Classics Salon!

[cahn]

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

Comments

Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[selenak]

cahn, you bringing up divided opinion on Nero as an explanation of why part of the people cheered and others kept bringing flowers to his grave, and why fake Neros kept turning up and had great success for a while, reminded me of something the recent years have changed my opinion about.

Now, in terms of source evaluation and scepticism, already decades ago some modern historians pointed out that 98% of the historians writing about Roman history are from the Senatorial class, i.e. exactly the aristocrats who lost out by the fall of the Republic and the ensueing development of the Empire where the senate went from most important to irrelevant in Roman politics, and that might hugely influence how they evaluate Roman Emperors. (The other 2% are Flavius Josephus and some Greeks, who are aristocrats in their society as well, though arguably our boy Joseph while born an aristocrat did go through the experience of war imprisonment and slavery which the others did not.) Plus of course the more obvious bias of not dissing the current Emperor while the previous ones from another dynasty could be fair game. And/or projecting, i.e critisizing the current Emperor by writing about a past Emperor with the phrasing making clear the parallels without them ever being drawn explicitly.

(There's a famous German example of this. A journalist in pre WWI Germany wrote a novella length essay about Caligula which everyone and their sidekick understood to be a satire on Wilhelm II., but of course censorship couldn't prove it. Nevertheless the author was accused of Majestätsbeleidigung but avoided judgment because he denied all charges and brought the prosecution in the awkward position of having to point out parallels between Caligula and Wilhelm II themselves, at which point they threw up their hands and ended the law suit. If anyone wants to read the Caligula/Willy essay in German, it's here.)

Now, about that Senatorial bias: on the one hand, I can see it. For example, speaking of Caligula, when he makes his horse Incitatus consul, it's likely about taunting the Senate, not because he's crazy. (Doesn't mean he wasn't crazy, but that's not an example for it.) I can also see the case that Nero basically went from following the Augustan to following the Hellenistic monarch model (you can see this in the way he's depicted on coins and statues, too, especially if you compare it to late Ptolemaic coins. Young Nero looks like every Augustus successor, i.e. clearly modelled on Augustus, and then he suddenly looks like one of the Ptolemies.) And that this raised every xenophobic hackle in the Senatorial elite, while your standard butcher and baker in the population couldn't have cared less for as long as the grain supply was coming in. And the case against Nero being actually responsible for burning Rome is pretty solid. (According to Tacitus, who LOATHED Nero and really can't be accused of pro Nero bias but is the first one to write about this, he was in the countryside when the fire started, he when returning upon hearing the news was pretty good at organizing fire fighting and relief efforts, and the idea that he burned the city so he could compose a song about Troy comes in with Suetonius onwards who is prone for going with the most sensational.

However. What Nero definitely did do was looking for someone to blame once people started to demand a guilty party for the catastrophe (that's where the Christians in the arena came in). And even with a sceptical filter, he still ends up with a very high body count (including various family members). Plus: if the last years have taught me one thing, then that half the population absolutely loving a vile head of government who does incredibly shitty things is very much possible. So I've gone from "yeah, his enemies wrote his story, we have to consider that" to "nah, he probably was terrible".

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[felis]

because he denied all charges and brought the prosecution in the awkward position of having to point out parallels between Caligula and Wilhelm II themselves

I either never knew or had forgotten about this, but it's such a clever defence, I love it. Thanks for mentioning that particular detail.

(Also, yes, I'm around and reading along, but I probably won't have much to contribute, because my classics knowledge is pretty abysmal I'm afraid, despite my years of Latin. Looking forward to learning things, though!)

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, that was genius. "Parallels, what parallels? Pls explain." :P I laughed!

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[selenak]

Incidentally, for those not firm on Caligula and Wilhelm II., here are some of the implicit parallels Quidde drew by his phrasing:

- both have a very popular father (Germanicus/ Crown Prince Friedrich who ever briefly ended up as Friedrich III) on whom people pin their hopes for a liberal change from the conservative, oppressive government and whose early tragic death means these hopes and popularity get transferred upon his son

- Caligula/Willy actually is not like Dad at all but might be a bit like his Mom, a proud, passionate princess in enmity with the Pretorian Prefect (Agrippina the Elder/ Vicky the daughter of Queen Victoria)

- originally, everyone expects the old head of the Pretorian Guard to be the real boss, as the (former) head had been under Tiberius, but no, Caligula fires the guy (very obvious allusion to Willy firing Bismarck early on which gets compared to Caligula getting rid of Macro - this is specially glaringly obvious because Macro, who wasn't that old, nonetheless gets described as old (obviously Bismarck was)

- "So, let's talk about Caesarenwahnsinn. This is the syndrome where it's not just an egomaniac on the helm who constantly calls himself the best and has his sycophantic environment tell him the same thing day in and day out, but where the people themselves become complicit because they get corrupted as well and what opposition there is doesn't dare to do much for fear of being sued. Oh, and those guys make it a crime to critisze them in any way. Thank God we live in better times, amirite?"

(Mildred, the actual phrasing safe for the last sentence, which comes at the end of the essay, is: "Der spezifische Cäsarenwahnsinn ist das Produkt von Zuständen, die nur gedeihen können bei der moralischen Degeneration monarchisch gesinnter Völker oder doch der höher stehenden Klassen, aus denen sich die nähere Umgebung der Herrscher zusammensetzt. Der Eindruck einer scheinbar unbegrenzten Macht läßt den Monarchen alle Schranken der Rechtsordnung vergessen; die theoretische Begründung dieser Macht als eines göttlichen Rechtes verrückt die Ideen des Armen, der wirklich daran glaubt, in unheilvoller Weise; die Formen der höfischen Etikette – und noch mehr die darüber hinausgehende unterwürfige Verehrung aller derer, die sich an den Herrscher herandrängen – bringen ihm vollends die Vorstellung bei, ein über alle Menschen durch die Natur selbst erhobenes Wesen zu sein; aus Beobachtungen, die er bei seiner Umgebung machen kann, erwächst ihm zugleich die Ansicht, daß es ein verächtlicher, gemeiner Haufen ist, der ihn umgibt. Kommt dann noch hinzu, daß nicht nur die höfische Umgebung, sondern auch die Masse des Volkes korrumpiert ist, daß der Herrscher, er mag beginnen, was er will, keinen mannhaften offenen Widerstand findet, daß die Opposition, wenn sie sich einmal hervorwagt, zum mindesten ängstlich den Schein aufrecht erhält, die Person des Herrschers und dessen Anschauungen nicht bekämpfen zu wollen, ist gar dieser korrumpierte Geist, der das Vergehen der Majestätsbeleidigung erfunden hat und in der Versagung der Ehrfurcht eine strafbare Beleidigung des Herrschers erblickt, in die Gesetzgebung und in die Rechtsprechung eingezogen: so ist es ja wirklich zu verwundern, wenn ein so absoluter Monarch bei gesunden Sinnen bleibt."

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[mildred_of_midgard]

Wow, that's great. Maybe somebody should translate that into English, tweak it a bit, and publish it in a certain English-speaking country.

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[selenak]

My thoughts precisely, when I read it.

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[cahn]

Thank you for this, this is all great.

- "So, let's talk about Caesarenwahnsinn. This is the syndrome where it's not just an egomaniac on the helm who constantly calls himself the best and has his sycophantic environment tell him the same thing day in and day out, but where the people themselves become complicit because they get corrupted as well and what opposition there is doesn't dare to do much for fear of being sued. Oh, and those guys make it a crime to critisze them in any way. Thank God we live in better times, amirite?"

Oh GOSH.

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[cahn]

avoided judgment because he denied all charges and brought the prosecution in the awkward position of having to point out parallels between Caligula and Wilhelm II themselves

oh this is AMAZING, I love it!

And the case against Nero being actually responsible for burning Rome is pretty solid. (According to Tacitus, who LOATHED Nero and really can't be accused of pro Nero bias but is the first one to write about this, he was in the countryside when the fire started, he when returning upon hearing the news was pretty good at organizing fire fighting and relief efforts, and the idea that he burned the city so he could compose a song about Troy comes in with Suetonius onwards who is prone for going with the most sensational.

I had heard that Nero probably didn't burn Rome, but I didn't know what the evidence actually was, thank you! (I think in the Riordan books he just goes with the Rome burning thing, which I did point out to my kiddo.)

Plus: if the last years have taught me one thing, then that half the population absolutely loving a vile head of government who does incredibly shitty things is very much possible.

Yeah, as you probably figured out, the last few years have been what made me think of the possibility of divided opinion. I don't know that I would have thought of it as a possibility before that.

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[selenak]

Yeah, the last few years really did add a new perspective. :(

Re: the Great Fire of Rome, the Wiki article on it does a reasonably good job of summarizing the current research on what happened, why Nero eventually got blamed (and blamed the Christians in turn), and why he likely didn't do it. Personally, I suspect that like the Great Fire of London in the reign of Charles II, there was no malicious perpetrator, it was the unholy combination of dense living situations with lots of wooden buildngs and stupid accidents that were to blame. (In the Great Fire of London, there was the same urge later to blame someone, and unsurprisingly given we're talking about later 17th century England, a lot of people eyed the Catholics for this. Thankfully, Charles II. wasn't Nero and didn't go for an easy scapegoat.

BTW, Suetonius - who thinks Nero did do it - still has a low opinion of the Christians as well and thinks they're a very creepy foreign cult and should be dealt with. (This is the general opinion of late first century AD Roman writer, I should add. Tacitus and Pliny also think Christians are total creeps and why any sensible Roman should want to join that cult is beyond them. Nethertheless, they also think what Nero did to them was beyond the pale, which shows an interesting modern feeling attitude which would be comparable to "no, torturing ISIS terrorists in Guantanamo is not okay!"

Re: the Caligula/Willy essay, and speaking of wiki, it refreshed my memory and pointed out that Ludwig Quidde, the writer, went on the win the Novel Peace Prize in the 1920s (and made it out of Germany in time come 1933). You can learn more about him here.

Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?

[cahn]

Nethertheless, they also think what Nero did to them was beyond the pale, which shows an interesting modern feeling attitude which would be comparable to "no, torturing ISIS terrorists in Guantanamo is not okay!"

Huh, that's really interesting.

I'm glad Quidde made it out of Germany! (And won the Nobel.)