in November is if the election is “rigged.”161 And after his 2020 loss, Trump tweeted frequently that he actually won by a lot. The encouragement is connected to the belief that the system is both fraudulent and that, as he said in his 2016 acceptance speech, “I am your voice.”162 Not only does Trump make one voice out of the plural voices of democracy, but he also suggests that any outcome other than his voice can only occur fraudulently. Every public event involving Trump appears as a public reaffirmation of acclaim. One gets an early sense of his consuming interest in demonstrating the extent of his acclaim when he exaggerated the numbers who attended his inauguration, claiming they were the largest ever (they were not), and expressing outrage at the photographs illustrating the smaller numbers who were actually in attendance.163 He then pressured the Park Service to find evidence that would support his belief and continued to bring up the crowd size.164 He filled an otherwise serious intelligence ceremony with cronies who gave him a standing ovation and applauded on cue.165 And he signed a proclamation naming his inauguration day a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.”166 The proclamation is telling: it makes Trump’s own election into a statement of patriotism, as something of a different magnitude than the normal succession of leadership in a republic. In fact, he stated that Democrats who did not applaud his economic news at the State of the Union were “un-American” and “treasonous.”167 The point I want to make here is not that Trump claimed a mandate or sought applause. All presidential victors do that, and in fact there is 159 160 161 162 163

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D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Nov. 27, 2016. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, July 30, 2020. D. Trump, rally address, Oshkosh, WI, Aug. 17, 2020, in Chalfant, “Trump: ‘The Only Way We’re Going to Lose’.” Trump, presidential nomination acceptance speech. J. H. Davis and M. Rosenberg, “With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2017. Since then, he claimed (contrary to fact) that the most people ever watched his 2017 State of the Union address. K. Tumulty and J. Eilperin, “Trump Pressured Park Service to Find Proof for His Claims about Inauguration Crowd,” Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2017. H. Farrell, “This Is How Donald Trump Engineers Applause,” Washington Post, Jan. 23, 2017. “National Day of Patriotic Devotion,” Proclamation No. 9570, 84 Fed. Reg. 8349 (Jan. 20, 2017). A. Gearan and J. Wagner, “Trump Calls Democratic Lawmakers Who Didn’t Applaud Him ‘Treasonous,’ ‘Un-American’,” Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2018.

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a long-standing tradition of presidents claiming to be the voice of the people. Rather, as this acclamation arose from a distrust of institutions, it was directed toward further subverting the norms that orient actors and sustain those institutions. Violations of law can be remedied in the courts. Bad policy can be changed. Unpopular politicians can be removed through election. But as Cicero makes clear, while formally defining the res publica as organized by law and a common sense of justice, the law includes a range of informal norms and customs. So, too, does the mixed government of the United States that, like Rome, depends on interconnected functions,168 checks on particular actions, and balances in forms of authorization. What we see, and it is not clear how one reverses it, is not just rhetoric but an ongoing subversion of the norms by which American republican institutions function.169 Subverting Norms There are two ways in which institutions and institutional norms get subverted. One way is by bypassing institutions through unilateral action. Trump began his first month with a flurry of executive order mandates, each of them dramatically publicized. Obama famously used executive orders in the face of a partisan divide that obstructed the normal process of legislation. As he declared in 2014: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.”170 And he was criticized by none other than Trump for his “power grabs.”171 That partisan divide remained under Trump. But what was significant in the cases under Trump is that the orders not only increased from an average of thirty-seven orders per year under Obama’s first term to Trump’s fifty-one orders per year,172 but also were specifically aimed at invalidating and delegitimizing earlier actions, much like what happens with the nullification of laws in the late Republic. We are not talking about an aberration but now a cycle of action and reaction: the Democratic presidential candidates all 168 169 170

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See P. Strauss, “The Places of Agencies in Government: Separation of Powers and the Fourth Branch,” Columbia Law Review 84 (Apr. 1984): 573–669. See Hennessey and Wittes, Unmaking the Presidency. K. Freking, “Trump Outstripping Obama on Pace of Executive Orders,” AP News, Oct. 20, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-barack-obama-politics-25ca8d3b39024f9 e828df7ebeb718274. Freking, “Trump Outstripping Obama.” G. Peters and J. Woolley, “Executive Orders,” The American Presidency Project, www .presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders; see Freking, “Trump Outstripping Obama.”

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promised to reverse Trump’s executive orders, continuing the trend toward invalidating whatever came before. Comparing the first one hundred days in office, George W. Bush revoked five prior orders, Obama revoked seven, Trump revoked eight, and Biden revoked twenty one.173 Trump routinely bypassed other norms that serve as important checks on power. The unitary executive theory was used as the basis of Trump’s Justice Department statement that “courts cannot review the president’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act,” an act passed in the wake of Watergate that gives ownership of official records to the United States rather than the person.174 One can point to instances in previous administrations of violations of the act through the use of nongovernment accounts for official business (famously Hillary Clinton, but extending back to the use of the Republican National Committee account by members of the George W. Bush administration). But what the Trump administration revealed is that the preservation of records depends almost completely on the good faith of officials involved (staff members would tape back together, after meetings, the records ripped up by Trump), with violations carrying little legal consequence. The administration’s argument also defended the use of encrypted software that automatically destroys traces of any communication, and claimed that it is up to the president to decide the “creation, management, and disposal” of any presidential records.175 Trump instructed those in the administration not to cooperate with legislative oversight or any subpoenas. As Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, wrote to the House about the impeachment hearing, “In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the executive branch and all future occupants of the office of the presidency, President Trump and his administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances.”176 No 173 174

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J. Woolley and G. Peters, “Biden in Action: The First 100 Days,” The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/analyses/biden-action-the-first-100-days. In fact, in February 2022, the National Archives had to retrieve over twenty-four boxes of presidential records that were improperly removed from the White House and taken to Mara-Lago. On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant to retrieve approximately twenty additional boxes from Mar-a-Lago, with the primary focus on eleven sets of classified documents. That does not include the records that are reported to have been routinely destroyed. See A. Parker, J. Dawsey, T. Hamburger, and J. Alemany, “‘He Never Stopped Ripping Things Up’: Inside Trump’s Relentless Document Destruction Habits,” Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2022. S. Hau, “Trump’s Argument in Record-Keeping Case: ‘Courts cannot Review the President’s Compliance with the Presidential Records Act’,” Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2018; B. Eakin, “Watchdog Squares Off on Trump’s Invisible Ink,” Courthouse News Service, Jan. 17, 2018, www .courthousenews.com/watchdog-squares-off-on-trumps-invisible-ink/. N. Fandos, P. Baker, M. Schmidt, and M. Haberman, “White House Declares War on Impeachment Inquiry, Claiming Effort to Undo Trump’s Election,” New York Times, Oct. 8,

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Republican opposed the claim. And the attempt to subpoena former White House counsel Don McGahn revealed the limitation of the legal system to protect congressional oversight powers. The refusal to cooperate with congressional oversight extended even to briefings with the select Gang of Eight – a bipartisan group of leaders who are supposed to receive intelligence briefings – on the airstrike that killed general Qasem Soleimani.177 And Trump refused to comply with the Global Magnitsky Act regarding the murder by Saudi Arabian officials of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The act requires a report on gross violations of particular human rights. The White House responded, in line with claims of the unitary executive theory, that “the president maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate.”178 One also sees bypassed the norms of granting pardons and clemency, which are traditionally vetted in the Justice Department and aimed at righting particular wrongs.179 The process has been misused in the past as presidents would pardon loyalists or cronies: George Bush pardoned six felons convicted in connection with Iran-Contra; Clinton pardoned Marc Rich; and George W. Bush gave clemency to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (who was then pardoned by Trump). But under Trump over half the pardons and commutations did not meet the department’s standard for consideration. The pardons and acts of clemency were overwhelmingly given to personal or political connections and exonerated betrayals of the public trust: massacres, lying to the FBI or federal agents connected to the Russia inquiry, extortion, and campaign finance violations.180 Some of the unilateral actions extended to military and police action. Overriding normal military procedures, Trump pardoned two war criminals

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2019. On oversight, see C. Savage, “Trump Vows Stonewall of ‘All’ House Subpoenas, Setting Up Fight over Powers,” New York Times, Apr. 24, 2019; F. Bowman, “Trump’s Defense against Subpoenas Makes No Legal Sense,” Atlantic, Jan. 28, 2020. A. Bolton, “Schumer: Trump failed to Alert top House, Senate Leaders on Iran Attack,” The Hill, Jan. 3, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/476678-schumer-trump-failed-to-alert-tophouse-senate-leaders-on-iran-attack/. E. Chen, A. O’Brien, and J. R. Zebrak, “The Missing Khashoggi Report: A President Can’t Choose to ‘Decline’ His Constitutional Role to Accommodate Congressional Oversight,” Just Security, Mar. 1, 2019, www.justsecurity.org/62762/president-choose-decline-constitutional-roleaccommodate-congressional-oversight/. See J. Goldsmith and M. Gluck, “Trump’s Circumvention of the Justice Department Clemency Process,” Lawfare Institute, Dec. 29, 2020, www.lawfareblog.com/trumps-circumvention-justicedepartment-clemency-process. See Goldsmith and Gluck, “Trump’s Circumvention of the Justice Department Clemency Process”; M. Haberman and M. Schmidt, “Trump Pardons Two Russia Inquiry Figures and Blackwater Guards,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 2020.

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and restored the rank of a third.181 Under the guise of the Insurrection Act of 1807, Trump assembled his own federal policing force under his command who, in unmarked vehicles and with unmarked uniforms, seized people from the streets and took them to undisclosed locations.182 In short, the administration could simply take what, over the preceding years, had been largely ceded to the executive branch: an ability of the president to undertake unilateral action in defiance of norms more than laws. A second way of subverting norms, and the one with longer-term consequences, is to change the orientation of political actors from a notion of public service to personal loyalty. Particularly powerful in organizing the executive branch into a single will has been the combination of Trump’s own conception of power as personal with the theory of the unitary executive. Attorney General Barr has referred to the danger of officials within government seeking to overthrow that government. In talking about federal intelligence activities focused on election interference that included people associated with the Trump campaign, Barr paints a picture of officials following their own rules: I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they’re there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official.183

The reference is telling because the praetorian guard was formed under the principate, not the Republic. Accepting the gist of Barr’s statement, we can agree that the internal overthrow of the government would be a problem. But in seeing a minority of voters as a majority, a majority, in turn, as having a will, and conflating that will with the executive’s will “alone,” as Barr writes in his memo to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein about the Mueller probe into Trump’s role in foreign election interference,184 Barr glosses over the different 181

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M. Cox, “Trump Issued Pardons in Soldiers’ War Crimes Cases: What Now?,” Military.com, Nov. 19, 2019, www.military.com/daily-news/2019/11/19/trump-issued-pardons-soldiers-warcrimes-cases-what-now.html. A. Fisher, “Trump Always Wanted His Own Police Force: Portland Is Just His Excuse to Use It,” Business Insider, July 22, 2020. W. Barr, interview by J. Crawford, This Morning, CBS, May 31, 2019, www.cbsnews.com/news/ william-barr-interview-full-transcript-cbs-this-morning-jan-crawford-exclusive-2019-05-31/. Barr, “Mueller’s ‘Obstruction’ Theory.”

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reasons, other than political preferences, why members of the executive branch might not subordinate their will to a presidential one. Those reasons include avoiding conflicts of interest, allowing for the oversight functions of inspectors general, and responding to acts of illegality or impropriety. Trump routinely required loyalty oaths, including asking for one from the FBI director, James Comey.185 In response to expressions of dissent within the State Department, the White House warned that State Department officials should leave if they do not agree with Trump. This departs from a vehicle established during the Vietnam War and continued through the Obama administration, the Dissent Channel, by which diplomats could express divergent views to leadership.186 Disagreement, or refusing to follow an order one believes is unconstitutional, appears as “betrayal.”187 The most egregious expression of this demand for loyalty appeared when Trump called Lt. Col. Vindman, who testified at the first impeachment trial, “very insubordinate,” and followed through with a barrage of attacks by himself and his supporters against Vindman, and suggested he could be disciplined by the military.188 Vindman was eventually driven from service.189 These actions are unproblematic from the perspective of the unitary executive. Departing from a norm followed by every president, Trump personally interviewed the US attorney candidates who would serve in critical jurisdictions where he lived and held properties.190 There is the erosion of even the pretense of an independent federal judiciary. The attorney general openly changed sentencing recommendations from federal prosecutors for presidential allies.191 As Trump tweeted, “‘The President has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case,’” referencing a statement by 185 186 187

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M. Rosenwald, “From the Civil War to Trump: The Paranoid History of Loyalty Oaths,” Washington Post, June 9, 2017. M. Landler, “State Dept. Officials Should Quit If They Disagree with Trump, White House Warns,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 2017. Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement on the Appointment of Dana Boente as Acting Attorney General,” news release, Jan. 30, 2017, accessed Oct. 21, 2019, www.whitehouse.gov; M. Schmidt, “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation,” New York Times, May 16, 2017; Baker, Schmidt, and Haberman, “Excerpts from the Times’s Interview with Trump.” D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Feb. 8, 2020; J. Mason, “Trump Says Military May Consider Discipline for Ousted Aide Vindman,” Reuters, Feb. 11, 2020, www.reuters.com/article/ususa-trump-impeachment-vindman-idUSKBN2052P6; J. Wise, “More Than 1,000 Veterans Speak Out against Trump’s ‘Sustained Attacks’ on Vindman,” The Hill, Feb. 20, 2020, https://thehill.com/ homenews/administration/483797-over-1000-veterans-speak-out-over-trumps-sustained-attacks-onvindman/. See the recollection in A. Vindman, Here, Right Matters (New York: Harper, 2021). E. Kilgore, “Trump Courts Appearance of Impropriety in Interviewing U.S. Attorney Candidates,” New York Magazine, Oct. 19, 2017. See K. Benner, S. LaFraniere, and A. Goldman, “Prosecutors Quit Roger Stone Case After Justice Dept. Intervenes on Sentencing,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2020.

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Barr, and then adds, “This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!”192 Trump would test the limits of the extent to which the Justice Department could be made to conform to his will. He spoke openly, on the eve of the 2020 vote, about the need to indict the former president, Obama, and the opponent at that time, Biden, for the “greatest political crime in the history of our country.”193 That was unlikely to happen. But only with the threat of mass resignation by remaining officials in the Justice Department did Trump relent in his desire to appoint as attorney general an unqualified loyalist who had promoted a plan to overturn the 2020 election.194 Trump said he would replace the generals with those who endorsed him.195 He signed an executive order that placed one of his own people in each agency to watch over it, in a sense converting independent watchdogs to dependent ones.196 In the course of a week, he fired Michael Atkinson (April 3, 2020), the inspector general for the intelligence community, who had forwarded the whistleblower complaint; and he removed Glenn Fine (April 7, 2020), who had been appointed to head the committee overseeing the coronavirus pandemic relief fund. This followed a signing statement rejecting the constitutionality of independent oversight of the corporate bailout funds for Covid, saying he would control the information that goes to Congress.197 He attacked the principal deputy inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, Christi Grimm, for addressing shortages in hospitals.198 And by the end of his term, one-third of thirty-seven inspectors general offices were unfilled. Not surprisingly, the principal players in the administration were there for their loyalty and not their competence, even in such highly sensitive areas as intelligence and national security.199 The irony – or perhaps it is the purpose – is that the disarray further reinforces the American people’s sense of distrust in that government. 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199

D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Feb. 14, 2020. P. Baker and M. Haberman, “Trump Lashes Out at His Cabinet with Calls to Indict Political Rivals,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2020. K. Benner, “Report Cites New Details of Trump Pressure on Justice Dept. Over Election,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 2021. T. Ricks, “You’re Fired,” Foreign Policy, Sept. 8, 2016. G. Morrongiello, “Trump Signs Executive Order Establishing Regulatory Watchdogs,” Washington Examiner, Feb. 24, 2017. C. Savage, “Trump Suggests He Can Gag Inspector General for Stimulus Bailout Program,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 2020. See D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Apr. 7, 2020, suggesting political bias. J. Fabian, “Trump Moves to Install Loyalists,” The Hill, Apr. 8, 2019, https://thehill.com/home news/administration/437947-trump-moves-to-install-loyalists/; D. Ignatius, “Trump Loyalists take Command of the Intelligence Community,” Washington Post, Mar. 17, 2020.

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Trump’s top advisor at the beginning of the administration, Steve Bannon, who made millions on Wall Street and then turned his attention to building the White nationalist internet site Breitbart, exclaimed at a conservative conference that the administration sought the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”200 That desire follows a trajectory articulated earlier by Ronald Reagan that government is the problem rather than the solution. The method is to destabilize by undermining, or continuing to undermine, a belief in almost every political institution and process: Congress, the media, the courts, civil servants, scientists, intelligence officers, the military, international organizations, and the electoral system. All of these claims share the aim of depicting political institutions as obstructing, rather than expressing, the voice of the people. I want to be clear about the argument I am making. Many of the norms themselves, such as of a nonpartisan civil service, are fairly new, dating from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, with fuller oversight established after Richard Nixon’s administration. And the use of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the Internal Revenue Service for partisan purposes is part of American political history: notably, the falsification of casualty data in the Vietnam War under Lyndon Baines Johnson, the targeting of domestic enemies through the FBI and Inland Revenue Service under Nixon, and the manipulation of intelligence information to justify invading Iraq under George W. Bush. Those abuses of federal institutions increased under the Trump administration. But the significance of these actions for the argument I am making here lies elsewhere; namely, in the willingness or complicity of others to endorse this subversion of norms. The motivations vary widely, including a genuine belief in Trump, a desire to pursue some policy goal, personal ambition, fear, or an embrace of partisan ideology. But they all share a willingness to allow political answers to be located not in democratic processes, but in individuals who stand outside them or subvert them. The Strange Quiet When Tacitus, or Cicero and Caesar before, described the loss of the animating spirit of the Roman Republic, they were referencing the gradual depletion of the norms that oriented and animated political actors. It is not just the leader, though; it is the willingness of others to adopt the language 200

S. Bannon, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Feb. 23, 2017, in J. Peters, “Stephen Bannon Reassures Conservatives Uneasy about Trump,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2017.

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and behavior of autocracy. As if reenacting the scene painted by Tacitus of the senators struggling to outdo each other in flattery upon Augustus’ death (Ann. 1.7.1), the Republicans were strikingly quick to adopt the practice of acclaim.201 In Trump’s first cabinet meeting, a remarkable spectacle unfolded: Each cabinet official took turns heaping praise on Trump, thanking him for his great leadership. The secretary of the treasury, Steven Mnuchin, weighed in during an interview, saying that Trump has perfect genes.202 Sen. Lindsay Graham, who earlier said that Trump was unfit to be president, was quite willing to ingratiate himself with the president, tweeting about Trump’s “spectacular golf course”203 and describing a briefing (that Sen. Mike Lee [R-Utah] characterized as “insulting and demeaning”)204 as the greatest briefing ever. Vice President Pence effused about Trump’s leadership (in what averaged to be every twelve seconds) in a televised cabinet meeting after the passage of the tax bill.205 We see an even more grandiose display of all the Republican senators and representatives lined up outside the White House after the passage of the tax bill, each rushing to ingratiate himself with the president in this triumphal celebration. Orrin Hatch, a longtime congressional institutionalist, said, “You stop and think about it, this president hasn’t even been in office for a year, and look at all the things that he’s been able to get done, by sheer will in many ways.”206 Stephen Miller, one of the few original advisors who made it to the end, defended Trump as “a political genius,” describing how during the descent of a flight Trump could hear breaking news and in twenty minutes could dictate ten paragraphs of new material and deliver it “flawlessly.”207 Symptomatic of the reach of the demand for fawning loyalty, Deborah Birx, who held the rank of ambassador as the State Department’s Global AIDs director and is highly accomplished, said on a Christian Broadcasting Network interview, “He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data, and I think his ability 201 202 203 204 205 206 207

See D. Kapust, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). M. Greenwood, “Mnuchin: Trump has ‘Perfect Genes’,” The Hill, Mar. 24, 2017, https://thehill .com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/325657-mnuchin-trump-has-perfect-genes/. L. Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC), Twitter, Dec. 10, 2017. W. Cummings, “‘The Problem Is Not with the President’: Sen. Mike Lee Says His Issue Was with Iran Intel Briefing, Not Trump,” USA Today, Jan. 13, 2020. W. Cohen, “Trump Celebrates Tax Cuts with Cabinet Meeting Honoring Himself,” Vanity Fair, Dec. 20, 2017. J. Wagner, “Republicans Celebrate Their Tax Bill – and Heap Praise on Trump,” Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2017. S. Miller, interview by J. Tapper, State of the Union, CNN, Jan. 7, 2018, www.cnn.com/videos/ politics/2018/01/07/white-house-adviser-stephen-miller-full-interview-sotu.cnn.

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to analyze and integrate, that comes out of his long history in business, has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”208 The comments would be less surprising if Trump had not promoted false cures and conspiracy theories about the virus. But perhaps the most ominous event was in the wake of the 2020 election. Trump had frequently mused about being “president for life.”209 And if one imagines oneself as the unmediated voice of the people, then for both Trump and his supporters, to not win electorally can only mean that the problem lies in the election. (The language of the election being stolen preceded Trump’s first election, continued through his term, and then became a movement.) Trump openly called for the courts, governors, congressional leaders, and electors – and personally called the speaker of the Pennsylvania House, the Georgia governor, the Georgia secretary of state (with a released one-hour phone call pressuring him to find the votes), Michigan lawmakers, the Arizona governor (who did not answer the phone), and brought to the White House Michigan lawmakers – to appoint different electors to overturn the popular vote.210 Thirty-two Pennsylvania state legislators joined a suit to overturn the vote in Pennsylvania. The Texas attorney general filed suit to block the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan – states that voted for Biden. That lawsuit was joined by Trump, seventeen other Republican attorneys general and supported by 106 Republican representatives. These actions occurred in a larger context of complicity. Reports indicate that Trump planned to fire the acting attorney general and appoint in his place a person who would act directly on overturning or disqualifying the election. There was also coordination between the White House and Republican legislators to overturn the election. Trump pressured Pence to refuse to certify the votes. The courts, to their credit, held the line, noting the complete lack of evidence of voter fraud (though there was every reason to believe the courts might intervene, given the 2004 Supreme Court decision, Bush v. Gore, that preempted a recount). So, too, did the attorney general, the head (since fired) of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and most 208

209 210

D. Birx, interview with Faith Nation, CBN News, Mar. 27, 2020, www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/2020/ march/us-coronavirus-task-force-coordinator-tells-news-communities-have-the-ability-to-stopspreading-virus. M. Crowley, “Trump Won’t Commit to ‘Peaceful’ Post-Election Transfer of Power,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 2020. D. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, Dec. 9, 2020: #OVERTURN.

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of the electors. That the decision by a Michigan elector to certify the election (against the backdrop of other Republican electors abstaining) was seen as a profile in courage suggests just how much the norms of succession have changed. That elector, and other Republicans who declared that the election was fair, faced armed protests outside their homes and death threats, including by a prominent lawyer on Fox. The assault on the norms of transition had real effects: Over 50 percent of Republicans believe that Trump “rightfully won” and almost 70 percent of Republicans believe the election was “rigged.”211 The escalating rhetoric made the incomprehensible a reality. In the final weeks, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor who was pardoned by Trump for making false statements to the FBI, encouraged Trump to declare martial law and use the military to “rerun” the election.212 Talk of civil war and threats of violence had become a staple of right-wing social media sites. And as the House and Senate began to count the votes, Trump (along with Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s son) called for the crowd to go to the Capitol (Trump saying he would walk with them, though, instead, he watched the scene unfold on television). A mob violently breached both Houses, beating officers, chanting for Vice President Pence and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to be killed, in order to stop the transfer of power. A gallows was erected by the Capitol. The number of off-duty or retired police officers and military personnel who joined with white nationalist and neofascist groups in the violence is chilling.213 And in the wake of the violence, as the vice president, representatives, and senators emerged from their hiding places to continue the otherwise arcane ceremony of counting the Electoral College votes, a majority of House Republicans and eight Republican senators (a total of 147 Republicans) voted to reject the outcome of a democratic election. It is stunning that no representative, senator, or member of the administration who earlier had claimed that the election was stolen has recanted. In fact, some state legislators have actually passed laws to make it easier for the electoral board to overturn election results. To add to the uncertainty, many Republicans subsequently downplayed the threat posed by the insurrection and sought to discipline and censure any 211

212 213

C. Kahn, “Half of Republicans Say Biden Won Because of a ‘Rigged’ Election: Reuters/Ipsos Poll,” Reuters, Nov. 18, 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/half-of-republicans-saybiden-won-because-of-a-rigged-election-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN27Y1AJ. M. Haberman and Z. Kanno-Youngs, “Trump Weighed Naming Election Conspiracy Theorist as Special Counsel,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 2020. The ratio of those with military ties is approximately one in nine: E. Watson and R. Legare, “Over 80 of Those Charged in January 6 Investigation Have Ties to the Military,” CBS News, Dec. 15, 2021, www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-january-6-military-ties/.

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Republicans who expressed alarm or who joined in an investigation. As a result of concerns about who can be trusted within the walls of the Capitol, all senators and representatives now have to pass through a metal detector. Congress now represents, and I speak of representation somewhat ironically here, how we have become Strangers to each other. The best case we can make for the complicity with, and effusive flattery of, Trump is that it is disingenuous, employed as a way of making Trump a vehicle of personal ambition. And to a certain extent, that is precisely what I am saying. It is not that any of these flatterers yearn for autocracy. They are the same people who a few years before decried Obama as a lawless tyrant. But the language, whether employed for individual, policy, or partisan ends, is important because it reorients how the public conceives of political action, shifting the arena of action from messy processes of debate and deliberation to tidy declarations of a will. That is the entire point of the theory of the unitary executive. And, in fact, the actual legislative process has mirrored the willingness to forego the norms by which consensus is formed and oversight conducted. Like in Rome, in an age of dissensus, not only is consensus hard to come by; it is not even sought. Redefining the Republic The story I am telling is of the depletion of norms by which political institutions are able to function, leading to both a loss of belief in these institutions and a willingness to embrace solutions that bypass these institutions. I want to reiterate that this embrace is not motivated necessarily by a desire for autocracy. It is driven by any number of motivations: personal ambition, interest, ideology, partisanship, even policy beliefs. But subordinate to these motivations should be a belief that certain institutionsustaining norms are important or worth articulating. The gradual erosion of those norms not only affects the functioning of these institutions but also how we conceive of them. I want to return to the Roman Republic briefly to give some perspective on what is at stake in how a republic defines itself. The term “republic” derives from the Latin term res publica, which translates as “a thing of the people.” What this meant for Cicero is that the state is the property of the people, operating as a type of partnership (or societas) on behalf of its owners (Rep. 1.48).214 To be sure, the reality of ownership has always been a different story, both here and in Rome. But something significant happens in 214

See Hammer, Roman Political Thought, 46–62.

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Rome: Stripped of their meaningfulness as public things, Roman institutions were left with few constraints or norms to direct individual behavior. We see in Rome the gradual reorientation of public institutions toward private and personal ends, culminating in Augustus’ redefinition of the state as a type of household rule.215 Augustus is given the title of pater patriae (father of the fatherland) in 2 bce, at first through popular acclamation and then through the senate (RG 35.1), making Augustus the father of the state (Cass. Dio 53.18.3; Ov. Trist. 2.37–40; Ov. Fast. 2.131–32). Some suggestion of the importance of this title is made by Ovid, who writes that being the pater patriae means that “Caesar [Augustus] is the state” (res est publica Caesar) (Ov. Trist. 4.4.13–15). In Res gestae, Augustus employs this language of the paterfamilias, referring to the funds he provides to the plebs and the state out of his own patrimony and largesse (RG 15: to plebs; 17: adds to public treasury; 18: for grain). Augustus would also consolidate the highest recognition of triumphs to his family. America does not have a princeps nor will it have one; what it has is a blueprint now that shows how, in the absence of democratic-sustaining norms, a president is able to so easily transform public institutions into a version of an extended household (almost literally, at points) that eschewed public accountability. In fact, what is remarkable is how explicitly and openly Trump was allowed to do this. Trump thought about choosing his daughter as vice president. The inside circle of advisors included his daughter (who awkwardly sat with G20 world leaders in 2019) and son-in-law (who, among other tasks, created his own pandemic model). Trump was unashamed to use his public position to promote his family interests. The norms of financial transparency arise precisely to protect public institutions from being used for private enrichment. Trump signaled early on that these norms meant very little to him when he simply rejected the tradition that dates back to the 1960s of presidential candidates releasing tax returns. The tradition of divesting of one’s own businesses was similarly ignored. Trump pointed out, as well, that presidents are not bound by the conflict-of-interest rules that govern the rest of the executive branch.216 Not only did Trump exempt himself, but the administration routinely provided ethics waivers for conflicts of interest among his 215

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D. Hammer, “Thinking about Sovereignty”; D. Hammer, “Reading Sovereignty in Augustus’ Res gestae,” in A. Balasopoulos and S. Achilleos (eds.), Reading Texts on Sovereignty: Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought (Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 33–40. J.-E. Bromwich, “Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview in 12 Tweets,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 2016.

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appointees.217 He funneled money to himself by way of his properties, including steering lobbyists and foreign leaders to his Washington, DC, hotel, using his Turnberry golf resort as a layover for military personnel (and refusing to turn over revenue results),218 attempting to host the G7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, and pushing his ambassador to Britain to promote moving the British Open to his Turnberry course.219 And the Justice Department argued in court that it was not unconstitutional for the president to profit from foreign governments and officials while in office.220 The result was a systematic use of public office to both promote Trump’s businesses and to channel money by way of his properties from people and organizations seeking influence.221 Even the allocation of public goods was treated as an act of private largesse, a problem the Roman Republic similarly faced. Trump ordered that his name be printed on the 2020 stimulus checks.222 Later, Trump directed that the United States Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program include a letter from Trump claiming credit for the program. In the midst of the Covid pandemic, as state and local governments had to scramble for supplies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency intercepted and took coronavirus supplies, including N95 masks.223 In response to desperate appeals by states and localities to use the Strategic National Stockpile, Jared Kushner argued, “And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile” (my italics). The 217 218 219 220 221

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See E. Lipton, B. Protess, and A. Lehren, “With Trump Appointees, a Raft of Potential Conflicts and ‘No Transparency’,” New York Times, Apr. 15, 2017. D. Kirkpatrick and E. Lipton, “Inside the Military’s 5-Star Layovers at a Trump Resort in Scotland,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 2019. M. Landler, L. Jakes, and M. Haberman, “Trump’s Request of an Ambassador: Get the British Open for Me,” New York Times, July 21, 2020. N. Penzenstadler, “Taxpayers Pay Legal Bill to Protect Trump Business Profits,” USA Today, Nov. 15, 2017. See the extensive investigation of the use of properties in N. Confessore, K. Yourish, S. Eder, B. Protess, M. Haberman, G. Ashford, M. LaForgia, K. Vogel, M. Rothfeld, and L. Buchanan, “The Swamp That Trump Built,” New York Times, Oct. 10, 2020. There are numerous accounts of corruption: D. Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (New York: Harper, 2018); S. Blaskey, N. Nehamas, and C. Ostroff, The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020); J. Toobin, True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump (New York: Doubleday, 2020); J. Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); A. Chakravarti, “Trumpworld’s Corruption Is As Globalized As the Ultra-Rich the President Mingles With,” Foreign Policy, Oct. 12, 2020. A. Rappeport, “Getting a Stimulus Check? Trump’s Name Will Be on It,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 2020. A. Linskey, J. Dawsey, I. Stanley-Becker, and C. Janes, “As Feds Play ‘Backup,’ States Take Unorthodox Steps to Compete in Cutthroat Global Market for Coronavirus Supplies,” Washington Post, Apr. 11, 2020.

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language resulted in a change in how Health and Human Services described the stockpile. The Health and Human Services website stated originally: The Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out. When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency. Organized for scalable response to a variety of public health threats, this repository contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.

In fact, in the creation of the program, the Department of Health and Human Services recognized that states would not be expected to have sufficient supplies in large-scale emergencies. The language was revised to say the following: The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.224

What “our” stockpile means becomes clearer when Trump described the expectation of appreciation for anything given to the states by him: “No, I think we’re doing very well. But, you know, it’s a two-way street. They [the governors] have to treat us well also.”225 None of this is new. Lobbyists, donors, political appointees, congressional leaders, and private corporations routinely use their relationships to advance their personal, financial interests. What has changed is the openness. Bribery is difficult to prosecute, particularly after McDonnell v. United States (2016) that allows for influence peddling as long as it is not a specific payment for a specific action. Even more difficult to track are the intricate legislative efforts that transfer public money. The Office of Government Ethics has no real statutory power. The former head, Walter Schaub, who resigned in 2017, noted that shaming effects have no 224 225

A. Blake, “The Trump Administration Just Changed Its Description of the National Stockpile to Jibe with Jared Kushner’s Controversial Claim,” The Washington Post, Apr. 3, 2020. D. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in a Fox News Virtual Town Hall,” news release, Mar. 24, 2020, www.whitehouse.gov /briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-taskforce-fox-news-virtual-town-hall/ (page removed).

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influence with a polarized electorate.226 The Hatch Act, which prohibits civil servants from engaging in political activity, has been so openly violated without consequences that there is little reason for it to remain a law. And with the complicity of the other branches and the electorate, there is little to check the corruption. This has significant consequences not only for democracy but also for the capacity of the state to act. When Dewey describes democracy as an ethos, he is referring to an attitude and belief not just about institutions but also about the less visible dispositions without which these institutions cannot survive.227 There is very little that democratic institutions can do to protect themselves as these orientations change. Rome would discover this as it scrambled to enact laws that attempted to formalize its own republican norms. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy to the dynamic I am describing. Absent a belief in the norms that allow institutions to work, institutions do not work, thus perpetuating distrust in the institutions’ ability to project the community into the future. Trump fomented that distrust, using his frequent refrain of draining the swamp as an anti-institutional, rather than reform, foil. But the issue is not Trump. It is what preceded him and what follows. In Rome, what followed a loss of belief in its Republican institutions was an oligarchic competition to loot the res publica until the Republic collapsed in open warfare. The state had lost its capacity to act. Romans may not have wanted Octavian, or they may have decided that Octavian worked to their interests, but there was no going back once the norms that gave life to these institutions had collapsed. In the American context, the media continually talked about the red line or bright line where Republicans would stop Trump. But what I am suggesting here is that there was no line that would be based on anything democratic because there was no longer a belief in the norms upon which a line would be drawn. Trump’s rise or fall or return – any more than the rise or fall of the Gracchis, Marius, Sulla, Cinna, Pompey, Lepidus, Antonius, or Caesar – leaves in place the erosion of democratic norms that are supposed to animate our institutions, an erosion that has been advanced, or at least allowed, by the major institutional leaders of the country. It took the Roman Republic 100 years to eventually collapse. If 2008 serves as a marker of when politics becomes a politics of Strangers, the United States is less than two decades in. The experience of the Roman

226 227

R. Lizza, “How Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2017. J. Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in D. Morris and I. Shapiro (eds.), John Dewey: The Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 59–65.

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Republic shows that it is not clear how one reverses the collapse of norms, how one restores faith in the invisible.

Final Thoughts We began with the community of Strangers, dislocated from space and time, who mythically founded Rome and the United States. The story I have been telling is of different attempts by social actors to define the boundaries of identity against the dissonance of these origins, boundaries that living bodies continually confound; we ended with both communities divided into Strangers who are seen by each other as incomprehensible and dangerous. It does not have to be this way. The issue of vulnerability lingers. The founding myths foreground bodily vulnerability: loss, weakness, helplessness, sadness, disorientation, violation, dependence, violence, and danger. We have seen some responses to this vulnerability, including attempts to assert bodily autonomy and to control the bodies of others by disciplining them, conquering them, or erecting barriers to what is seen as their intrusion. One of the more striking aspects of the dissonance of American culture is that a community comprised of vulnerable Strangers would suppress that very vulnerability. An instance of this occurs in the Trump administration’s 1776 Report, written as a reaction to The 1619 Project that placed slavery at the center of an American narrative.228 The grounding for civic education imagined in The 1776 Report is the “foundational and permanent character” of the “timeless works” and principles upon which the country was founded that “transcend the time and landscape of their creation.”229 In contrast, teaching about oppression has the consequence that the group “should no longer see themselves as agents responsible for their own actions but as victims controlled by impersonal forces.”230 The founding myths can point us in a different direction, one that does not pit vulnerability against autonomy but recognizes their relationship. For example, Martha Fineman begins with the notion that “human vulnerability arises from our embodiment, which carries with it the imminent or ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune.”231 These vulnerabilities are both universal and particular: “We have different forms 228 229 231

N. Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021). Commission, 1776 Report, 35. 230 Commission, 1776 Report, 32. M. A. Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal 60 (2010): 267; also M. A. Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20 (2008): 1–24; C. Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational

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of embodiment and also are differently situated within webs of economic and institutional relationships. As a result, our vulnerabilities range in magnitude and potential at the individual level. Vulnerability, therefore, is both universal and particular; it is experienced uniquely by each of us.”232 In particular, vulnerability points to our relationship to others, as we explored in both the Aeneid and Josey. As Judith Butler notes: “Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”233 Butler highlights an approach that aligns with my attempt to view the founding through a lens other than traditional liberal or republican frameworks. As Butler writes, “Although this language [of rights] may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are [sic] own, irreversibly, if not fatally.”234 The founding myths are built around individuals torn from their own place and past, with formal citizenship an incomplete substitute for belonging. Nor are individuals subsumed within a collective vision. Rather, the myths invite a reexamination of the relationship between autonomy and vulnerability. Catriona Mackenzie, for example, rejects the connection of autonomy to the already-constituted, unrestricted individual, arguing, instead, that we can understand autonomy as “both the capacity to lead a self-determining life and the status of being recognized as an autonomous agent by others.”235 Autonomy is neither something we are born with nor something we acquire on our own. It is something that is “cultivated by a society that pays attention to the needs of its members, the

232 233 235

Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in C. Mackenzie, W. Rogers, and S. Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33–59; see also J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); S. Rushing, The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” 268–69. Butler, Precarious Life, 22. 234 Butler, Precarious Life, 25. Mackenzie, “Relational Autonomy,” 41; also Butler, Precarious Life, 25; J. Anderson and A. Honneth, “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice,” J. Christman and J. Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 127–49. Anderson and Honneth make the argument for a “recognitional model of autonomy” (144) that identifies certain psychological conditions of autonomy that derive from recognition (such as self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem).

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241

operation of its institutions, and the implications of human fragility and vulnerability.”236 My contribution to this discussion is to suggest that the cultural resources for beginning to recognize vulnerability can be retrieved from our foundation stories. To return to Josey, we can see intimations of this recognition. There is an unremitting sense of vulnerability, violation, and loss: the murder of Josey’s wife and child, with his scar as the mark of his helplessness; the destruction of his house; the murder of Watie’s family and tribe on the Trail of Tears; the rape and banishment of Little Moonlight, also marked with a scar; the abduction, and transformation of, the aristocratic family into slaves to be sold; the sexual violation of the daughter, stopped so that she would bring more money when sold; and the last stand of Ten Bears who has lost his land and people. But suggestive are the mechanisms for responding to this vulnerability: teaching how to handle a gun, organizing the different roles in protecting themselves, preparing the land for them to survive, and even reaching agreements with the neighboring tribe. These actions foster the possibility of a flourishing life in which the individuals are not just able to survive but also able to live in relationship with each other. There are moments of a new respect for each other by all the members, even the aristocratic mother, who looked down on the others, as they join together. There is even the possibility of love. It is a version of autonomy, as a form of self-determination, that none possessed on their own. Or we can look to a more recent invocation of vulnerability. At almost the same time as the release of The 1776 Report, Amanda Gorman delivered her poem at the 2021 presidential inauguration. The poem, written in response to the insurrection in which rioters stormed the Capitol just a few weeks before, opens on an expression of vulnerability: “When day comes we ask ourselves, / where can we find light in this never-ending shade? / The loss we carry, / a sea we must wade.”237 America “is more than a pride we inherit, / it’s the past we step into / and how we repair it”; it is more than “a union that is perfect,” but one “with purpose / To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and / conditions of man.” Where that history for The 1776 Report can only undermine the possibility of “self-government” by denying responsibility, Gorman’s poem (and her interviews later) speak, instead, of “dream[ing] of becoming president.”238 236 237 238

Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” 260. A. Gorman, “The Hill We Climb,” CNBC, Jan. 20, 2021, www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/amandagormans-inaugural-poem-the-hill-we-climb-full-text.html. Commission, 1776 Report, 17.

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And where The 1776 Report imagines the division of the community into subgroups, each with their own grievances, the poem imagines a community emerging from the experience of vulnerability: Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew That even as we hurt, we hoped That even as we tired, we tried That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious Not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.

The American founding does not tell a story of equal or identical experiences of vulnerability and loss. It holds out the possibility that in the recognition of these experiences a common purpose can be forged. It opens up the possibility that we can learn what the Romans never did.

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Select Bibliography

Below is a select bibliography to guide the reader to further scholarship on themes raised in the book. More complete references can be found in the relevant sections.

Theoretical Scholarship Bazin, A., “The Western or the American Film par excellence,” in H. Gray (ed.), What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Butler, J., Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) Fineman, M. A., “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal 60 (2010): 251–76 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980) Gilmore, D. D., Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990) Habermas, J., The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984) Hutchens, B., “Constitutive Inter-Corporeity: An Outline of the Phenomenology of the Fight,” Phenomenological Inquiry 32 (2008): 125–52 Mackenzie, C., W. Rogers, and S. Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) Meskell, L., “The Somatization of Archaeology: Institutions, Discourses, Corporeality,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 29 (1996): 1–16 Ricoeur, P., “Architecture and Narrativity,” Études Ricoeuriennes/ Ricoeur Studies 7 (2016): 31–42 Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Ricoeur, P., Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Schütz, A., The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967) Schütz, A., “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology 49 (1944): 499–507 243

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Schütz, A., and T. Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, 2 vols. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) Tuan, Y., Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977)

Roman Scholarship Adams, J. N., “‘Romanitas’ and the Latin Language,” Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 184–205 Bloomer, W. M., Latinity and Literary Society at Rome (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) Braun, M., A. Haltenhoff, and F.-H. Mutschler (eds.), Moribus antiquis res stat Romana: römische Werte und römische Literatur im 3. und 2. Jh. v. Chr (Munich: Saur, 2000) Brunt, P. A., The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Cairns, F., Virgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Christesen, P., and D. G. Kyle (eds.), A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) Coleman, K., “‘The Contagion of the Throng’: Absorbing Violence in the Roman World,”Hermathena 164 (1998): 65–88 Dench, E., From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Edwards, C., Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Farrell, J., Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Fentress, E., and S. E. Alcock (eds.), Romanization and the City: Creation, Transformations, and Failures: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy in Rome to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Excavations at Cosa, 14– 16 May, 1998 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000) Flower, H. I., Roman Republics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) Gotter, U., “Cato’s Origines: The Historian and His Enemies,” in A. Feldherr (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 108–22 Gruen, E. S., Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) Gruen, E. S., The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) Habinek, T. N., The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) Habinek, T. N., and A. Schiesaro (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

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Haeussler, R., Becoming Roman? Diverging Identities and Experiences in Ancient Northwest Italy (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013) Hammer, D., Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) Hammer, D., Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Hammer, D., “Roman Spectacle Entertainments and the Technology of Reality,” Arethusa 42 (2010): 63–86 Hardie, P. R., Augustan Poetry and the Irrational (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Hingley, R., Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire (London: Routledge, 2005) Hope, V., “Fighting for Identity: The Funerary Commemoration of Italian Gladiators,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, supplement (2000): 93–113 Jenkyns, R., Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History – Times, Names, and Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Kapust, D., Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Knapp, R., Invisible Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) Laurence, R., and J. Berry (eds.), Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1998) Letta, C., “L’ ‘Italia dei mores romani’ nelle Origines di Catone,” Atheneum 64 (1984): 416–39 Lintott, A. W., Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Mattingly, D. J., Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) Mouritsen, H., “II The Making of Second Century Italy: 3 The Romanisation of Second Century Italy,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42 (1998): 59–86 Mouritsen, H., Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Nelsestuen, G. A., “Numunus Remulus, Ascanius, and Cato’s Origines: The Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Aeneid 9,” Vergilius 62 (2016): 79–97 Nicolet, C., Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991) Noy, D., Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers (London: Duckworth, 2000) Potter, D. S., and D. J. Mattingly (eds.), Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) Putnam, M. C. J., Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) Quint, D., Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) Raaflaub, K., and M. Toher (eds.), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and his Principate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)

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Reed, J. D., Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) Richlin, A., Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Roselaar, S. T. (ed.), Processes of Integration and Identity Formation in the Roman Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2012) Russell, A., The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Salmon, E. T., Samnium and the Samnites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) Sciarrino, E., Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose: From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011) Seider, A. M., Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid: Creating the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Sherwin-White, A. N., The Roman Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) Slater, W. J. (ed.), Roman Theater and Society: Salmon Conference Papers I (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) Steel, C., The End of the Roman Republic, 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) Syed, Y., Vergil’s Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) Thomas, R., Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Toll, K., “The Aeneid as an Epic of National Identity: Italiam Laeto Socii Clamore Salutant,” Helios 18 (1991): 3–14 Toll, K., “Making Roman-Ness and the ‘Aeneid’,” Classical Antiquity 16 (1997): 35–46 Trillmich, W., and P. Zanker (eds.), Stadtbild und Ideologie: die Monumentalisierung hispanischer Städte zwischen Republik und Kaiserzeit: Kolloquium in Madrid vom 19. bis 23. Oktober 1987 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: commissioned by C.H. Beck, 1990) Vasaly, A., Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) Ville, G., La gladiature en Occident des origines à la mort de Domitien (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981) Wallace-Hadrill, A., Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Wiedemann, T. E. J., Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992)

American Scholarship Appiah, A., Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) Applebaum, A., Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020)

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Arendt, H., On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965) Bailyn, B. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967) Baker, H. A., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) Barnett, L. K., The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975) Bercovitch, S., The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) Bird, S. E. (ed.), Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996) Bonfiglio, T. P., Race and the Rise of Standard American (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002) Deloria, P. J., Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) Dippie, B. W., The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982) Finkel, E. J., C. A. Bail, M. Cikara, P. H. Ditto, S. Iyengar, S. Klar, L. Mason, et al., “Political Sectarianism in America: A Poisonous Cocktail of Othering, Aversion, and Moralization Poses a Threat to Democracy,” Science 370 (Oct. 30, 2020): 533–36 Gorn, E. J., The Manly Art: Bare-knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) Heimert, A., “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” New England Quarterly 26 (1953): 361–82 Heimert, A., Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) Holm, T., The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) King, D. S., Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) Lewis, D. L., W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: H. Holt, 1993) Maddox, L., Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) Malamud, M., Ancient Rome and Modern America (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) McConachie, B. A., Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820– 1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992) Miller, P., Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956) Murphy, C., Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007) Oates, J. C., On Boxing (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006) Prats, A. J., Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)

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Reed, P. P., Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Rollins, R. M., The Long Journey of Noah Webster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980) Sammons, J. T., Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) Scheckel, S., The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) Skowronek, S., “The Conservative Insurgency and Presidential Power: A Developmental Perspective on the Unitary Executive,” Harvard Law Review 122 (2009): 2070–2103 Slotkin, R., Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) Smil, V., Why America Is Not a New Rome (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010) Smith, R. M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997) Stewart, K., The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) Timony, P., The American Fistiana: Containing a History of Prize Fighting in the United States, with All the Principal Battles for the Last Forty Years, and a Full and Precise Account of All the Particulars of the Great (New York: H. Johnson, 1849) Todorov, T., The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) Warrior, R. A., Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) West, M. R., The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) Wilentz, S., Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 2004) Winterer, C., The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) Wood, G. S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1969)

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Index

1619 Project, The, 239 1776 Report, The, 239, 241 Actian games, 33 Addison, Joseph, 1, 3 Aeneas and agreement, 36–42 and destiny, 30 and founding, 28–42 grief of, 16, 32, 157 journey of, 13, 17, 20–28, 45, 96 and labor, 28–36, 50 and Latium, 31, 71 memorial games for the father of, 33 and memory, 20–26, 40–42, 118 and nature, 30, 31 and Troy, 25 and Turnus, 27, 40, 52–53 and violence, 18, 29, 32, 40–41, 54, 139 agreement, principle of, 31 American, 49–55 Roman, 36–42 Alba Longa, 35 Ali, Muhammad, 184 Allotment Law, 114 Anchises, 31, 33, 35–36, 56, 70 Appian, 67, 142, 194, 196–97 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 19, 22, 34, 38, 40, 43, 51–52, 54, 163, 188 Aristides, 79 Augustine, 8 Augustus, 4, 22, 33, 40, 68, 106, 128, 147, 152, 157, 185, 201, 231, 235 Barlow, Joel, 46 Barr, William, 212, 214–215, 227, 229 Beauvoir, Simone de, 133 Bell, William “Billy,” 168 Benicia Boy (John Camel Heenan), 173 Bibulus, 195, 198 Boone, Daniel, 13, 48–49, 133

Bowery Boys, 184 boxing, 72, 139, 154, 159, 173, 184 boxing, bare-knuckle, 14, 133, 147, 158–74, 181–84, 187 Bradford, William, 46–48 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 124 Burke, James “Deaf,” 184 Bush, George, 207, 226 Bush, George W., 207, 213, 226, 230 Buthrotum, 25 Caesar, Julius acclamations of, 201, 211, 221 and agrarian legislation, 198 assassination of, 67, 75 and civil war, 1, 143, 185, 197 in Gades, 100 and games, 33, 143, 157 and kingship, 199 and language, 77–78, 80, 84 and new Caesarism, 215 populism of, 200 and res publica, 199, 201 as savior, 216 and triumvirate, 200 violates norms, 198–99, 201, 222, 230, 238 Camilla, 26, 31 Carthage, 26, 35–36, 99 Catiline, 143, 196 Cato the Elder, 13, 62, 65, 67–77, 80, 83, 107, 130, 132, 145, 164, 173, 177 Cato the Younger, 1, 202 Channing, William Ellery, 173 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 109 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 13, 62, 65, 211 and agreement, 39 and citizenship, 38, 64, 67, 74 constructing a Roman genealogy, 73–78, 81, 83, 130, 132, 146, 163 and crisis of the res publica, 197, 199, 201, 230 and Dream of Scipio, 97

249

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Index Dido, 26, 30, 32, 35 Du Bois, W. E. B., 13, 85–86, 88–92, 118, 130

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (cont.) and founding, 35, 39, 42, 74, 102, 138 and Gauls, 67 and gladiators, 142–43, 149, 152, 182 and Greece, 67, 73 and humanitas, 100 and institutions of the res publica, 191 and Latinity, 73–78, 82 and law, 39 and novus homo, 54, 132 oratory of, 73, 75 and place, 97, 117 and polarization, 193–95 and Pompey, 199–200, 220 res publica defined by, 37, 224, 234 and the Stranger, 73–77, 95, 103, 137 and Varro, 77 and Verres, 38 Cicero, Quintus, 58, 60, 66 Cinna, 104, 199, 238 citizenship and African Americans, 87, 92 and belonging, 2, 10, 12, 60, 78–79, 83–85, 93, 102, 196, 240 and Cicero, 38–39, 64, 67, 74, 81 as ethos, 57 as farmer, 34, 51, 71 and gladiators, 146, 153, 155 and Livius Drusus, 194 and Native Americans, 115–17 and political arenas, 188 and Social War, 65, 80, 104–5 clementia, 18, 22, 40, 54 Clinton, William, 207, 226 Clodius, 38, 195–96 Coburn, Joseph, 184 collegia, 155 collegia iuvenum, 157 communicative dissonance, 8 Comte, Auguste, 101 condere, 29–30 Conflict of the Orders, 189 Constitutio Antoniniana, 79 Crèvecouer, Jean de, 42–43, 51, 54–55, 132 Crib [Cribb], Tom, 171 cursus honorum, 200

Habermas, Jürgen, 6–7, 9 Hannibal, 65, 104–5, 149 Hannibalic War, 79, 105, 149 Henry, Patrick, 3 Horace, 13, 75, 102, 105–6, 119, 128–30, 147, 153 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 3 humanitas, 99, 107 Husserl, Edmund, 6 Hyer, Tom, 165, 167, 169–70, 173, 184

Dardanus, 25 Dares, 132, 139 Dawes Act. See Allotment Law Dawes Commission, 110, 115 democracy crisis of, 190, 202–39 destiny, 55–57

identity and bodily memory, 118–31 embodied as boxer, 160–63, 165, 168–72 embodied as gladiator, 144, 146–47, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157–58 embodied as rugged, 2, 6, 10, 14, 49 embodied as wild, 12–13

Eastman, Charles, 13, 14, 118–27, 129–30, 133 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 174 Entellus, 132, 139 Evander, King, 26, 31–33, 38, 53 exceptionalism, 55–57 executive orders, 224 Federalist Papers, 42, 45 Ferguson, Adam, 101 fides. See agreement filibuster, 195, 203, 206–7, 209 First Punic War, 33, 150 Five Civilized Tribes, 45, 114, 116 foedera. See agreement Forrest, Edwin, 174–81 Foucault, Michel, 112–13, 119, 135 founding myths of Athens, 27, 60 constitutional, 18 defined, 20 Hebrew, 27, 60 Puritan, 17, 49 shared, 2, 10, 11–14, 19–20, 63–64, 96, 101, 132, 181–83 Ghost Dance, 114, 126 gladiator, 14, 124, 133–58, 160–61, 163, 175–76, 182, 184 Golden Age, 29, 31, 46 Gorman, Amanda, 241 Gracchus, Gaius, 194, 196 Gracchus, Tiberius, 65, 192, 194–96

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Index and embodied dispositions, 11, 61, 97, 132–44 and embodied encounters, 8, 53, 69, 81 and embodied histories, 95 embodied in politics, 201, 219 embodied in theater, 173–84 embodied language, 81 and embodied memory, 13, 14, 24 and embodied Native American, 111–30 and embodied place, 97 and embodied space, 97 and embodied suffering, 46, 51 and embodied vulnerability, 239 and genealogy, 65–95 and space, 97–102 narratives of, 6–10 Indian. See Native American infamia, 136, 138, 147–48, 151, 160 infamis. See infamia Jay, John, 42, 45 Jefferson, Thomas, 162 Jeffries, James, 184 Johnson, Jack, 184 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 230 Josey Wales and community, 45, 53–54 and founding, 11, 16–17, 55, 93, 121, 163 and founding myth, 44 and grief, 44, 50 and labor, 44, 51, 88, 123 and memory, 20, 45, 54, 118 and nature, 46–47, 49 and promises, 52 and ruggedness, 169, 177 and Ten Bears, 50 and Terrill, 50, 53 and trust, 54 and violence, 45, 49–50, 52–53 and vulnerability, 16, 46, 50–51, 240–41 journey of, 16, 17, 43, 45, 48, 51, 101 labor/labor and building, 34–36, 45–49 ethos of, 34, 51 and identity, 30, 51, 146 and violence, 28–34, 45–49 and wildness, 31–36, 45–49 Latin Wars, 102 Latinus, King, 25, 36–37, 70–71 Lavinium, 35 lex Caecilia Didia, 195 lex Calpurnia de ambitu, 199 lex Lutatia, 199 lex Plautia, 199 lex Pompeia de ambitu, 199

251

lex Pompeia de vi, 199 libertas, 137, 140, 143–44, 148, 150 lifeworld, 6, 7, 9, 189 Lilly, Christopher, 166, 169–70 Little Moonlight, 16, 45, 49, 241 Locke, John, 96 Lone Watie, 16, 17, 45, 50–53, 123, 241 ludus Troiae, 33, 157 Luther Standing Bear, 120 manifest destiny, 56 Marius, 13, 72, 74, 104–5, 132, 145–46, 164, 169, 174–75, , 196, 238 McCleester, John, 165 McCoole, Mike, 184 McCoy, Thomas, 165, 169–70 McDonnell v. United States, 237 mixed martial arts, 159, 184 Molineux, Tom, 171 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 101 mourning and collective memory, 33, 54 and funeral games, 33 nationes, 58, 60, 66, 70, 78, 85, 100, 143 Native American, 13–14, 45, 48–49, 94, 97, 109–27, 132–33 naumachia, 33 neo-Romanism, 8 new Caesarism, 215–39 Nixon, Richard, 230 nobiles, 14 O’Rourke, Sam, 184 Obama, Barack, 94, 95, 205–7, 209, 224, 228–29, 234 Octavius, Marcus, 192 optimates, 74, 192 Other. See Stranger Ovid, 25, 77, 235 Parkman, Francis, 101 Pergamum, 25, 30, 34–35 phenomenology, 6, 62, 119, 187 pietas, 36, 40, 157 politics and agreement. See agreement as arena, 186–90 as experience, 187–90 norms of, 191–92, 202–4 obstruction of, 192–95, 197–98, 206–9 polarization in, 192–94, 204–6 search for alternatives to, 199–202, 209–12, 216–34 of Strangers, 192–98, 216–21 and violence, 196–97, 211, 233–34

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252

Index

Pompey, 56, 74, 143, 195, 197–201, 211, 216, 221, 238 Poole, William “Bill the Butcher,” 184 populares, 192, 194 promises. See agreement Pyrrhic War, 105 Quarry, Jerry, 184 Quintilian, 24, 78 Reagan, Ronald, 207, 213, 230 Remulus, Numanus, 32, 38 Remus, 27, 31 res publica crisis in, 14, 185–202 defined, 37 Ricoeur, Paul, 5, 23, 41, 97, 101 Roman Republic. See res publica Rome compared to the United States, 5–6 and Gauls, 13, 65, 97, 104, 128 and Greeks, 65–79 as inheritance, 3, 9, 43 as model, 3–4 as warning, 4–5 Romulus, 27, 31, 36, 42, 74, 94, 103, 132, 139, 182 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 230 Roosevelt, Theodore, 101, 154 Sabines, 71, 76, 78, 94, 103, 107, 129 Sallust, 54, 67, 72, 145, 146, 194, 197, 201 Samnites, 13, 97, 102–10, 117, 118, 119, 128, 129, 132, 182 role in Social War, 105, 128 wars with Rome, 104–5, 107–8 Saturninus, 195–96 Schütz, Alfred, 62–63 Second Punic War. See Hannibalic war Secor, Tom, 168 Segesta, 33, 35 senatus consultum ultimum, 196 Smith, Adam, 101 Social War, 34, 65, 80, 104–5, 107, 128, 196–97 Spartacus, 142, 150, 164, 169, 174–77, 179, 183, 197 Spencer, Herbert, 101 state of nature, 96 Stranger African American as, 87, 89, 219 and Cato the Elder, 68–73 and Cicero, 73–78 corrosive, 2, 12, 13, 63–85, 132 defined, 60, 62–63 and founding myth, 2, 10, 11, 19, 27, 37, 45, 55, 68, 85, 94, 102, 239 Gauls as, 13, 65, 97 gladiator as, 133–58

Greek as, 13, 65–79, 97 Hannibal as, 150 and Horace, 128–30 and identity, 2, 6, 11–13, 59–62, 65–95, 118 immigrant as, 218 Latins as, 13, 65, 97 Native American as, 13, 97, 109–27 and Noah Webster, 79–85 and place, 96–131 and politics, 2, 10, 15, 190, 192–98, 216, 234, 239 and Quintilian, 78 Rome as, 25 Samnite as, 13, 97, 102–9 valorization of, 133 and Varro, 77 wild, 2, 13, 96–132 Sulla, 33, 74, 104–5, 157, 196–97, 199, 238 Sullivan, James “Yankee,” 165, 168, 170 Tacitus, 93, 100, 201, 230 Ten Bears, 17, 45, 49–50, 52–53, 241 The Outlaw Josey Wales. See Josey Wales theater Caius Marius, 174 early American, 174–81 The Gladiator, 174–81, 183 transvectio equitum, 158 Trumble, John, 3 Trump, Donald, 95, 190, 211–12, 214–39 trust. See agreement Turnus, 27, 31–32, 38, 40–41, 52–53, 71, 139 unitary executive, 212–16 Varro, 13, 23, 62, 65, 70, 77–78, 80, 82–84, 130 Verres, 38–39 Virgil, 3, 11, 17–43, 46, 48, 51, 56, 93, 100, 139, 176, 181 Aeneid, 20–42 and Augustus, 21–23 Georgics, 29, 34, 36, 48 virtus, 25, 36, 72, 137–38, 144–45, 147–49, 153, 158, 182 Wales, Josey. See Josey Wales Washington, Booker T., 13, 85, 86–88, 90–91, 118, 130 Washington, George, 3 Webster, Noah, 13, 62, 65, 79–85, 130, 132–33, 170, 182 Western, genre, 43–44 Winthrop, John, 46, 52, 176 Wounded Knee, 110, 114 Xanthus, 80 Zitkala-Ša, 119

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