Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire
Sara H Lindheim
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Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire
Latin Elegy and the
Space of Empire
SARA H. LINDHEIM
1
3
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For my family:
Bob, Eric, Matthew
and
Mom, Dad, Rachel, Isabel
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Terminal Anxiety 1
1. Sine fine: Imperium and Subject in Catullus 27
2. What’s Love Got To Do With It?: Mapping Cynthia 56
in Propertius’ Paired Elegies 1.8a–b and 1.11–12
3. On the Road Again: Following the vias in Tibullus 85
4. Painted Worlds and Porous Walls: Propertius 4.3 with 123
4.2 and 4.4
5. Sine finibus: Imports and Exile in Ovid 154
(Amores 1.14, Ars Amatoria 3, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina
Faciei Femineae, Tristia, Epistulae Ex Ponto)
Conclusion: The Amator, the Puella, and the Space
of Empire 197
Bibliography 205
Index Locorum 223
General Index 234
Acknowledgments
As such a long (in time, not in space) project comes to its conclusion, it is a
happy task to reflect on all the people to whom I owe gratitude. David
Konstan was the first to read the manuscript in its entirety, and to utter the
beautiful words: “it’s a book.” My thanks to him for his unwavering confi-
dence in the project, for suggesting that I consider the Classical Literature
and Gender Theory series at OUP, for shepherding the manuscript through
to publication. Both he and Alison Sharrock, as series editors, offered
comments and criticisms that have notably enriched the final version, as
did the Press’s anonymous readers. I am grateful for the improvements they
inspired and very aware that I alone am responsible for the errors that
remain. I also want to thank OUP’s Katie Bishop, Georgina Leighton,
Karen Raith, and project manager Kabilan Selvakumar, who all provided
expert, patient guidance along the path to publication.
The University of California, Santa Barbara has provided a creative and
collaborative environment in which to work. A sabbatical year in 2016-17
allowed me the much-needed time to complete a draft of the project, and the
Robert Emmons Faculty Award in 2019-20 provided me with funding to
complete the final manuscript. Within the Classics department, my col-
leagues are a constant source of inspiration and energy, especially Dorota
Dutsch, Rose MacLean, Helen Morales, and Bob Morstein-Marx. UCSB’s
long-standing emphasis on interdisciplinarity has ensured that I also cross
paths with many brilliant colleagues in other fields, in particular through the
Comparative Literature Program. Richard Helgerson generously offered me
encouragement, bibliography, and his discerning interpreter’s eye when the
project was in an embryonic stage. His strong endorsement provided con-
fidence at a crucial moment; as I reach the end of the project, I am saddened
anew that he is not alive to share his perceptive insights.
My first attempts to formulate my thoughts about Propertius, Ovid, and
the space of empire were for audiences at Yale and Drew, at two separate
events honoring the memory of Shilpa Rival, who was a graduate student
with me and whose work on Ovid and feminist theory often intersected with
mine. It seems fitting that she remains intertwined with this project, too.
I am grateful to organizers, fellow speakers, and audience members alike for
x
their excellent questions and comments. A workshop on ancient literary
letters, convened by Helen Morales at UCSB, provided me with an oppor-
tunity to present and discuss later stages of my research. I learned much
from my co-presenters, as well as from our lively and engaged audience.
Friends and colleagues have been generous in conversation and in read-
ing. My thoughts have been improved and sharpened by Mark Buchan,
Emilio Capettini, Dorota Dutsch, Francesca Martelli, Allen Miller, Helen
Morales, Bob Morstein-Marx, Kirk Ormand, and Mario Telò. Erika
Zimmermann Damer and Micah Myers provided keen feedback on an
earlier version of my chapter on Catullus that will appear in their forthcom-
ing edited volume, Empire, Travel, and Geography in Latin Poetry. Two
former students, Randy Pogorzelski and Nicole Taynton, were, at different
ends of the project, important interlocutors. A third student, Maria Leventi,
saved the manuscript from many errors and helped with the index locorum.
Two former teachers, Georgia Nugent and Michael Putnam, will, I hope, still
find traces of their indelible influence on me.
And finally, thanks sine fine to my home team for their love and support.
Thanks to the Friday night crew, Helen Morales and Tony Boyle, my
forever-friends, Susannah McQuillan and Susie Chaitovitz, my parents,
Ralph and Nancy Lindheim, my sister, Rachel Lindheim, my niece, Isabel
Wilder, and last, but most of all, my children, Eric and Matthew Lindheim-
Marx, and my husband, Bob Morstein-Marx, who have long endured, with
love and good humor, my obsession with the idea of the map that somehow
coincides with my inability to read an actual one. I could not have done this
without you.
Unless I note otherwise, the translations are my own and fairly literal. The
epigraph to Chapter Two is taken from Christian Jacob’s The Sovereign
Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History
(University of Chicago Press, 2006), copyright © 2006 The University of
Chicago. It appears with the permission of the University of Chicago Press.
An earlier version of Chapter Two first appeared in 2011, in American
Journal of Philology 132.4: 633–65, copyright © 2011 Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Introduction
Terminal Anxiety
“Give me a map; then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world . . . ”
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine,
Part II V.iii.123–4
‘The map is not the territory.’
Alfred Korzybski
Latin elegy, even if we adopt a capacious definition of the genre, has a very
short lifespan. Only about seventy years elapse from the time Catullus
composes his poetry, now considered elegiac precursors even though they
do not manage to register in Quintilian’s canon of elegy (Institutio Oratoria,
10.1.93), to the posthumous publication of Ovid’s final exilic complaints
which effectively bring the curtain down on the genre. These seventy years
correspond to the end of the Republic, the early years during which Octavian
consolidates power, and the rise and establishment of the Augustan age. The
changes on every level, despite the reiterated trope of restoring the res
publica, are momentous, a cultural revolution. The political transformation
and the effects of the upheaval on individual subjects are well known; many
modern analyses of literature from the period highlight the ways in which
authors grapple with their historical present. This book focuses instead on
the spatial dislocation that accompanies the political one in an era that saw
the massive increase of territory subject directly to Rome’s imperium.
Augustus boasts: “I extended the boundaries of all the provinces of the
Roman people to which there were neighboring peoples who were not
subject to our imperium” (omnium provinc[iarum populi Romani,] quibus
finitimae fuerunt gentes quae non p[arerent imperio nos]tro, fines auxi, Res
Gestae 26.1). And yet, aggressive imperial conquest does not start with
Augustus. Pompey and Caesar, too, expand the boundaries of empire, linking
Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0001
2
territorial expansion with the intoxicating notion of Roman imperium sine
fine (“empire without end/boundaries”).
Let us begin by attempting to imagine concretely the extent of physical
space we are talking about. In the seventy years from the late 60s to the
early years of the first decade of the Common Era, Roman imperium
expands very widely; all, most, or part of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt,
Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain and Portugal, France, Belgium, Switzerland,
southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Romania, Bulgaria fall under Rome’s direct control.
Additionally, in these years the army makes splashy forays into Armenia,
the Caucasus, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Sudan, Britain, and northern
Germany. As Romans come face to face with their conquests—through
triumphs, monumental building, an increased flow of goods and peoples—
their understanding of the geographical space of the world changes. They
experience the extent of their physical world in a novel way, with a newly
conceived sense of geographical space. In this book, I suggest that if we look
closely at elegy, including the poems of Catullus in our reading, what emerges
is an overall sense that the Roman worldview becomes cartographic; in other
words they apprehended physical space in a two-dimensional, interrelated
way as if on a map. This statement, of course, does not imply that most
ancient Romans in the first century were familiar with maps as physical
objects, the way we are today. They did not, for the most part, pore over
atlases or illustrated geographical texts,¹ and they certainly never consulted
aerial and satellite web-based maps. As we shall consider in more detail
below, the first public map of the orbis terrarum (or the “inhabited world”)
only takes its prominent place in Rome at the tail end of the first century
or at the start of the first century . What I am suggesting, however, is that
the Roman sense of geographical space morphs (more or less, depending
on the individual) into a physical conception of what is Roman, both what
lies within and what lies beyond Roman imperium. And once Romans
conceive of geographical space in this way, the next obvious step is a
publicly displayed world map (Agrippa’s map) and the host of spatial issues
it simultaneously responds to and introduces. Maps, especially world maps,
force us to confront big questions beyond mere geography, in particular
questions of power, control, and subjectivity. Maps of aggressively expand-
ing empires frequently—and certainly in the case of Rome—raise issues
¹ See Chapter 4, pages 129–31 below, for more.
3
about limits, boundaries, and self-definition. Maps drawn to clarify the
margins of empire can introduce complications. Do they define the
bounded territory or problematize the very possibility?
The poetry of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid is chock full of
geographic references, images, descriptions. This is not ornamental; for the
poets, geography matters. On the one hand, in a world of increasingly
expanding territory, mentions of new and therefore exotic places fall tripp-
ingly off the tongue (or the stylus). On the other hand, however, I suggest
that we trace more meaningfully the reactions in the poetry to the extraor-
dinarily expanded world. I have chosen the theoretical writings of twentieth-
century French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as a helpful way to tell the
story of the deeper effects of massive spatial change and dislocation. Lacan
compellingly explains that the subject is a mess—decentered, contradictory,
dislocated—that constantly attempts to paper over the fissures and present a
coherent self in images and language. Certain moments of trauma, however,
of drastic change in the Symbolic realm, cause the fissures to come to the
fore. This book suggests that this time period of changing Roman worldview,
the seventy years that witnessed the transformation to seeing the Roman
world cartographically, is just such a pressure point. For this reason, elegiac
poems that mention the space of empire foreground problems with the
subject; the subject, like the map, embodies a constant suspension between
upholding a fantasy of a bounded whole and simultaneously revealing it to
be no more than a fantasy.
Most interpretations of the elegiac subject offered in the last few decades
engage, to some extent, with questions of gender. Readings of elegy tease out
the complex and nuanced gender relations that the poems expose, in
particular those between the (usually) male lover-poet and his largely
unattainable yet (therefore?) highly desirable puella. At first blush the
story reveals a feminized amator, or at least an amator who has eschewed
the regular trappings of Roman masculinity, in hot pursuit of a powerful,
enchanting, yet distant beloved.² But if he pursues, how active, how dom-
inant can she be? Not only does he pursue, but moreover he is the one who
writes, whose voice we hear, who ultimately controls the narrative. So her
representation, the ways in which she is characterized (or objectified), rests
² Hallett 1973 offers a feminist reading of elegy and the dominant role of the puella. The late
1990s and early 2000s saw a return of feminist arguments emphasizing “releasing” or “resistant”
readings that empowered women, for example, Liveley 1999. For the amator’s problematic rela-
tionship to traditional masculinity, consider Gold 1993, Oliensis 1997, Janan 2001, Miller 2004.
4
in his hands. Rhetorical control belongs to him.³ And yet, as speaking
subject, to what extent does he possess full control?⁴ At what moments, in
which situations, do his words betray him, revealing more than he wishes—
about the feminine subject, the masculine subject, his desires, his anxieties?
An exploration of the gendered subjectivities of the amator and his puella, as
well as other secondary characters, centrally occupy us in this study, always
with the understanding that our access to them emerges from the narrative
of the elegiac “I” whose words may exceed his calculations and/or intentions.
As the elegiac subject encounters the space of empire, we shall see that the
experience unfolds in strikingly different ways and with varying conse-
quences depending on gender. In this book we shall come across masculine
subjects caught up in imperial ventures in foreign lands—as soldiers, mer-
chants, low-level participants in political life—and feminine subjects, most
often in or near Rome, puellae and matrons, usually adulterous, in one case
(also) a Vestal Virgin, frequently dressed to the nines in imported finery.
Movement and travel over vast geographical expanses are generally mascu-
line prerogatives, not without consequences, sometimes dire ones, to the
masculine subject’s sense of integral wholeness. And yet, although she
herself seems more generally rooted than footloose, it is the puella’s body
that bears the mark of interaction with space. Empire’s aggressively porous
boundaries and the woman’s corporeal instantiation remain intertwined in
the poets’ imaginations. As we shall discover, individual poets at distinct
moments in this short span of time between the 60s and 18 each have
unique expressions of the confrontation with the space of empire, and its
subsequent effect on the gendered subject, leaving us to trace a complicated
and multifaceted narrative about the subject in the transition to a new
Roman worldview.
The story unfolds diachronically and somewhat organically. Before we
begin looking at the various poets, however, we need to step back for a wider
view. What does a cartographic worldview look like? What drives us to make
a map? And what are we looking at, explicitly and implicitly, when we
examine one? To find our way into the issues that will occupy us—the
intimate interconnection of cartography and subjectivity in Catullus and
the elegists—let us think a bit first about maps in general and an important
³ See here arguments that draw connections between the puella and poetics, for example,
Sharrock 1991, Keith 1994, Wyke 2002: Part One, and readings that emphasize the poet’s
rhetorical power over representation, for example, Greene 1998, James 2003, Sharrock
2000, 2013.
⁴ Here see primarily the psychoanalytic readings of Janan 2001, Miller 2004, Taynton 2018.
5
Roman map, the map of Agrippa, in particular, and then move to some
introductory comments about cartography and subjectivity.
Introductory Roadmap
Go to your computer and type “Google Earth” into the search function of
your web browser. You will not be alone. Although Google notoriously
safeguards its statistics, we know that one billion people had downloaded
Google Earth in 2011, eager to orbit the world in 3D via satellite and aerial
photography.⁵ When you reach the site’s home page, various tantalizing,
pithy slogans greet you. “Gain a new perspective” and “explore the far
reaches of the world;” click here and up pops a promise and a command:
“The world is yours. Go explore.” With untold possibilities opening up
before you, you will probably, like the overwhelming number of Google
Earth users, turn inward before you look outward. Your first search will be
for yourself. Brian McClendon, Vice President of Engineering at Google, in
charge of Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Ocean, Google Sky, Google
Moon, and Google Mars, is avowedly intent on creating a live digital atlas of
the entire world, accessible on computers, phones, and other smart elec-
tronic devices. Although he seeks to offer users the whole world at their
fingertips, he says that users “always” choose to search for themselves first,
inputting their cities or towns, even their actual homes.⁶
The map-user’s egocentric choice stands at the heart of this book. When
we look at a map, we seem to be looking, first and foremost, for ourselves, no
matter what else we might also, simultaneously be searching for. “You are
here” marks innumerable publicly displayed maps and directories to help us
orient ourselves. In our cars and increasingly as we walk we follow trajec-
tories on GPS devices or on our smartphones that begin with a blue dot
marking our current location. Those examples imply, however, that maps
serve primarily to help us move through space with ease, and some do. But
many do not, like atlases, globes, world maps set up by imperial cultures, or
like Google Earth. Even those that get us from one physical, geographical
location to another also provide us with a comforting sense of our existence
⁵ The number now, after the release of version 9 on April 18, 2017, must be higher. On April
19, 2018, we learned that hundreds of millions of people had searched Google Earth since the
launch of the new version (https://www.blog.google/products/earth/how-we-explored-whole-
wide-world-google-earth-past-year/, accessed November 13, 2019).
⁶ Garfield 2013: 427–9.
6
in space as well as of our spatial coordinates vis-à-vis others. To the
seemingly straightforward question “where would we be without maps?”
the response is complex. “The obvious answer is, of course, ‘lost,’ but maps
provide answers to many more questions than simply how to get from one
place to another.”⁷ Indeed, the most burning question that a map answers is
the query born from the viewer’s desire to know about him/herself and his/
her place in the world.
Equally important, makers of maps, as well as their viewers, possess a
similar impulse to locate themselves within a wider physical context. Early
maps, and especially early world maps, overwhelmingly reveal a construc-
tion of geographical space that provides a consistent answer to the inevitable
“where am I?” question posed by the culture producing the document. The
map’s response: “at the center.” What does it mean if what one discovers at
the center of a map are the coordinates of the culture that produces the
artifact?⁸ It looks very much like the results of a digital mapping search
today, where the user’s own location provides the focal point as a geograph-
ical grid extends outward. In other words, a map is less an objective,
scientific representation of geographical space, and more a subjective ren-
dering of a particular culture’s (or, in the case of online mapping, a particu-
lar individual’s) take on the world. This is not to imply that absolutely
anything goes when it comes to map-making. Each map is based on a series
of assumptions, scientific, religious, economic, and/or political, shared
within at least a certain portion of the culture producing the artifact.⁹ But
it is still a subjective construct of the world, and not an objective reproduc-
tion; as in the well-known dictum, “the map is not the territory.” More
boldly, “a map always manages the reality it tries to show,”¹⁰ in the process
constructing for the individual a (false) sense of self and other in relation to
physical space.
While the map attests to the profoundly human desire to locate the self in
relation to some larger whole, a map also caters to another, equally human,
⁷ Brotton 2012: 4.
⁸ See here Talbert’s summary about the shape of the Peutinger Map, a conceptualization of a
peaceful and united orbis terrarum, with Rome as its focal point in the center: Talbert 2008:
17–18. Talbert 2010: 261 boldly states about the same map: “only a mapmaker with a confident
grasp of some conventional, ‘accurate,’ representation of this world would have had the capacity
to reshape it so deftly.”
⁹ Consider the assertion of historian Jerry Brotton 2012: 220: “To adopt Marx, men make
their own geography, but not of their own free will, and not under circumstances they have
chosen, but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly con-
fronted.”
¹⁰ Brotton 2012: 7.
7
urge. The map organizes and categorizes the surface of the earth, establishing
centers and margins, borders and boundaries, places belonging to the ‘self ’
and locations that fall to the dominion of the “other.”¹¹ We shall discover
that divisions of this sort must also ultimately be classified as primarily
subjective. But the impulse to draw a line, to mark a boundary, to separate
“in” and “out,” and to seek to define the self in a binary opposition to the
other on the other side of the delineated space emerges beyond the enclosure
of the map. We should not forget that the story of Rome, after all, begins
with a wall, a line or a boundary established to separate “in” from “out,”
“Roman” from “non-Roman,” to mark off Romulus’ new city. Indeed, to
reinforce the association between city wall and geographical boundary, we
should also note the connection the Romans made, based on ancient
tradition (so claims Tacitus, at least), between the pomerium (the sacred
boundary of the city of Rome, a strip just inside or outside the city wall)¹²
and the boundaries of empire. The historian asserts that Roman military
leaders who increased the boundaries of empire correspondingly had the
power to increase the city limits.¹³ To consign this preoccupation solely to
the Roman past, however, would be to forget a signature rallying call of the
Trump presidential campaign of 2016. The racist and xenophobic call to
“build the wall” boils down at its core to a desire to establish a fixed boundary,
clear and impermeable, between “in” and “out,” between “American” and
“Mexican.”
At the center, but in the background, of all my readings in this book is a
map, Agrippa’s map, the first publicly displayed map of the world in Rome,
prominently located in the Porticus Vipsania in the Campus Martius,
completed sometime after the death of Agrippa in 12 by Augustus
¹¹ On the urge to map, see for example Blaut, Stea, Spencer, and Blades 2003; for the desire to
locate and define oneself spatially in relation to the “other,” see Kitchin 1994.
¹² Varro conjectures that etymologically pomerium is post+murum or “after the wall,” at De
Lingua Latina 5.143. The correctness of the etymology is doubted; Ernout and Meillet 1959: s.v.
murus.
¹³ “And Caesar [Claudius] increased Rome’s pomerium according to ancient tradition by
which it is granted to those who have extended the boundaries of empire to enlarge the
boundaries of the city. Roman military leaders, however, except for Sulla and Augustus, had
not seized upon this power even though they had conquered great nations” (et pomerium urbis
auxit Caesar, more prisco, quo iis qui protulere imperium etiam terminos urbis propagare datur.
nec tamen duces Romani, quamquam magnis nationibus subactis, usurpaverant nisi L. Sulla et
divus Augustus, Tacitus, Annales 12.23). There remains debate about whether Augustus actually
presided over a pomerial extension; see note 35 below.
We should note, however, that altering and extending the pomerium with the boundaries of
empire also unwittingly underscores the lack of permanent fixity belonging to the boundaries
of Rome, to what is “in” the city and what is kept “out.”
8
himself. We cannot examine this map today; it is no longer extant.¹⁴ My
readings, however, depend less on details of the actual artifact than on
explorations of the map as a cultural idea. Why does a culture make a
map? Why display it in public? From what perspective is it drawn? Why
consult a map? What is the viewer seeking? What does he/she see? What
does the impulse to make a map reveal about map-making culture and
viewer? What does it reveal about a culture’s worldview at a particular
historical moment, about the way it produces space?
Mapping an Empire: Theoretical Preliminaries
a. The “Mapping Impulse”
The avid interest in space in the humanities—now called the “spatial turn”—
dates from the late 1980s, drawing on a term made popular by Edward
Soja’s Postmodern Geographies, although the foundational text is Michel
Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces.”¹⁵ Across a wide array of disciplines, from
geography to history, philosophy to literature, the concept of space has
attracted the attention of scholars. Their work shows us that space is central,
ubiquitous, no longer to be consigned to the background as some neutral
or unchanging mise- en scène in front of which action—political, cultural,
narrative—unfolds.¹⁶ Indeed, “no meaningful understanding of how human
beings produce and reproduce their worlds can be achieved without invok-
ing a sense that the social, the temporal, the intellectual and the personal are
inescapably always and everywhere also the spatial.”¹⁷ Scholars, depending
on their primary areas of specialization, demand that we consider space
actively, that we explore how it participates in, and is a product of, social and
political relations, constructions of identities, bodies, and monuments. We
should think of space as imagined or culturally produced rather than as
(or, as always already ineluctably intertwined with) real or given; there is no
one monumental, monolithic way to experience “real” space. In addition,
¹⁴ Pliny the Elder twice refers to a map, NH 3.17 and 6.139 (where I accept the emendation of
Ulrichs 1853 printed in the Teubner text of Mayhoff). In addition, Pliny refers in more than
thirty places in books 3–6 to Agrippa’s geographic measurements. See Carandini 2017: 482.
Dilke 1985: 44–52 collects and discusses them individually. We shall return to the map in more
detail below, pages 10–12, where I provide the text for Pliny NH 3.17 and 6.139.
¹⁵ Soja 1989, Foucault (published) 1986, but from a lecture delivered in 1967. Equally
significant is Lefebvre 1991.
¹⁶ See Hubbard and Kitchin 2011. ¹⁷ Warf and Arias 2009: 7.
9
the work done on space from a psychoanalytic perspective emphasizes the
interconnection of space and subjectivity. Subjectivity is not mapped onto a
person against the backdrop of space. Instead, space itself plays a role in
shaping, defining, limiting, obfuscating. Space participates, dynamically, in
constructing the subject, in letting him/her know his/her place in the
world.¹⁸
Exciting recent work in Classics has examined ancient literary texts for
how they reflect and shape our understanding of space at various moments
in Greece and Rome. Greek epic poetry as a genre draws the most interest;
questions about whether the poems reveal an experience of space that was
“hodological” (conceived in terms of an itinerary) or “cartographic” (con-
ceived in terms of a map) recur.¹⁹ Often, discussions of space and Latin
literature foreground the urban space of the city, Rome itself, as they explore
the ways in which texts bring to life either “actual” urban spaces (for
example, Ovid’s Rome in the Ars Amatoria) or types of spaces (for example,
domestic space or the street).²⁰ This book shares many of the broad funda-
mental concerns of this scholarship about the centrality of the production
of space in narrative, in particular the role space plays in the constitution of
the subject. Additionally significant to my argument, however, are recent
suggestions about the Roman sense of space among scholars considering
maps and other information technologies rather than literature to pursue
questions of physical geography in the Roman imagination. Recently,
Richard Talbert and Andrew Riggsby have argued²¹ that although we do
not possess many examples of Roman maps, and, in fact, although Latin
seems to lack a noun to signify the item, nevertheless we should avoid
leaping to the conclusion that Romans only experienced space in linear,
¹⁸ The literature on space and psychoanalysis is too large to summarize here. Bachelard 1964
remains essential. On psychoanalysis and cultural geography, in particular, see for example Pile
1996 and Blum and Nast 1996 (on the importance of Lacan on Lefebvre). Also consider
Hubbard and Kitchin 2011, especially the entries for Rose and Sibely.
¹⁹ Thalmann 2011 sees a hodological experience of space in the Argonautica, while Purves
2010 distinguishes between the cartographic experience of space in the Iliad and the hodological
one in the Odyssey. Also see Clay 2011 and Tsagalis 2012. Two recent edited volumes opt for
wider generic coverage; see de Jong 2012 for a broad survey of space and narrative in ancient
Greek literature, and Gilhuly and Worman 2014 who interrogate space, place, and landscape.
²⁰ To cite a few recent examples, for Latin literature, Larmour and Spencer 2007, Rimell 2015,
Fitzgerald and Spentzou 2018. Rimell and Asper 2017 has essays about Hellenistic and Roman
literature.
²¹ Talbert 2004, 2008, 2010, and Riggsby 2019. Consider, for example, Talbert 2004: 6: ‘in the
minds of most users, maps were only one among several means by which they developed their
worldview, and to them (unlike us) not even necessarily the most important means.’
10
hodological fashion.²² Just because maps are not extant does not mean that
they never existed. Moreover, we should not fail to consider other objects—
texts, images, material objects—which may help to reveal complex and
multiple models of Roman spatial understanding. Indeed, the evidence we
do possess points to an audience capable of comprehending a two-
dimensional sense of space which reproduces elements of geographical
reality (i.e. like a map). On the one hand, this first moves us forward to
study Agrippa’s map and other map-like instantiations in order to mine
them for what they tell us about how Romans see the world. On the other, it
will bring us eventually to the heart of the argument: elegy, literary texts
from the decades around the creation of Agrippa’s map. We shall explore
what these texts, in juxtaposition with the map, have to tell us about the
Roman worldview, and particularly, how they do so.
The most important piece of evidence for a Roman cartographic world-
view is a world map. So let us turn to our map—or rather, to be more precise,
a map that is no longer extant. Initiated under the supervision, and from the
geographical commentaries,²³ of Augustus’ right-hand man, Agrippa, the
map once occupied a prominent position in the Porticus Vipsania, located in
the Campus Martius.²⁴ Unfortunately, we can say little with any certainty
²² Janni 1984, Whittaker 2002, and Brodersen 2003 are the main proponents of the argument
for Rome’s itinerary-driven or hodological perception of space. Now see also Brodersen in
Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 108–10. His argument rests primarily on the lack of evidence of
maps in the ancient Greco-Roman world. In addition to the absence of extant maps, he also
notes that texts, descriptive geographies, did not rely on illustrations to assist the reader. Both of
these propositions, however, are more complicated than he allows. We must acknowledge that
illustrations did exist in ancient texts, but were often lost in transmission (Dueck and Brodersen
2012: 100); so, for example, scientific writings, like those of Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and
Ptolemy, appear for us without the illustrations that originally accompanied the written texts
(Jacob, 2006: 55). Contra Janni, Whittaker, and Brodersen, see for example Nicolet 1991, Clark
1999: 201 n. 17, Salway 2001 and 2012, Talbert, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, Arnaud 2015,
Riggsby 2019.
²³ These commentaries are no longer extant, but were used by Pliny and Strabo. See
especially Nicolet 1991: 95–122. Pliny, NH refers to Agrippa as an auctor (3.86) and lists
Agrippa in his index as an auctor. Moreover, Pliny cites Agrippa more than thirty times in
books 3–6 for geographic distances “concerning the dimensions of the provinces and of regions
of the world, the seas, the islands” (collected in Dilke 1985: 44–52) and Strabo cites Agrippa at
least seven times. Now see also Arnaud 2015: 207, who counts “not less than 32 passages” where
Pliny names Agrippa as his source; “the number of times Agrippa is quoted makes him the main
explicit source of Pliny’s geographical books (3–6).”
²⁴ Pliny NH 3.17: Agrippam quidem in tanta viri diligentia praeterque in hoc opere cura, cum
orbem terrarum urbi spectandum propositurus esset, errasse quis credat et cum eo divum
Augustum? is [Augustus] namque conplexam eum [= orbem terrarum] porticum ex destinatione
et commentariis M. Agrippae a sorore eius inchoatam peregit (“Indeed who could believe that
Agrippa, given the exceeding painstakingness of the man and especially his care in this
undertaking, and with him the divine Augustus, had made a mistake when he was about to
11
about this map. We do not know its shape, its layout, or the medium in
which it was executed,²⁵ nor have we discovered exactly when, between the
years 7 and 14 , the Roman public could first view it.²⁶ Most of the
little we do know about Agrippa’s map comes from the writings of Pliny
the Elder. The Naturalis Historia, Pliny’s encyclopedic compendium,
informs us of numerous specific geographic measurements for which
Agrippa is responsible.²⁷ Moreover, Pliny twice refers to something that
appears to be a map, first when he speculates about whether Agrippa could
have carelessly mismeasured geographical distances “when he was about to
exhibit the entire world for the city [Rome] to examine” (cum orbem
terrarum urbi spectandum propositurus esset, NH 3.17), and a second time
when Pliny indicates that he saw the precise location of the town called
Charax in the Porticus Vipsania.²⁸ Scholars suggest that Agrippa’s geo-
graphic commentarii were the basis for his map that revealed not just the
Roman world but, as the presence of Charax situated at the mouth of the
Euphrates river demonstrates, depicted the entire inhabited world, orbis
terrarum.²⁹
This is an exciting conclusion; Agrippa’s would be the first publicly
displayed map of the world in Rome. That we cannot envision and describe
Agrippa’s map as an actual artifact, however, does not much affect my
arguments. It is the idea of the map, rather than the map per se—the
exhibit the entire world for Rome to examine? For Augustus completed the portico that
enclosed the map, the portico begun according to the plan and notes of Marcus Agrippa by
his sister”).
Pliny NH 6.139: prius fuit a litore stadios X—maritimum etiam Vipsania porticus habet—
Juba vero prodente L p. (“[Charax] was previously 10 stades from the coast, and the Porticus
Vipsania, too, has it by the sea, although Juba gave the distance as 50 miles,” following
Mayhoff ’s 1906 Teubner text that accepts an emendation to read Vipsania porticus).
²⁵ See Brodersen, chapter 4 “Cartography” in Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 108–9, where he
summarizes opinions on shape and appearance. These options include globe, floor mosaic,
painting, engraved bronze or marble, in circles, ovals, or rectangles of various heights and
widths.
²⁶ The Porticus Vipsania was built by Agrippa’s sister Vipsania Polla, and was not yet
complete in 7 as we know from Cassius Dio 55.8. Pliny, NH 3.17 makes it clear, however,
that the project was completed in Augustus’ lifetime.
²⁷ See note 23 above.
²⁸ Nicolet 1991: 98–9. Nicolet 1991: 99 accepts the emendation at NH 6.139.
²⁹ Nicolet 1991: 95–122. Similarly see also Dilke 1985: 39–54. Sherk 1974 discusses the
importance of commentarii to communicate geographical knowledge possible because of
Roman expansion. Crook 1996a: 71 acknowledges that Agrippa wrote commentarii and
1996b: 139 that Agrippa’s map performed an important service in Augustan ideology.
Riggsby 2019: 190 reminds us that commentarii are always notes on something else (my
emphasis).
12
impulses behind making and displaying it, impulses of which the map is but
one instantiation—that drives this exploration. The map is “a gesture of
authority, both Roman political authority over much of the land displayed
and a more general capacity to comprehend and appropriate the oikumene
as a whole.”³⁰ As Nicolet shows in his groundbreaking work, Space,
Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, the creation and exhib-
ition of a world map very well suits the zeitgeist of the Augustan age.
Drawing up and disseminating world maps, it turns out, is a behavior shared
by those in possession of large-scale world empires.³¹
In his wide-ranging exploration Nicolet powerfully marshals evidence to
support what might be, at first blush, a strange assertion: “Rome had an
empire before becoming an empire.”³² The transition from “having” an
empire to “becoming” one entails, he argues, a dramatic shift in awareness
about space for Romans in the Augustan age.³³ The ability to conquer vast
expanses of territory had long been a Roman specialty, but the inability to
establish a way of governing the territory effectively and coherently was one
of the factors that led to the demise of the Republic. The age of Augustus,
however, managed both to conquer and subsequently to rule, a feat that
simultaneously depended on and demanded a new and active interest in
spatial boundaries. On the one hand, Romans began to apprehend in a
unified fashion the physical extent of the world that was theirs. Strabo
composes his extensive geography under Augustus. The princeps’ great
summary of his own accomplishments, the Res Gestae, a text he wanted
inscribed outside his mausoleum at his death, “can be considered at least in
its second half as a genuine geographic survey” of Augustus’ conquests,
pointing out annexed territories and looking towards potential future acqui-
sitions.³⁴ A global map of the world, publicly displayed “for the city to
survey,” embodies a similar push for Romans to conceptualize their world
in a unified fashion.
³⁰ Riggsby 2019: 191. Riggsby adduces as comparandum the world map at a rhetorical school
in Augustodunum (modern-day Autun) that the orator Eumenius asked to restore. The map
itself is no longer extant but the rhetorical speech delivered in the 290s exalts its pedagogical
value as well as its value as a tool of empire, allowing the students to enjoy a depiction of the
world in which they see nothing that does not belong to them. Talbert 2010: 255–9 also
discusses this world map.
³¹ A brief Roman story illustrates the fact that maps and imperium go hand in glove. When
Mettius Pompusianus had a world map painted on his bedroom wall, he aroused the ire of the
emperor Domitian, who had him put to death for his “cartographic crime.” In other words, the
map led to the accusation that Pompusianus harbored imperial ambitions. See Arnaud 1983.
Dio tells the story at 67.12.3-4.
³² Nicolet 1991: 1. ³³ Nicolet 1991; Whittaker 1994. ³⁴ Nicolet 1991: 9.
13
On the other hand, successfully governing conquered territory, people,
and resources equally demanded that Romans under Augustus conceive of
physical space with new interest and in a coherent way. Though ultimately
deciding not to adopt the name Romulus, Augustus goes to great lengths to
associate himself with Rome’s legendary founder, ideologically establishing
himself as a second founder of the city. To assert this claim the princeps
perhaps even expanded the city’s pomerium, its sacred boundary and the
line Romulus initially drew to found Rome.³⁵ Augustus divided Rome and
Italy into districts or regiones.³⁶ Rome became the primary vantage point for
the administration of a unified empire. Documents recording numbers of
people and extents of land circulated and flowed to central repositories,
allowing for more tightly controlled, unified, and centrally administered
record-keeping—in theory, at least. Censuses no longer stipulated that
citizens come to Rome to be counted; magistrates in local municipalities
throughout Italy counted Roman citizens and sent documents preserving
the number to a central administrative repository in Rome. Similar tech-
niques applied to censuses now taken at the provincial level, and increased
the ease and frequency with which such counts could occur. In addition, it
became obligatory in the Augustan period to register births.³⁷ In a manner
that displays a similar tendency towards considering and recording inven-
tory, public and private land was surveyed, measured, divided, bounded, and
these operations were logged and centrally maintained.³⁸
The points of intersection between world map, geographical writing,
territorial divisions, the recording of numbers of people and their property
are not difficult to comprehend.³⁹ All partake of the “mapping impulse,” a
drive to represent, to circumscribe, to unify, to control, a desire particularly
appealing to imperialist powers seeking to achieve and retain mastery over a
large extent of territory, people, and resources. An explosion of theoretical
work on maps and mapping, primarily at first by geographers, in the 1990s
³⁵ On Augustus as a second Romulus, see Suetonius, Augustus 7.2 and Dio 53.16.7–8. Also
see Ungern-Sternberg 1998: 166–82 and, for visual connections, Zanker 1988: especially 201–10.
The question of whether Augustus actually presided over a pomerial extension remains debated,
despite the literary evidence of Tacitus, Annales 12.23, Dio 55.6.6, and the vita Aureliani of the
Historia Augusta. Though often simply accepted (Ober 1982: 317–19, for example) Augustus’
extension of the pomerium still has its doubters (Syme 1983: 131–45, Boatwright 1986,
Richardson 1992, s.v. pomerium, for example).
³⁶ Wallace-Hadrill 2005 and 2008.
³⁷ Nicolet 1991: 132. Similarly Richardson 2008: 117–45. ³⁸ Nicolet 1991: 123–70.
³⁹ “ . . . [M]aps have never been used to the exclusion of other strategies for simplifying spatial
complexity. Even in modern industrial societies, maps are routinely used in conjunction with
other, noncartographic descriptions of space,” Edney 2007: 119.
14
and early 2000s, has opened up fruitful perspectives on this impulse,
exploring why one draws, and how one interprets, cartographic lines.⁴⁰
Challenging the accepted wisdom that maps are scientific and objective
representations of a reality “that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of
our days, a reality we achieve in no other way,” historians of cartography
now question a map’s pretensions to totality, cohesion, and “reality.”⁴¹
Maps are texts, map-makers, individual subjects embedded in networks of
political, social, cultural relations; as such maps cannot escape the fact that
they are subjective, constructed products. A map, by nature, requires a
choice, a decision about what to represent, and from which focal point;⁴²
hence “mapmakers do not just reproduce the world, they construct it” and
“a map always manages the reality it tries to show.”⁴³ A map flattens,
uncomplicates, unifies space;⁴⁴ it betrays “a metaphysical urge to harness
geographical diversity–and often cultural diversity as well–to a dream of
order.”⁴⁵ To the anxiety-producing possibility that the unmapped world
has “no contour, limit, form, nor dimension,” the map “is an attempt to
impose the discipline of reason onto what is indistinct, indeterminate, and
formless.”⁴⁶ It presents its audience with the fantasy of a unified, know-
able, orderly space with fixed boundaries over which mastery is possible. It
feeds and creates illusions of power and control.
b. “To ask what a map is, and what it means to map
therefore, is to ask: in what world are you mapping, with
what belief systems, by which rules, and for what purposes?”
So let us return to Agrippa’s map.⁴⁷ Even without knowing its precise orien-
tation, dimensions, relative scale, by allowing its existence as a “map,” however
⁴⁰ To cite a few most significant examples: Gould 1985; Olsson 1992; Wood 1992; King 1996;
Cosgrove 2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2004.
⁴¹ Wood 1992: 1.
⁴² The classic example here is Saul Steinberg’s cartoon that appeared on the cover of the New
Yorker on March 29, 1976, often dubbed “A New Yorker’s View of the World,” featuring an
exaggeratedly large Manhattan centrally located within a significantly compressed United States
and beyond an even more significantly compressed world.
⁴³ Brotton 2012: 7.
⁴⁴ “Where real space is an assemblage of landscapes with infinite differences, a map intro-
duces a ruling order with categorical constants,” Jacob 2006: 23.
⁴⁵ Cosgrove 2001: 13. To put it bluntly, maps “could never be ideologically neutral,”
Helgerson 1992: 147.
⁴⁶ Jacob 2006: 29–30.
⁴⁷ The quotation that makes up subheading b. is Pickles 2004: 76–7.
15
loosely defined, we acknowledge for the map-makers and for the viewing
public a shared “worldview,” or an understanding of space that sees places in
relation to one another in a more complex fashion than in linear, one-
dimensional, hodological terms.⁴⁸ Exhibited in a “crowded, public place,”
serving neither administrative nor touristic purposes,⁴⁹ set up, as Pliny points
out, “for the city (Rome) to examine,” the world map allows Romans to see
how much of the world was theirs. Indeed, on the one hand, controlling large
swaths of territory can produce a certain amount of anxiety. It is a little
unsettling to be faced with the prospect of belonging to a new, enlarged empire
that remains formless and indeterminate. A map, a visual conceptualization of
empire, invites viewers to acquire knowledge, and control, of the land depicted.
Armed with information about Rome’s latest conquests, the dutiful imperial
subject can trace the empire’s boundaries.⁵⁰ The map suggests that this fixed,
unified space on the wall, this false vision of knowable space with clear and
stable boundaries, over which mastery is possible, represents the Augustan
empire. On the other hand, however, the map in and of itself is problematic.
Setting boundaries, as we have just seen historians of cartography point
out, is often more messy than it seems on the surface. Recent studies about
frontiers of the Roman empire have argued for apprehending frontiers in
fluid rather than rigid terms, thus belying the possibility of clear, bounded
spatial divisions.⁵¹
Moreover, the Augustan empire was not a static entity. The territorial
limits of the Augustan empire one day/month/year were not necessarily
those of the empire the next. Tiberius’ controversial claim that Augustus
informed him that the limits of empire had been reached and that he should
undertake no further expansion reinforces the point.⁵² Whether Augustus
⁴⁸ “The display value of maps . . . hinges on the average viewer being able to grasp that a map
. . . is a representation of a certain kind of space, whether or not that viewer understood or cared
about the details,” Riggsby 2019: 197. Of course, this is not to say that Roman map use was
widespread or that itineraries were not the most common spatial expressions; see Talbert 2010.
⁴⁹ Riggsby 2019: 191.
⁵⁰ Indeed, as Nicolet 1991: 180 astutely points out, Augustus went to great lengths to emphasize
his conquests and keep them front and center in people’s minds. His death provides a nice
example. At the first meeting of the Senate after his death, three documents were read out,
instructions regarding his funeral, his Breviarium in which he offered an accounting of the empire’s
lands, peoples, and monies, and his Res Gestae which listed his conquests. (Suetonius, Augustus
101.4; Tacitus, Annales 1.11.3–4 speaks about the Breviarium, on which see Goodyear 1972: ad loc.
Dio 56.33.3 mentions a fourth document.) His funeral procession, as Dio 56.34.3 records it, then
featured a parade of allegories of conquered peoples. Similarly Richardson 2008: 143–5.
⁵¹ Here see in particular the work of Whittaker 1994 and 2004.
⁵² Tacitus, Annales 1.11: quae cuncta sua manu perscripserat Augustus addideratque con-
silium coercendi intra terminos imperii (“All these things Augustus had written in his own hand,
16
actually issued such advice at the end of his life or Tiberius merely imputed
the idea to his predecessor, this represents a radically new policy.⁵³ Under
Augustus the Roman empire experienced, on several frontiers, the greatest
territorial expansion since the Mediterranean conquest of the third and
second centuries .⁵⁴ If Augustus did indeed attempt to call a halt to
additional territorial acquisition, then it was only after a period in which
Roman power and the limits of the world seemed coterminous. Boundaries
were not only markers of the end of empire at any given time, but also a line
beyond which Romans constantly aspired to reach. To insist on the fixed-
ness of boundaries necessitates the unthinkable imposition of closure on
future Roman imperial expansion. Jupiter’s famous prophecy in the Aeneid
culminates in the promise of imperium sine fine: “I set no limits to their
holdings and no time; I have given empire without end” (his ego nec metas
rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi, 1.278–9). The historian
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo in his Geography both echo the poet’s
sentiments, equating the borders of the inhabitable world and the limits
of Roman empire.⁵⁵ Boundaries always contain within themselves that
which will invite an imperial power to dismantle, deconstruct, re-erect
them further on down the line. Despite the desire that they be fixed, they
must be fluid. In a rather circular fashion, this fuels an impulse to map. Sine
fine, it turns out, provokes an unsettling anxiety and thus a desire to concep-
tualize the physical extent of one’s world in a unified manner, to impose
and see the fines.
It is important to note here that Virgil’s Jupiter proffers an alluring
fantasy of Roman imperium that takes on, within the epic, complex layers
of meaning. The god promises an imperium boundless both temporally and
physically so that ultimately limits of both historical time and geographical
and he had added the counsel that the empire should be maintained within its current
boundaries”).
⁵³ The question of whether Augustus, at the end of his life, compelled by the Pannonian
revolt (6–9 ) and the defeat of Varus (9 ), actually advocates a policy of no new expansion
or whether this was his successor’s own intention foisted on Augustus at his own accession in
14 is much debated. The ancient sources are Tacitus, Annales 1.11.4 and Dio 56.33.5–6. See
now Harris 2016: 55–7, and also 112–50 (chapter 4). For the purpose of my argument, it does
not matter whether Augustus explicitly formulated this idea or whether it only became explicit
in 14 .
⁵⁴ Gruen 1996: 147–97.
⁵⁵ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.3.3: “She [Rome] is the first and only
state recorded in all time that ever made the risings and the settings of the sun the boundaries of
her dominion.” See also Strabo, Geography 1.2.1 and 6.4.
17
space fall away. Indeed, the Aeneid thematizes multiple definitions of the
word finis, thus alternating between, while simultaneously intertwining,
various ideas about endings—of speaking, narrative, life, war, historical
time, and territorial borders.⁵⁶ And yet, even though the poet enshrines
the memorable phrase in his epic sometime in the 20s , the notion of
Rome’s boundless territorial empire, including the gradual shift in meaning
of the word imperium as it begins to acquire a “geographical flavor,”⁵⁷ has
already achieved cultural currency, as far back as either the 80s or, on
another view, the 60s . Richardson, for example, in his important study
The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third
Century to the Second Century , points out that Pompey’s activities in
the East after his defeat of Mithridates, annexing territory and thereby
altering the meaning of “province” in relation to Roman imperium, register
fundamental changes in the “mental wallpaper of a section of society.”⁵⁸
Erich Gruen, in his earlier groundbreaking work, The Hellenistic World and
the Coming of Rome, sets the date for a dawning Roman sense of expansive
territorial empire somewhat earlier, in the 80s , offering as evidence
Ciceronian speeches, the Ad Herennium, and repeated images on coins.⁵⁹
Whether one agrees with Gruen or Richardson makes no significant differ-
ence to my argument here. Virgil manages to capture and to distil into an
indelible catchphrase (albeit with his own temporal twist) a conception that
predates the writing of the Aeneid by several decades.
We must remember that maps do not exist in a vacuum. The impulse to
impose fixed and stable boundaries, to imagine a large expanse of land,
people, and resources as a coherent unity,⁶⁰ the “mapping impulse,” re-
emerges in countless aspects of a culture, in a myriad of ways. In “Toward a
Cultural History of Cartography,” Christian Jacob explains:
The historian of cartography can consider maps in isolation, as self-defined
artifacts to be classified and analysed. Or an attempt can be made to
understand maps within the culture that produced and used them, so
long as such a contextual approach does not lose sight of the map itself.
⁵⁶ See Mitchell-Boyask 1996. ⁵⁷ Richardson 2008: 92.
⁵⁸ The quotation is Richardson 2008: 6. His discussion of Pompey is at pp. 106–16. For more
on Pompey and Caesar and boundless imperium, see Chapter 1, pages 28–30 below.
⁵⁹ Gruen 1984: 273–87.
⁶⁰ Indeed, one should note here that recent work on globalism and Roman imperialism also
adds to the argument against any kind of fantasy of unity marking peoples and places that
become part of the Roman empire, suggesting instead that we consider regional variation and
diversity in the adoption of Roman culture. See for example Hingley 2005 and De Angelis 2013.
18
The cultural context of a map might be compared to a pattern of concentric
circles surrounding the map. We can move from the inner circle of map
making to the remote circles of economic, social, political, intellectual and
artistic context.⁶¹
As we have seen, the impulse to create a map of empire coincides with other
propensities for controlling space in the Augustan period—census-taking,
cadastration, writing of geographic literature, division of Rome and Italy
into discrete units.⁶² Let us move further afield. The impulse to gain control
of space, the desire to impose boundaries and to create a coherent unified
whole out of the empire’s territory and its people, spills over into almost
every aspect of Roman public life. Political, social, and cultural discourses in
Augustan Rome, rotating around questions of what it means to be Roman,
especially Roman and male, display a striking tendency towards order,
stability, and fixity.⁶³ Augustus lobbies for, and lends his name to, social
legislation concerning the boundaries of marriage.⁶⁴ Civic space and public
monuments—the Augustan Forum and Ara Pacis and the immense sundial,
the solarium Augusti, to name but a few examples⁶⁵—equally reveal this
Augustan desire for order and fixity.
So far, we have discussed Augustus and the increasing awareness of the
physical space of Roman imperium. As my first chapter will show, however,
ideas of Roman imperium sine fine, while certainly reaching new heights
and developments under Augustus, begin, in fact, in the late Republic with
Caesar and Pompey. These two rivals focus their attention on adding,
almost unfathomably, to the space of empire—Pompey to the East and in
Spain, Caesar in Gaul, Germany, and even Britain. Because the real geo-
graphical space of the Roman world expands and reconfigures itself so
aggressively in the 70–80 years that span the end of the Republic, the rise of
Octavian and the ensuing Augustan age, I propose to explore what light
the poets of Roman elegy, a genre almost chronologically coterminous with
⁶¹ Jacob 1996: 193. ⁶² Nicolet 1991, also Wallace-Hadrill 2005.
⁶³ On the Augustan “revolution in structures of knowledge,” see Wallace-Hadrill 2008:
213–312; on reorganizing time in lockstep with reconceiving space, see Feeney 2007: especially
167–211; on public order in Rome, see Nippel 1995: especially 85–98.
⁶⁴ On Augustan legislation and ideology, see Cohen 1991, Edwards 1993: 34–62, Severy 2003:
52–6 and 232–51, Milnor 2005: 140–85.
⁶⁵ Zanker 1988 remains essential reading. Nicolet 1991: 21–3; 41–5; 171–2 (especially) has
much to say about the Augustan Forum. See also Kellum 1990 and Rehak 2006 on the Ara Pacis
and the solarium Augusti.
19
such vast changes, can shed on the (elite, male) Roman worldview, the
Roman conception and production of the space of empire at that particular
historical and cultural moment.
c. Emphasis on “Impulse”: Cartographic Theory
and Jacques Lacan
Psychoanalytic theory, especially the work of the twentieth-century French
psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, offers a fruitful way to link together the
massive expansion in the space of Roman imperium between the 60s
and 18 , the effects such spatial dislocation has on the collective Roman
unconscious, and the features that emerge in the poetry of Catullus,
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Rapidly increasing imperial territory intro-
duces stress and anxiety; how does one define what is Roman in a unified
and fixed way? An impulse to create a coherent and orderly image under the
signifier “Roman empire” emerges. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on this
nexus of anxiety and desire which also emerges in the “I” of erotic poetry,
and is especially apparent in the Catullan and the Latin elegiac subject.
Indeed, in fascinating ways, Lacan’s theories about the constitution of
the subject mirror both the strategy behind, and the ultimate failure of,
the desire to make and study a large-scale map. Just as the map proffers a
fantasy, an uncomplicatedly false vision (adjusted, flattened, altered) of a
unified and knowable space with clear, stable boundaries, over which mas-
tery is possible, so, too, a powerful fantasy of unified wholeness, bounded
and gendered, propels the Lacanian subject. The subject seeks this wholeness
through adherence to images and signifiers that can offer only false whole-
ness because the images and signifiers are, in themselves, ultimately divided,
lacking, and unstable.⁶⁶ The subject, Lacan argues, is inherently fractured
and lacking; irremediable division, or inescapable alienation, characterizes
subjectivity itself.⁶⁷ The lack of unifiedness in the Lacanian subject, the stress
and anxiety this produces, and the impulse to seamless order that emerges
render Lacanian psychoanalytic theory a meaningful tool to connect the
subject of elegy and the space of empire, the deeper effects of transition on
cartography and subjectivity.
⁶⁶ In addition, it is impossible to separate out images from signifiers since language always
already intervenes, in particular because images exist structured in and by language. Or, in other
words, Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic realms are always already ineluctably intertwined.
⁶⁷ Lacan 1981: 203–15.
20
Language (among other factors) renders the subject divided, a propos-
ition Lacan nicely illustrates with the paradox: “I am lying.” The statement
lays bare two, irreconcilable “I”s, the subject of the statement and the subject
of the enunciation.⁶⁸ Language exists before the subject and exerts controls
over her; she emerges into a network of signifiers in place long before her
appearance and with which she strives to align herself. Lacan defines the
subject as “that which one signifier represents to another signifier.”⁶⁹ But
language itself is lacking. Language makes each fixed and coherent self-
image ultimately unravel. The subject desires wholeness and attempts to
paper over fundamental lack and dividedness; s/he embraces apparently
firm, fixed, unified cultural identities and presents her/himself accordingly,
a totality, undivided, coherent—a “man” or a “woman,” a “Roman,” an
“amator” or a “puella.” The subject anchors his/her sense of self, however,
on a signifier (or several), which, as is the way with signifiers, turns out to be
itself falsely unified, stable, and coherent. On the one hand, language’s
construction of meaning is not finite; the possibility constantly exists that
a new signifier will come along that will retroactively require all other
signifiers to shift their meaning. On the other, signifiers acquire meaning
through a relation of difference with other signifiers (hence the prevalence of
binary opposition—e.g., Man/Woman, Roman/Non-Roman), for which one
must posit a complete and closed system of signifiers to which nothing new
can be added. Ultimately the subject cannot escape a bind: the Symbolic
order (the realm of language, law, society), in which she must operate,
cannot successfully define her because it is only capable of accounting for
her through signifiers that cannot but fail to represent her.⁷⁰ Although she
struggles to present herself according to a signifier that her culture enshrines
⁶⁸ Lacan 1981: 138–42. Theorists of cartography isolate a similar rift that emerges from the
subject as she locates herself on a map with the famous words “I am here.” Consider Jacob 2006:
27: “The map allows for the experience of a duplication and a distancing: ‘I am here,’ that is,
I am at the same time here, on this side of the representation, in reality, and inside the
representation itself, a simulacrum of this reality” and “Identifying one’s place on the map
means indicating the place one occupies in real space by virtue of this detour through
representation, and of this metaphorical place where I see myself but where I am not.”
⁶⁹ Lacan frequently repeats this formulation, but see for example 1981: 207.
⁷⁰ Lacan 1981 defines a subject as that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier.
The signifier stands in for the subject that is eclipsed by language. In his lucid book about the
Lacanian subject, Bruce Fink 1995: 52–3 explains: “The signifier is what founds the subject; the
signifier is what wields ontic clout, wresting existence from the real that it marks and annuls.
What it forges is, however, in no sense substantial or material.”
21
as an unproblematic totality, ultimately contradictions, divisions, and inco-
herence emerge.⁷¹
So self-presentation for a subject, Lacan suggests, always involves the
contradictory, the conflicting, the incoherent. Such is the fate of all subjects.
And yet, the possibilities for dislocated representation, the images and
signifiers at the center of the construction, vary. Moreover, fractures and
tension always exist, but some moments of upheaval, crisis, flux bring the
decentered nature of the subject to the fore, drag it out into the light for our
contemplation. The change in the Roman production of space, a striking
shift in worldview that accompanies brutal civil wars, the collapse of the
Republic, and the rise of the principate, is one such dramatic metamor-
phosis. Simultaneous with, and as a means of recovery from, civil war, comes
an age of boundless conquest for Romans. Imperial expansion can be a
mixed blessing. Tremendous territorial acquisition brings tangible benefits:
an influx of people and goods from various cultures to Rome, a mix of
identities within the boundaries of empire, a heady sense that only the end of
the habitable world can bring a halt to Roman expansion.⁷² It also has
consequences. These elements combine to provoke anxiety in the form of
the rather uncomfortable possibility that with each conquest what it means
to be Roman may not be stable but rather be up for renegotiation. If a
signifier gains meaning only in its relation of difference to other signifiers, a
“Roman” has meaning only through the existence of that which is “non-
Roman.” That which is “non-Roman,” moreover, must be fixed and unalter-
able for “Roman” to attain definite, clear-cut meaning; there cannot be the
possibility of another signifier coming along that will retrospectively change
the definition of the signifier “Roman.”
But that possibility, by definition, always remains present in language,
and thus the signifier can never be fixed, stable, and coherent. To be more
precise, zeroing in on the example of Roman imperial boundaries (the issue
at the heart of this book), the proliferation of Roman conquest, sine fine,
constantly threatens to reclassify what is “non-Roman” as “Roman,” thus
rendering both categories disquietingly shifting. What kind of essential
⁷¹ See here the formulation of Porter and Buchan 2004: 3: Lacanian theory “is less a world-
view than a theory of why worldviews never entirely cohere . . . ” The entire section entitled
“Classical Antiquity with Lacan” (pp. 2–6) sets forth lucidly the Lacanian notion of the subject
as empty, something to be considered for what it lacks, for desire, rather than for the narratives
it offers about itself.
⁷² Ovid, Fasti 2.683–4, himself offers this oft-cited formulation: gentibus est aliis tellus data
limite certo: / Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem (“to other nations territory is granted with
fixed boundaries: the extent of the city of Rome and of the world is one and the same”).
22
differences can one posit if one can conceivably renegotiate the meaning of
the “non-Roman” and the “Roman,” particularly when the “Roman” can
capaciously expand to incorporate the “non-Roman,” thus compelling both
to be redefined?⁷³ Enter Augustus, who, at every turn, encourages, and
responds to, the desire for unified, bounded wholeness—centralizing, con-
solidating, and justifying his overarching administrative, financial, military,
moral, and religious power.⁷⁴ Indeed, as Micaela Janan has suggested,
Augustus “represents a desperate and determined effort to make ‘wholeness’
possible, to locate a redeemed and healed subject in a purified, coherent
Roman State.”⁷⁵ This is not to impute entirely pernicious motives to the
princeps; as a subject himself Augustus operates according to his own desire
for wholeness.
Drawing the Line(s): Elegy and the Space of Empire
This book traces the responses in Latin elegy to the changing perceptions
about the space of empire as Octavian emerges onto the world stage and
then consolidates his power over Rome as Augustus. For reasons that I will
explain in more detail hereafter, mostly having to do with the fact that
literary and political history are never quite as neatly circumscribed as we
would like them to be, I begin both before Octavian and before what is
technically called Roman elegy in the 60s with Catullus, and I end by the
Black Sea with Ovid, and his generically transgressive Tristia and Epistulae
Ex Ponto, a few years after the death of Augustus in 14 . A word seems in
order here about my choice to limit my textual exploration to Catullus and
the elegiac poets. It is impossible to escape the irony that one needs, even in a
book that exposes the reflex as problematic and artificial, to establish some
boundaries, to decide, for the sake of order and control, what belongs
“inside” the discussion and what must be relegated to a spot “outside” this
particular conversation. While the genres of epic, satire, and historiography
⁷³ Janan 2009 deploys Lacan in a similar fashion to reflect compellingly on Roman identity
and its predication on the non-Roman, especially when she discusses Narcissus and Aeneas
(pp. 174–9), Pentheus and the snake (pp. 186–212) in the Metamorphoses, and Silius Italicus’
post-Ovidian epic (pp. 233–9).
⁷⁴ See Dio 53.17: “And thus, the entire power of the people and of the senate passed to
Augustus, and from that time (27 ) a veritable monarchy was established.” And indeed, as
his principate continued, Augustus consolidated more and more elements of power in his own
hands.
⁷⁵ Janan 2001: 19.
23
occupy the attention of the majority of scholars working on questions of
space and Roman literature,⁷⁶ elegy and its precursor in Catullus call out for
this particular line of interrogation. The genre, perhaps uniquely short-lived,
explodes onto the scene, flourishes, and then disappears, almost in lockstep
with a dramatic shift in Roman spatial imaginations towards a cartographic
worldview. I shall argue that elegy’s experiences of Roman spatial dislocation
mirror, anticipate, run parallel to the ways in which the map produces space,
highlighting the problems and anxieties born from expanding empire, ones
that the map both tries to solve and simultaneously uncovers. The changing
world affects individual elegiac identities, both masculine and feminine.
As I conceived of this project, and discussed it with many interlocutors,
I became aware just how pervasively issues of space emerge in literature
written in the late Republic through the age of Augustus. Perhaps unsur-
prisingly, Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Horace, and Virgil are all authors whose
works show a profound engagement with the space of empire.⁷⁷ Ovid’s
fifteen-book epic, the Metamorphoses, may very well be the text most suited
to this line of inquiry, reveling as it does in its unbounded nature, its stories
that spill into other stories, and its narratives that wantonly disregard ends
of books, traditional markers of a tale’s conclusion.⁷⁸ But let us consider, for
a brief and short-hand example, the well-known and heavily programmatic
sequence of poems that launches Propertius’ third collection of elegies. The
poet foregrounds a variety of issues as he sets forth his themes for the book.
Primary among these is a significant dichotomy around which elegy consti-
tutes itself. The elegiac poet sets himself up in opposition to a writer of
public poetry. To himself he attributes the qualities of fashioning aesthetic-
ally polished, sparklingly original, pithy bon mots about love; to his coun-
terpart belong war and the expansion of empire in screeds that rival the
weightiness of the subject matter in length and scope.
A multitude of others, Propertius claims, will keep track of Roman history,
tracing its geographic expansion to modern-day Afghanistan where “Bactra
will be the boundary of empire” (finem imperii Bactra futura, 3.1.16). These
writers mimic in verse the adventures of Augustus who ponders engaging
“weapons” (arma, 3.4.1) “against wealthy India” (dites . . . ad Indos, 3.4.1),
⁷⁶ There are, of course, exceptions, in particular Catullus (see Chapter 1, below), Horace (e.g.,
Fitzgerald 2018, Rimell 2015, Oliensis 1998), Ovid (e.g., Rimell 2015, Habinek 1998), Seneca
(Edwards 2018, Rimell 2015), Statius (Kirichenko 2017, Rimell 2015).
⁷⁷ Again here see recently for example Riggsby 2009, Rimell 2015, Rimell and Asper 2017,
Fitzgerald and Spentzou 2018, Krebs 2018.
⁷⁸ My first attempt is Lindheim 2010.
24
“the most distant land” (ultima terra, 3.4.3). The elegiac poet, in a carefully
self-constructed opposition, refuses war as a topic of his verse—a valeat,
Phoebum quicumque moratur in armis (“Off with him, whoever delays
Phoebus with discussions of war,” 3.1.7, with armis echoing Augustus’ pre-
occupation with arma at 3.4.1). The road (via, 3.1.14, a concept that will
occupy us again hereafter)⁷⁹ that the elegist travels is pristine (intacta, 3.1.18),
not wide (lata, 3.1.14), a path that does not strike out through the physical
extent of empire (the orbis terrarum) but remains steadfastly in the realm
of elegiac song (carminis . . . in orbem, 3.2.1). The dichotomy Propertius
tries to draw is clear. And yet, even as he banishes Bactra and India, the
boundaries of imperium and its furthest lands, they enter the text and
the reader’s imagination as central to the amator’s definition of self and
of his puella.
Through my readings I hope to ask readers to reconsider poems, often
well-known ones, with an eye to noticing how frequently in fact geography
emerges, either explicitly as a central theme or quietly hovering at the
margins. We shall discover as we proceed through our readings that
Catullus and the elegists betray an intense interest in the subject in relation
to the expanding boundaries of the Roman empire. New possibilities open
up for reading elegy’s deep engagement in the construction of Roman
identity in the period of dramatic upheaval and transformation at the end
of the Republic and into the early empire, a vital and vibrant project whose
literary agents are often sought among the more serious and robust “public”
poets or the prose writers of historical importance.⁸⁰ My observations about
the importance of the physical space of empire in poems of Catullus,
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid intertwine with, and give fresh explanation
to, a significant line of interpretation that focuses on the unstable Roman
masculine self that emerges from the poetry. While the claim that elegy’s
subject is destabilized has by now gained widespread acceptance, interpret-
ers can, and do, describe and explain the incoherence that they perceive
differently.⁸¹ I suggest that we consider the link between geography and the
⁷⁹ See Chapter 2, pages 71–4 below, and especially Chapter 3, passim.
⁸⁰ For example, the following statement points to a fairly typical range of texts suggested for
this type of project: “In particular, there is no question that an alert reading of Greek and Roman
authors can uncover much about their worldview – among major ones, for example, Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Julius Caesar, Pliny the Elder, Pausanias, Ammianus
Marcellinus” (Talbert 2012: 6–7).
⁸¹ To cite a few examples: Lee-Stecum 1998; Janan 2001; Wyke 2002: 155–91; Miller 2004;
Greene 2005; Rimell 2006.
25
instability of the subject in poems that concern themselves with the physical
space of empire.
Elegy is where I chose to draw the line.
A Second Roadmap: An Overview
Every book tells a story, and this one is no different. It offers a narrative
about Latin elegy in which the genre’s various responses to the changing
shape and perception of the space of empire in the second half of the last
century takes center stage. My reading of elegy will seem simultaneously
both different and familiar, inevitably intersecting with the work of others
about genre, gender, subjectivity, Roman-ness, late Republican/Augustan
age politics, yet ultimately insisting that geographical space becomes the lens
through which our interpretation gets filtered. We begin with Catullus
(Chapter 1) whose poetry reveals an acute awareness of the constant and
almost unfathomable widening of his world. In his work people and goods
circulate with ease through geographical space, impervious to boundaries.
But sine fine takes its toll, especially at the level of the subject. The porous
nature of geographical boundaries seems to rub off onto the signifiers by
which the subject constructs him/herself as a coherent, unified, fixed entity.
The situation has not changed dramatically by the time Propertius writes his
early elegies (Chapter 2). Octavian/Augustus, following in the footsteps of
both Pompey and Caesar, relentlessly presents the Roman people with the
image of himself as unstoppable expansionist. Propertius’ Cynthia takes
advantage of the geographic expanse, journeying through geographic space
away from Rome and away from her lover. As we see with Catullus’ poetry, the
anxieties also emerge from Propertius’ elegies when he imagines the individ-
ual faced with an infinite and ever-changing world. While the Catullan subject
comes undone, the Propertian subject has a different response, one that
reflects the overall movement from reveling in vast spaces towards creating
clearly demarcated territories. The Propertian amator struggles to establish
and cling to the possibility of known and definable boundaries. He seeks to
render Cynthia his finis and to anchor his self-definition to her.
The story continues in the elegies of Tibullus (Chapter 3). If Propertius in
the Monobiblos seems to embrace the desire for control and fixity at the
heart of map-making, Tibullus’ poems both acknowledge their intense
attraction and admit their ultimate impossibility. On the one hand, he
draws a firm line between the lover-subject and anything that participates
26
in the geographic expanse of empire; his attention lingers on the viae in
particular. In Tibullus, commerce, exploration, war all stand in direct
opposition to amor. On the other, the fines between the two spheres seem
less clear, less stark than they might be. Just as boundaries on a map are not
eternally fixed, but lines to be crossed by expanding powers, or not precisely
delineated, but rather hazily defined zones of interaction, so in Tibullus’
elegies empire encroaches into amor, and somehow the two enter into a
troubled alliance. Propertius’ fourth and final book of elegies also dramatizes
the anxieties that emerge when one draws a map (Chapter 4). The false
promise of order and control, of being able to determine what is “in” and
differentiate it from what is “out,” what is “Roman” as opposed to what is
“non-Roman” returns in the guise of an Augustan-era map that the young
wife, Arethusa, consults in elegy 4.3 and of the walls around early Rome in
Tarpeia’s story of transgression from elegy 4.4. Propertius intertwines carto-
graphic fines with the fortified boundaries of the new city, until he retro-
spectively reconstructs the problem of porous limits as an originary one for
Rome, one that does not solely spring up with the imperial expansion of the
Augustan age but always already existed at the very beginnings of the city.
Ovid brings the narrative to its conclusion (Chapter 5). In the city people
can visit and examine Agrippa’s map; we have reached a time when the
“mapping impulse” finally leads to a map, a time when, evoking powerful
fantasies of order, control, and hierarchy, a publicly displayed world map
clearly demarcates center and peripheries. But side by side with these
fantasies, daily life reveals a heightened increase of movement of goods
and of people, as if fines were evaporating. The poet rejoices, heralding the
capital city as an imperial hub, destination for the flow of all commodities. In
his early erotic works, Ovidian women become consumers par excellence,
enhancing their appearance, and therefore their desirability in the new
“global” economy. After all, what could go wrong in this new world?
Serious issues crop up, it turns out, that take on a somewhat different aspect
for women and men. After a woman cloaks herself in the luxurious trap-
pings of empire that now flow to Rome, as she must to keep in step with her
times, we discover an impossibility of rediscovering her pre-adorned “self.”
Catch her before she performs her daily toilette and what you find is an
absence. With Ovid, banished to the very margins of empire away from his
beloved, central Rome, we get a front-row seat to what would be the fines
imperii on the map. But at Tomis nothing is clearly demarcated. Everywhere
hybrid and melange take over. And again the self falls into crisis, alienated
from himself, barbarus rather than Roman, “practically a Getic poet” rather
than a Roman one (paene poeta Getes not Romanus vates).
1
Sine fine
Imperium and Subject in Catullus
gentibus est aliis tellus data limite certo:
Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem.
“To other nations territory is granted with fixed boundaries:
The extent of the city of Rome and of the world is one and
the same.”
Ovid, Fasti 2. 683–4
Catullus is a bundle of contradictions. He says so himself. His feelings about
Lesbia, or about desire in general, unveil most clearly the Catullan subject’s
lack of fixity. In what is arguably his most famous poem, he offers a pithy but
discordant statement about desire: odi et amo (“I hate and I love,” 85.1). He
does not necessarily fare much better when he attempts to explain the
sentiments that Lesbia, in particular, inspires in him, alternately enraptured
by her untouchable, goddess-like aspect and disgusted by her whore-like
behavior.¹ Ultimately he ties himself in such knots that he utters the striking
confession that he has reached the point “that it is not possible any longer to
wish you well, should you become the most virtuous woman, nor to cease
loving you, should you stop at nothing” (ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si
optima fias, / nec desistere amare, omnia si facias, 75.3–4).² The carmina
Catulli do not lack sophisticated interpretations that home in on the para-
doxical and conflicting layers that make up the “I,” especially ones that
consider the poet’s treatment of amatory or poetic issues.³ And yet, while the
¹ The two Sapphic poems, 11 and 51, constitute the most obvious pair of poems to illustrate
this polarity. In my opinion, Janan 1994: 62–76 has the best reading, and it will become clear to
the reader that I find Lacan the most productive lens through which to read Catullus.
² Thomson 2003: ad loc, suggests that omnia si facias means “if you should prove to be
capable de tout.” I use his text except where otherwise noted.
³ For example, see Greene 1998: 1–36, who argues that erotic desire in Catullus reveals “the
fragmenting effects of amor on the self” (1), and Fitzgerald 1995 considers the power of the poet
in relation to poetic language to construct himself, his characters, and his readers as he chooses.
Miller 2004 and Janan 1994 fall partially into this category, but their use of Lacanian theory to
Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0002
28
divided Catullan subject occupies my attention in this chapter, for the most
part my reading emerges from an exploration of poems that belong in the
category neither of Lesbia poems nor of poems that center explicitly on
aesthetic, poetic choices.
My interest lies instead in poems that highlight geography, the physical
space of the imperium Romanum, as Catullus conceives of it in his poetry.⁴
I define the physical space of empire broadly to include, along with an
interest in geographical expanses, the flow of people, goods, and information
from one place to another, for political as well as non-political (commercial,
travel, etc.) purposes. I suggest that these poems, in a manner that rivals the
poems that center on the amatory experience, present an intensely fractured
and divided subject, who cannot cleave to a narrative of wholeness, but
rather slides from signifier to signifier at dizzying speed. The question is why
the thought of geographical space seems to incite, in the Catullan text, the
dissolution of the subject as a coherent, fixed entity. In an effort to cast light
on the polysemous subject that emerges from these particular poems,
I attempt an interpretation that marries the psychoanalytic theories of
Jacques Lacan about subjectivity and desire and the work of Roman
historians—social, cultural and political—about changing Roman concep-
tions of their imperium.
In Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, Nicolet
argues that the Augustan age moves Romans towards a new understanding
and conceptualization of the geographical space of their empire. As Octavian
transforms into Augustus and establishes his rule, as Rome grows from
“having to becoming an empire,” the princeps’ “obsession with space”⁵
becomes progressively more and more pervasive. An emphasis on territorial
read the text means that the desire they are exploring goes beyond the erotic self-portrait of the
amator. Janan’s groundbreaking reading of the Catullan corpus demonstrates that a Lacanian
analysis of the poems reveals in poet and audience the relentless desire that exists at the heart of
the subject to fashion and embrace unifying fictions while the text simultaneously demonstrates
the impossibility of achieving such ideals. Miller, in his book about Latin elegy, which includes a
chapter on Catullus whom he designates as a precursor to the elegists, deploys Lacan to explain
the unstable characterization of the elegiac amator, a frequently self-contradictory and inco-
herent self-representation that emerges from the collapse of the Republic and transition to the
regime of Augustus as cultural values and identities are in flux.
⁴ Usual readings of these poems (and I shall discuss 11, 29, 115 below, pages 34–9, and 28
below, pages 43–5) consider the extent to which Catullus rails against Roman brutality,
culminating most often in a linking of Lesbia’s promiscuity in poem 11 with the greedy grasp
of Roman imperialism—for example, Konstan 2000, 2007, Fitzgerald 1995: 179–84, Greene
1998: 26–36.
⁵ Nicolet 1991: 8.
29
expansion spills over into other strategies for ordering space, such as a
reorganization of Rome and of Italy into regions and a movement to centralize
and classify archives.⁶ And yet, imperial conquest is hardly a concept novel to
Augustus. Nicolet himself acknowledges that Pompey and Caesar, too, focus
their attention on the space of empire. Both men link together vast territorial
expansion and the intoxicating notion that Roman political dominion
stretches over the orbis terrarum.⁷
Pompey’s conquests in the East—in Asia, Pontus, Armenia, Paphlagonia,
Cappadocia, Cilicia, Syria—not only extend the fines imperii to an almost
unfathomable degree, but also allow him to boast Asiam ultimam provin-
ciarum accepisse eandemque mediam patriae reddidisse (“that he had
received Asia as the most remote of [Roman] provinces and had handed it
back to his country at its center,” Pliny, NH 7.99).⁸ Emphasizing his victories
in Spain and Africa, along with his eastern expansion, in triumphs, inscrip-
tions, speeches, coins, and the decor of his theater, that culminates rather
ostentatiously in the nude statue of the imperator with a globe in his left
hand,⁹ Pompey trumpets to Rome the idea that imperium sine fine is the new
Roman reality.¹⁰ Buying into his vision, publicani compete so frenetically
for tax contracts in the East in 61 that they must request adjustment
downward by about a third from the Senate to compensate for their rash
overbidding.¹¹ The results notwithstanding, the exuberance with which the
publicani initially bid when the opportunity first becomes available under-
scores their (perhaps rather naive) sense of a boundless world with limitless
resources opening up to them.
Not to be outdone, Caesar pursues a similar policy of limitless expansion,
pushing back Roman boundaries through military conquest in Gaul,
Germany, and even Britain. Indeed, when Pliny compares the two men
with respect to the glory each brought to the Roman empire (ad decus
⁶ In a similar vein to Nicolet, see Wallace-Hadrill 2005 and 2008 and Richardson 2008:
117–45. Also see the Introduction, pages 12–13 above, with footnotes.
⁷ See Nicolet 1991: 29–56, chapter 2, “Symbolism and Allegories of the Conquest of the
World: Pompey, Caesar, Augustus,” for a discussion of how and when the expression orbis
terrarum first makes its way into Roman political discourse, and then into official Roman
documents.
⁸ Pliny claims that Pompey uttered this boast when discussing his achievements in the
assembly (contio), NH 7.99. Similarly, Cicero, De Provinciis Consularibus 31.
⁹ Nicolet 1991: 31ff.; RRC no. 426 4a, described by Nicolet 1991: 37. See also Kuttner 1999.
¹⁰ Plutarch, Pompey 45.5: “For others before him had celebrated three triumphs; but he
celebrated the first over Libya, his second over Europe, and his last one over Asia, so that he
seemed in a way to have included the whole world in his three triumphs.”
¹¹ The classic treatment is Badian 1972: 99ff.
30
imperii Romani, NH 7.95), he ranks Caesar ahead of his rival (maior, NH
7.99). Pompey, Pliny claims, proudly and publicly asserts his territorial
acquisitions for Rome, but should anyone wish to scrutinize Caesar’s
achievements (Caesaris res, NH 7.99), totum profecto terrarum orbem enu-
meret, quod infinitum esse conveniet (“he would assuredly reckon up the
whole world, which task will be agreed to be infinite,” NH 7.99). Caesar, to
an even greater extent than Pompey, succeeds in rendering the limits of
imperium Romanum equivalent to those of the inhabitable world. Between
the actual conquests of the two commanders in the fields and their self-
promoting efforts to ensure awareness of their accomplishments at home, a
person living in Rome in the late 60s and early to mid 50s cannot but
view his world as extending constantly and rapidly outward.
A transpadanus by birth,¹² from Verona, Catullus lived in Rome during
this heady time of Roman expansion. In this chapter I explore the various
ways in which his poetry responds to the ever-increasing geographic space
of Roman imperium; indeed, even a cursory reading of the extant Catullan
corpus reveals fairly frequent and insistent geographical references.¹³ It is
important to note here, however, that a worldview that entertains fantasies
of constant territorial acquisition is not, literally, the same as one in which
boundaries simply do not exist (sine fine). A shared visualization of aggres-
sive expansion does not reveal an insouciance about limits. On the contrary,
imperium sine fine, somewhat paradoxically, reveals an obsession with,
rather than a heedlessness of, geographical boundaries—an obsession
simultaneously with their fixed existence and with their transgression.
Geographical boundaries always will invite an imperial power first to appre-
hend them and then to dismantle, deconstruct, re-erect them further on
down the line. They are markers not only of the end of empire at any given
time, but also the line beyond which Romans must constantly aspire to
reach. Moreover, to complicate matters further, the markers themselves are
always already in flux. Recent studies about the frontiers of the Roman
¹² Catullus refers to himself as transpadanus at 39.13. Lewis 2018: 122–3 nicely observes that
“on that side of the Po” implies Rome as the point of focalization, indicating a colonized
Catullus who sees the world through a Roman lens.
¹³ Recently Lewis 2018 and Fitzgerald 2018 both discuss the production of space in Catullus’
poetry. Lewis focuses on three different ways that Catullus locates Lesbia in space in his poems
while Fitzgerald links geographical space and the space of individual poems.
About half of the polymetric poems (28 out of 60) “feature explicit geographical references”
(Lewis 2018: 121 and n. 7). Lewis distinguishes among political and contemporary places in the
polymetric poems, archaic and literary “neoteric” space in poems 63–8, and abstract space in the
epigrams.
31
empire point out that, practically and conceptually, the boundaries consist
of fluid zones rather than precisely defined, clear lines in the sand.¹⁴
The constitution of the subject, in Lacanian theory, mirrors the problems
with the establishment of physical, imperial boundaries in spatial terms. Just
as geographical limits are both sought and pushed back, the subject, too,
seeks to lay down its boundaries, which must inevitably, inherently be
transgressed. Lacan argues that the subject is intrinsically fractured and
lacking; language (among other factors) insists that the subject be irreme-
diably divided.¹⁵ The lack results in desire, a desire to discover the object that
will confer wholeness to the subject, a wholeness in the form of coherence
and a unified self-image. On the one hand, the “I” develops from a fusion
or a sedimentation of linguistically structured images that coalesce into a
whole. On the other hand, however, language is always already lacking.¹⁶
A signifier acquires meaning in its relation of difference to other signifiers;
“Man” requires “Woman” to make sense while “Roman” has meaning only
through the existence of what is “non-Roman.” But the other signifier, in
relation to which the first signifier gains meaning, must be fixed and stable in
order for this operation to work. And yet, by definition, the signifier is never
unalterable, for there is always the possibility of another signifier emerging
that threatens to shift the definitions of already existing signifiers. If, by
continuing conquest, what was previously “non-Roman” becomes suddenly
“Roman,” for example, the definitions, the boundaries of both categories
dissolve and reconstitute themselves in a disquietingly shifting way. In this
chapter I argue, with the help of Lacanian theory, that Catullus betrays an
intense awareness of his changing geographic world in his poems and that
one can trace the impact of this historical, spatial awareness on the ways in
which the poet imagines the subject in his verses. The lack of spatial fixity,
intertwined with a sense of practically unlimited potential for Roman
expansion, causes an anxiety made manifest as the Catullan subject comes
apart at the seams.
The Whole Wide World: Catullus 11, 29, 84, 95, 115
The poems of Catullus have a cosmopolitan feel. On one level, the poet
seems obsessed with defining and defending his own urbanitas, as well as the
¹⁴ Whittaker 1994. ¹⁵ Lacan 1981: 203–15 and 138–42. ¹⁶ Lacan 2006: 495.
32
aesthetic and ethical big-city sophistication that his social set of friends and
fellow-poets displays.¹⁷ Unlike Egnatius, the Spaniard, who brushes his teeth
with his own urine until they shine brightly (39.17–21),¹⁸ or Suffenus whose
abundance of bad verses transforms him into “just any country bumpkin”
(unus caprimulgus, 22.10), a “ditch-digger” (fossor, 22.10), “more crude than
the crude rustic countryside” (inficeto . . . inficetior rure, 22.14), Catullus is a
man of Rome, in possession of all the urban social niceties, a writer of witty,
learned, Hellenistically-inspired verse. On another level, however, the poet’s
work exudes a sense of Rome’s place in a wider geographical context. Catullus
and his friends circulate, traveling east to Bithynia and Macedonia (10, 28,
and back 31), and west to Spain (9, 12). Products also flow to Rome, like
the special napkins that Veranius and Fabullus bring home with them
from Spain as gifts for Catullus (sudaria Saetaba ex Hiberis, 12.14) to
accompany their stories about the “places, deeds, and peoples” (loca, facta,
nationes, 9.7). Not a small, isolated little city like the Verona of poem 67
where doors are most concerned to reveal the sordid goings-on of house-
holds beset with adultery, Catullan Rome and its inhabitants, for better but
more often for worse, direct their attentions outward rather than inward,
beyond the boundaries of the city to the boundaries of the world.
The lived reality of Roman territorial expansion crops up in many guises
in Catullan verse. Poem 84 is an amusing and clever piece that builds slowly
to the punchline of the closing word. A poem about the uncouth speech of a
certain Arrius, the verses regale the reader with examples of words begin-
ning in a vowel that the poor man, attempting to put on an air of sophis-
tication, aspirates. In addition, as scholars have pointed out, Catullus more
subtly excoriates the same wretch with the constant repetition of the “s”
sound. While Arrius is in Rome, he drives everyone mad with his insistent
aspiration and his hissing.¹⁹ At line 7, everyone’s ears (omnibus aures) catch
a break; Arrius departs the city and “h”s and “s”s no longer abound.
Pointedly, however, Arrius has not simply left Rome; indeed, Catullus grants
¹⁷ For example, see Fitzgerald 1995: chapter 4 on Catullus’ performances in laying claim to
urbanitas. Urbanitas for Catullus is a social and ethical but also an aesthetic stance; poetic style,
in particular an allegiance to Callimachean principles, plays a significant role (along with proper
behavior) in staking a claim to urbanitas, see Fitzgerald 1995: especially 87–93. On Catullus’
defining urbanitas to include other key terms—venustus, lepidus, bellus, elegans, salsus—see
Wiltshire 1977 and Seager 1974.
¹⁸ See Lewis 2018: 129–31 on Egnatius in poem 37.
¹⁹ See Thomson 2003: introduction to poem 84, and Vandiver 1990.
33
him a very specific destination—Arrius gets sent to Syria.²⁰ Arrius travels far
from Rome, a geographic distance that requires a fair amount of time to
reach, both poetically—three lines—and temporally—a long enough period
that the pained ears of those who had the misfortune to hear him converse
(and of the poor readers as well) now have a chance to recover. Suddenly,
however, news comes back to the city. The Ionian Sea, once crossed by
Arrius, now gets renamed “Hionian” (84.12)! Roman boundaries move
outward, more and more territory belongs under Roman rule; in the period
of the late Republic, the possibility of a man in Rome undertaking a journey
to Syria is not far-fetched, but rather one of the everyday experiences that
make up the texture of Catullan verse. Not only people, but information, too,
flows freely between places, since a message (nuntius, 84.10) announces
Arrius’ geographical progress. The opening up of the eastern world to
Roman domination gets imagined here by Catullus in a tongue-in-cheek
fashion, as an uncouth, aspirating Roman compels the Ionian Sea into
linguistic submission.
A similar interest in geographic spaces emerges when Catullus imagines
literary fame. In a poem that scholars mine to demonstrate the poet’s
allegiance to Callimachean literary aesthetics,²¹ Catullus sharply contrasts
the verses of Cinna and Volusius. Over the course of nine long years Cinna
has composed the Zmyrna (95.1–2), a poem whose glory will transcend
time (95.6) and also space (95.5). Its fame will reach the hollow waves of
Satrachus (cavas Satrachi . . . ad undas, 95.5), a river in Cyprus, home of
Zmyrna’s story. Volusius, meanwhile, a prolific scribbler like Hortensius,
poet of five hundred thousand (words?, milia . . . quingenta, 95.3) in one
(year?, uno . . . 95.3) and long-winded Antimachus (tumido . . . Antimacho,
95.10),²² will not enjoy similar success. Volusius’ verses will immediately
provide abundant wrappings for mackerel (laxas scombris . . . tunicas,
²⁰ Thomson 2003: ad loc. argues that Arrius is probably sent on military expedition with
Crassus, and therefore dates the poem to about 55 . There is, however, no reason to assume
that there could be no other purpose for Arrius’ travels to Syria.
²¹ There is a great deal of scholarship on Catullus as a learned (doctus) poet with Callimachus
as his primary poetic model. See for example the oft-cited Clausen 1964. In the latest companion
to Catullus, two chapters focus specifically on Catullus’ Callimacheanism. Knox 2007 surveys
the influence of Callimachus on Catullus while Batstone 2007 approaches the issue from
another angle, considering the extent to which the programmatic aspects of Callimacheanism
are useful to a reading of Catullus.
²² Thomson 2003: 525 rehearses the arguments for accepting poem 95 as a whole, rather than
relegating the aspersions cast on Antimachus to a separate fragment.
34
95.8),²³ presumably fished out of the Padus (Po) river where Catullus
assures us Volusius’ literary fame will die (95.7). While clearly a polemic
expression of aesthetic preferences, pointing out, in fine Callimachean fash-
ion, the desirability of poetry that runs like a swift, clear river (Satrachus)
rather than like a slow, muddy one (Po), poem 95 also has something to say
about Catullus’ geographic world. Strikingly, literary fame here possesses a
spatial as well as a temporal dimension. Bad poetry has no afterlife in time
or space, remaining where it was originally produced to wrap fish. Excellent
poetry, on the other hand, transcends its author, read (and appreciated) by
generations to come not only in the place where Cinna wrote, but through-
out the Roman world.
Territorial expansion through military conquest also plays a significant
role in creating the sense of Rome’s infinite geographic possibility that
emanates from Catullan verse. Poems 29 and 115 center on Mamurra, a
Roman eques from Formiae (poems 41, 57) who served under Pompey in the
East, and under Julius Caesar in Spain in 61–60 as well as in Gaul.
A scathing attack on all three of his countrymen, poem 29 expresses
Catullus’ feelings of outrage at Mamurra’s large-scale profligacy, and at the
two generals’ willingness first to provide the wastrel with the means for his
expenditures, then subsequently to turn a blind eye to his excesses.
Enriching himself with loot (praeda, 29.18) from Pontus (29.18) and then
Spain (29.19), Mamurra manages to spend his profits faster than he acquires
them (29.16).²⁴ Insatiable, he now desires quod Comata Gallia / habebat
ante et ultima Britannia (“that which Long-Haired [Transalpine] Gaul and
farthest Britain used to possess before,” 29.3–4). Catullus links Mamurra’s
appetites with the extent of territory under Roman domination; both emerge
from the poem as limitless, ever capacious.²⁵
Indeed, one could suggest that Catullus highlights this very connection,
albeit in a (typically Catullan) hyperbolic fashion. Mamurra’s excesses,
catalogued in a series of poems (29, 41, 57, 105, 114, 115), have reached
such a frenzied level that Catullus has chosen to brand him with an
²³ See Thomson 2003: ad loc. for the assertion that laxas means abundant. There is some
argument over whether we are supposed to imagine the fishmongers wrapping the fish in the
papyrus sheets or whether such coverings were used only for cooking.
²⁴ Indeed, Pliny (NH 36.7) notes that Mamurra’s house was infamous for its excessive luxury,
the first to have marble paneled walls (Wiseman 1985: 103, with n. 40).
²⁵ Konstan 2007 points out that poems 29 and 115 link Roman imperial expansion with
Mamurra’s avarice and profligacy. He focuses, however, on Catullus’ sustained and serious
critique of Roman military expansion, motivated by a “a hollow lust for power, display, and sex”
on the part of the ruling men of the time (75).
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time of the great Deluge.” It is curious that he should give to the
Syrian Noah the Greek name, and that he should speak of him as
not a native, but as coming from the East, from Scythia. He says: “Of
this Deucalion have I heard in Greece, what the Greeks relate. The
story is this: The present race of men is not the first, for that
perished. This is the second race which sprang from Deucalion, and
was very numerous. The earlier generation was very evil, and
violated the Divine law. They neither kept oaths nor showed
hospitality; they took not the stranger in, nor protected him when he
sought protection; therefore a terrible destruction fell upon them.
Much water gushed out of the earth, great rains poured down, and
the sea rose and overwhelmed the earth. Deucalion alone of all men
was preserved to another generation on account of his wisdom and
piety. He was thus saved. He went into a great ark which he had
built, along with his wife and children. Then came to him, pair by pair,
cows, horses, lions, serpents, and all kinds of animals which are
nourished on earth, and he took them all in. They did not hurt him,
for Zeus ordained a great friendship among them. So they all sailed
in the ark as long as the flood lasted. This is the Greek story of
Deucalion.
“But very wonderful is the confirmation of the history as it is related in
Hierapolis. In the neighbourhood of that city a great chasm opened
which engulphed all the waters of the Flood. Thereupon Deucalion
erected altars, and dedicated a temple to Here (Atergatis) over the
chasm. I have seen this; it is very small: whether it was once large
but has since become smaller, I cannot say; but I saw that it was
small. For the confirmation of the history the following takes place:
twice in the year the sea-water is brought into the temple. Not only
do the priests bear it, but all Syria and Arabia, and many from
beyond Euphrates, come and carry water. They pour it out in the
temple; then it runs down into the chasm, and, though it may be very
small, it takes in all the water poured into it. This they do, say they,
because Deucalion instituted this rite as a memorial of his
deliverance, and of the mercy of God.”[210]
Equally fully has the Babylonian tradition reached us from the
Chaldee history of the old priest of Bel, Berosus (B.C. 260). The
Chaldees had placed ten kings at the head of this mystic history,
which answer to the ten generations in Genesis before the Flood.
The last of these patriarchs was called Xisuthrus, who is the same
as the Biblical Noah. Berosus relates the story of the Deluge thus:
“Under the reign of Xisuthrus there was a great flood. Kronos (i.e.
Bel) appeared to Xisuthrus in a dream, and warned him that all men
would be destroyed by a deluge on the 15th of the month Dæsios,
and he commanded him to write down all the learning and science of
men, and to hide it in the sun-city Siparis, and then to build a ship
and to enter it along with his family and relatives and nearest friends,
and to take into it with him food and drink, and beasts and winged
fowl. When he was asked whither he was about to sail, he was
bidden reply: To the gods, to pray them that men may prosper. He
obeyed; and made an ark five stadia long and two wide, laid in what
was commanded, and sailed with his wife and child and relatives.
When the flood abated, Xisuthrus sent out a bird which, as it found
no food nor ground on which to perch, returned to the ship. After a
day, he sent out another bird; this came back with mud on its feet.
The third bird he sent out did not return. So Xisuthrus knew that the
land appeared, and he broke a hole in the ship and saw that the ship
was stranded on a mountain; so he disembarked with his wife and
daughter and steersman; and when he had adored the earth, raised
an altar, and offered to the gods, he vanished. Those who remained
in the ship also went out, when they saw that Xisuthrus did not
return, to seek Xisuthrus, and they called him by name. But
Xisuthrus appeared again no more, only his voice was heard bidding
them fear God, and telling them that he was taken to dwell with the
gods, because he was pious. The same honour was accorded to his
wife and daughter and to the steersman.” This refers to their being
set in the sky as constellations: Xisuthrus as the water-bearer, the
virgin, and steersman still occupy their places there. “He bade them,”
continues Berosus, “return to Babylon, and, as Fate decreed, take
his writings out of Siparis, and from them instruct men. The place
where they found themselves was Armenia. Some fragments of the
ship remain on the mountains of the Kordyæans in Armenia, and
some take away particles and use them as amulets.”[211]
Eusebius has preserved a fragment of another Babylonian writer,
Abydenos, which gives the same story precisely.[212]
Another Chaldee tradition preserved by Cassian is that, before the
Flood, Ham concealed in the ground treatises of witchcraft and
alchemy, and that, when the water abated, he recovered them.[213]
According to Berosus also, Xisuthrus had three sons,—Zerovanos,
Titan, and Japetosthes. Zerovanos is the same as Zoroaster.
From Phrygia also come to us traces of a Diluvian tradition. A
number of coins of Apamea, a city of Phrygia, between the rivers
Mæander and Marsyas, of the period of Septimius Severus and the
following emperors, possibly bear reference to this event.[214] One, a
coin of Philip, bears on the reverse something like a box, containing
a man and woman; on the panel of the box, under the man, is written
“Noe,” the dove is bringing the olive branch, and the raven is seated
on the edge of the box above the head of the female figure. The
same two persons are also represented on dry land, with the right
hand uplifted in the attitude of prayer. Another coin with the same
subject, on the reverse has, inscribed on the ark, ΝΗΤΩΝ.
To elucidate these coins, reference is made to a passage in the
Sibylline Oracles to this effect: “In Phrygia lies steep, to be seen from
afar, a mountain, named Ararat.... Therefrom streams the river
Marsyas; but on its crest rested the ark (κιβωτός) when the rain
abated.”[215] As the ancient name of Apamea seems to have been
Kibotos, it is not unlikely that the Sibylline writer mixed together in
those lines the Mosaic and the Phrygian traditions.
It must, however, be admitted that it is quite as probable that the box
represents a temple, and the two figures tutelary deities, and that the
“Noe” is a contraction for “Neocoros,” the most important title
assumed by Greek cities, and often recorded on their coins.
The ancient Persian account in the Bundehesch is this:—“Taschter
(the spirit ruling the waters) found water for thirty days and thirty
nights upon the earth. Every water-drop was as big as a bowl. The
earth was covered with water the height of a man. All idolaters on
earth died through the rain; it penetrated all openings. Afterwards a
wind from heaven divided the water and carried it away in clouds, as
souls bear bodies; then Ormuzd collected all the water together and
placed it as a boundary to the earth, and thus was the great ocean
formed.”[216]
The ancient Indian tradition is, “that in the reign of the sun-born
monarch Satyavrata, the whole earth was drowned, and the whole
human race destroyed by a flood, except the pious prince himself,
the seven Rishis and their several wives.” This general pralaya, or
destruction, is the subject of the first Purana, or sacred poem; and
the story is concisely told in the eighth book of the Bhagavata, from
which the following is an abridged extract:—“The demon Hayagriva
having purloined the Vedas from Brahma whilst he was reposing, the
whole race of men became corrupt, except the seven Rishis and
Satyavrata. This prince was performing his ablutions in the river
Critamala, when Vishnu appeared to him in the shape of a small fish,
and after several augmentations of bulk in different waters, was
placed by Satyavrata in the ocean, when he thus addressed his
amazed votary:—‘In seven days all creatures who have offended me
shall be destroyed by a deluge; but thou shalt be secured in a
capacious vessel miraculously formed. Take, therefore, all kinds of
medicinal herbs and esculent grain for food, and, together with the
seven holy men, your respective wives, and pairs of all animals,
enter the ark without fear; then shalt thou know God face to face,
and all thy questions shall be answered.’ Saying this, he
disappeared; and, after seven days, the ocean began to overflow the
coasts, and the earth to be flooded by constant showers, when
Satyavrata, meditating on the Deity, saw a large vessel moving on
the waters: he entered it, having in all respects conformed to the
instructions of Vishnu, who, in the form of a large fish, suffered the
vessel to be tied with a great sea-serpent, as with a cable, to his
measureless horn. When the deluge had ceased, Vishnu slew the
demon and recovered the Vedas, and instructed Satyavrata in divine
knowledge.”[217]
The Mahabharata says that the boat containing Manu and his seven
companions rested on Mount Naubhandanam, the highest peak of
the Himalayas; and the name Naubhandanam signifies “ships
stranding.”[218]
The Greek traditions are not early, and were probably borrowed from
Semitic sources. We have seen the story told by Lucian in his book
“De Dea Syra,” but in his “Timon” he follows the more authentic
Greek legend, and makes Deucalion escape in a little skiff
(consequently without the animals), and land on Mount Lycoris.
We have also the same catastrophe somewhat differently related by
Ovid. The world he represents “as confederate in crime,” and
doomed therefore to just punishment. Jupiter sends down rain from
heaven, and rivers and seas gushing forth from their caves gather
over the earth’s surface, and sweep mankind away. Deucalion and
his wife alone, borne in a little skiff, are stranded on the top of
Parnassus. By degrees, the waters subside: the only surviving pair
inquire of the gods how they may again people the desert earth.
They are ordered, with veiled heads, to throw behind them the bones
of their great mother. Half doubtful as to the meaning of the oracle,
they throw behind them stones, which are immediately changed into
men and women, and the earth spontaneously produces the rest of
the animal creation.[219]
Apollodorus relates the matter thus:—“When Zeus determined to
destroy the brazen race, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus,
made a great ark, λάρναξ, and put into it all necessary things, and
entered it with Pyrrha. Zeus then, pouring down heavy rains from
heaven, overwhelmed the greater part of Greece, so that all men
perished except a few who fled to the highest mountains. He floated
nine days and nights in the sea of waters, and at last stopped on
Mount Parnassus. Then Zeus sent Hermes to ask him what he
wished, and he solicited that mankind might be made again. Zeus
bade him throw stones over his head, from which men should come,
and said that those cast by Pyrrha should be turned into women.”
Stephanus of Byzantium says that the tradition was that after the
surface of the earth became dry, Zeus ordered Prometheus and
Athene to make images of clay in the form of men; and when they
were dry, he called the winds and made them breathe into each, and
rendered them vital: and thus the earth after the Flood was
repeopled.[220] Diodorus says, “In the Deluge, which happened in the
time of Deucalion, almost all flesh died.”[221]
The Chinese begin their dynasties with Jao, the last of the old race,
whose words are thus recorded in the Schu-Kiug:—“The mighty
waters of the flood spread themselves out, and overflowed, and
drowned everything. The mountains disappeared in the deep, and
the hills were buried beneath them. The foaming billows seemed to
threaten heaven. All people were drowned.”[222] An ancient
inscription, which the Chinese attribute to Yu, the third patriarch after
the Flood, and which at least dates from before Christ, refers to this
event:—“The illustrious Emperor Jao said, sighing, ‘Companions and
counsellors! The great and little territories up to the mountain’s peak,
the homes of birds and wild beasts, were overflowed far and wide.
Long had I forgotten my home; now I rest upon the mountain top of
Jo-lu.... The trouble is over, and the misfortune is at an end; the
streams of the south flow, clothes and food are before us. The world
is at rest, and the flying rain cannot again destroy us.’”[223]
In one of the writings of the disciples of Tao-tse, the tradition takes a
fuller form. Kung-Kung, a bad spirit, enraged at having been
overcome in war, gave such a blow against one of the pillars of the
sky with his head that he broke it; and the vault of heaven fell in, and
a tremendous flood overwhelmed the earth. But Niu-Noa overcame
the water with wood, and made a boat to save himself, which could
go far; and he polished a stone of five colours—the rainbow—and
therewith he fastened the heavens, and lifted them up on a tortoise-
shell. Then he killed the black dragon Kong-Kong, and choked the
holes in heaven with the ashes of a pumpkin.[224] In the story of Jao
there is also a faint trace of his connection with the rainbow, for he is
said to have eyebrows coloured and shaped like rainbows.[225]
The Kamskadales say, “that in the remote ages when their great
ancestor and God, Kutka, lived in Kamschatka, there was a mighty
deluge. Many men were drowned therein, but some tried to save
themselves in boats, but the waves overwhelmed them. Those who
were saved were rescued on great rafts made of trees bound
together, to which they retreated, taking food and their property with
them. And that they might not drift out to sea, they anchored
themselves with great stones, which they tied to the edges and let
down into the water. And when the flood abated, they rested on the
top of a high mountain.”[226]
A Lapp tradition is that God once submerged the world, saving only
one brother and sister alive, whom He placed on Mount Passeware.
When all the water disappeared, the children separated to wander
over the earth, and see whether they alone remained alive. They met
after three years, and then separated again, for they recognized one
another as brother and sister. After three years they met, but turned
their backs on one another once more for the same reason. Again
they met after the lapse of three years, and again they parted; but
when they met again, after three years’ further absence, they no
longer recognized each other, and so they took one another in
marriage; and of them all generations of men are come.[227]
Among the Kelts, the Deluge formed a prominent feature, and the
ark was connected with their most sacred religious rites.
A Welsh legend is this:—“One of the most dreadful of events was the
outbreak of Llyn Llion, the sea of seas, which overwhelmed the world
and drowned all men except Dwyan and Dwyvach, who escaped in a
bare boat and colonized Britain. This ship was one of the three
masterpieces of Hu, and was built by the heavenly lord, Reivion; and
it received into it a pair of every kind of beast when the Llyn Llion
burst forth.” This Reivion is the same as Hu Cadarn, the discoverer
of the vine; and it is said of him that “he built the ark laden with fruit,
and it was stayed up in the water, and carried forward by serpents;”
and of the rainbow it was said, that the Woman of the silver wheel,
Arianrhod, to control the wizards of night and evil spirits of tempest,
and out of love to the Britons, “wove the stream of the rainbow,—a
stream which drives the storm from the earth, and makes its former
destruction stay far from it, throughout the world’s circle.”[228]
The Norse legend in the younger Edda is, “Bör’s sons (Odin, Vilj,
and Ve) slew the giant Ymir; and when he fell, so much blood (in
poetic phraseology Ymir’s blood signified water) ran out of the
wounds, that the whole race of the giants was drowned in it, except
one, who with his family escaped; this one is called Bergelmr. He got
into a boat along with his wife, and was thus saved.”[229]
The Lithuanian myth was this:—When Pramzimas, the most high
God, looked out of his heavenly house upon the world through a
window, he saw that it was filled with violence. Then he sent Wind
and Water to devastate the earth, and this they did for twenty days
and nights. Pramzimas looked on, and as he looked on, he ate nuts
at his window, and threw the shells down. One shell fell on the top of
a mountain, and some men, women, and beasts scrambled into it
and were saved alive, while all the rest of the inhabitants of the world
were drowned. When the flood drained away, the pairs in the nut-
shell left it, and were scattered over the earth. Only one aged couple
remained, and they complained; then God sent them the rainbow to
console them, and bade them jump over the bones of the earth.
They jumped nine times, and nine pairs of living human beings
started to life, and founded the nine races of Lithuanian blood.[230]
Among the negroes of Africa, traditions are faint, or have been little
sought after and collected. The Jumala negroes say that once when
the earth was full of cruelty and wickedness, the god Til destroyed it
with fire, and that one man alone was saved alive, named
Musikdgen, i.e. the mountain chief, because he was found without
blame.
In America the crop of traditions is abundant.
The Kolosches, living in Russian America, say that the first dweller
on the earth was Kitkhughia-si, and that he resolved to destroy all his
children who sinned against him. Thereupon he brought a flood over
the land, and all perished save a few who escaped in boats to the
tops of mountains, where, say they, the remains of the boats, and
the ropes which fastened them, remain to be seen.[231]
Among the Dog-rib Indians, Sir John Franklin found the story much
more complete; and as this tribe lives near the Polar Sea, far from
any mission stations, it is scarcely possible that the story can have
been derived from Christian teachers. They say that Tschäpiwih,
their great ancestor, lived on a track between two seas. He built a
weir, and caught fish in such abundance that they choked the
watercourse, and the water overflowed the earth. Tschäpiwih with his
family entered his canoe, and took with him all kinds of beasts and
birds. The land was covered for many days; at last Tschäpiwih could
bear it no longer, so he sent out the beaver to look for the earth. But
the beaver was drowned. Then he sent out the musk-rat, which had
some difficulty in returning, but it had mud on its paws. Tschäpiwih
was glad to see the earth, and moulded it between his fingers, till it
became an island on the surface of the water, on which he could
land.[232]
The Pacullies, on the west coast of New Georgia, say that at the
Deluge one man and one woman were saved by escaping into a
cave; and they add that when the earth was drowned, a water rat
dived for it and brought it to the surface again.[233]
A Caddoque tradition is, that Sakechah was a great hunter. One
night he saw in vision the Master of Life, who spoke to the dreamer
these words:—
“The world is getting very wicked, Sakechah.”
“I know it,” answered the hunter.
“I hear no longer the voices of men supplicating me for favours; they
no longer thank me for what I send them. I must sweep, wash, and
purify the earth; I must destroy all living creatures from off the face of
it.”
Then Sakechah said, “What have I done, Master of Life, that I should
be involved in this general destruction?”
The Master answered, “No, Sakechah, thou hast been a good
servant; I will except thee from the general doom. Go now, cut thee a
hemlock, knock off the cones, and bring them, together with the
trunk and leaves, to the bottom of the hill Wecheganawan. Burn
them in a fire made of the dry branches of the oak, kindled with the
straw of wild rice. When the heap is reduced to ashes, take the
ashes and strew them in a circle round the hill. Nothing need be
gathered within the circle, for the living creatures will of themselves
retreat to it for safety; but when this is done, take the trunk of the
hemlock, and strike it into the earth at the spot where the large tuft of
grass is growing on the barren hill. There lies the great fountain of
waters; and when the staff is struck into the earth the fountain shall
burst forth, and the earth be swept and washed and purified by the
great deluge that shall overwhelm it. Sakechah and his family shall
alone, of all the inhabitants of the earth, be saved; and the creatures
he assembles around him on the hill Wecheganawan be alone those
exempted from the all-sweeping destruction.”
The hunter obeyed. He took the staff and stuck it deep into the earth
at the place indicated, and the great fountain was broken up, and the
waters burst forth in a mighty volume. Slowly the element began to
cover the earth, while the hunter and his family looked on. Now the
low grounds appeared but as they appear in the season of showers;
here a little water, and there a little water; soon they became one
vast sheet. Now a little hill sank from view, then the tops of the trees
disappeared; again a tall hill hid its head. At length the waves rose
so high that Sakechah could see nothing more; he stood as it were
in a well. The waters were piled up on every side of him, restrained
from harming him, or his, or the beasts that had clustered around
him, by the magic belt of hemlock ashes.
“Sakechah!” said the Master of Life, “when the moon is exactly over
thy head, she will draw the waters on to the hill. She is angry with me
because I scourged a comet. I cannot prevent her revenge unless I
destroy her, and that I may not do, as she is my wife. Therefore bid
every living creature that is on the hill take off the nail from the little
finger of his right hand, if a man; if a bird, or beast, of the right foot or
claw. When each has done this, bid him blow in the hollow of the nail
with the right eye shut, saying these words, ‘Nail become a canoe,
and save me from the wrath of the moon.’ The nail will become a
large canoe, and in this canoe will its owner be safe.”
The Great Spirit was obeyed, and shortly every creature was floating
in a boat on the surface of the water. And, lest they should be
dispersed, Sakechah bound them together by thongs of buffalo-hide.
They continued floating for a long time, till at last Sakechah said,
“This will not do—we must have land. Go,” said he to a raven that
sat in his canoe near him, “fetch me a little earth from the bottom of
the abyss. I will send a female, because women are quicker and
more searching than men.”
The raven, proud of the praise bestowed on her sex, left her tail
feathers at home, and dived into the abyss. She was gone a long
time, but, notwithstanding her being a woman, she returned baffled
of her object. Whereupon Sakechah said to the otter, “My little man, I
will send you to the bottom, and see if your industry and
perseverance will enable you to accomplish what has been left
undone by the wit and cunning of the raven.” So the otter departed
upon his dangerous expedition. He accomplished his object. When
he again appeared on the earth, he held in his paw a lump of black
mud. This he gave into the hands of Sakechah; and the Great
Master bade him divide the lump into five portions; that which came
out of the middle of the lump he was commanded to mould into a
cake and to cast into the water: he did so, and it became dry land, on
which he could disembark; and the earth thus formed was repeopled
from his time. No matter whether the men of the earth be red or
white, all are descended from Sakechah.[234]
The Iroquois tell a very similar story, differing from the above in
merely few trivial particulars. According to the tradition of the
Knistineaux on the Upper Missouri, all men perished in the Deluge
except one woman, who caught the leg of a bird which carried her to
the top of a rock, where she was confined of twins, of whom the
earth was peopled.[235]
The Appalachian tribe in Florida is a relic of a more ancient nation
than the North American Indian tribes. They relate that the lake
Theomi burst its bounds, and overflowed the earth, and stood above
the top of the highest mountains, saving only the peak Oldamy, on
which stood a temple to the sun. Those men who had succeeded in
reaching this temple were saved, but all the rest of mankind
perished.[236]
According to the Cherokees, a dog foresaw the destruction that was
coming on the earth. It went every day to the bank of a river and
howled; and when its master rebuked it, it revealed to him what was
about to take place. The man therefore built a boat and entered it
with his family, and he alone of all mankind was saved.[237]
If we turn to Central America, we find that there also traditions of the
Flood abounded.
The ancient inhabitants of Mexico related the event as follows:—
There was a great deluge which destroyed all men and beasts, save
Coxcox and his wife Chichequetzal, who escaped in a cyprus trunk
and landed on Mount Colhuacan, where they became parents of
many children, who, however, were all dumb. Then appeared a
dove, which seated itself on a high tree, and taught them language.
But as none of them understood the speech of the other, they
separated and dispersed over the world. Fifteen heads of families,
however, had the good fortune to speak the same language. These
lived together in the same place, but at last they moved, and after
104 years of wanderings they settled in Aztlan. Thence they
journeyed to Chiapultepeque, and then returned to the Mount
Colhuacan and settled in Mexico.[238]
There was a story of similar description connected with the ancient
city of Cholula in the modern province of Puebla. “Before the great
flood in the year 4,008 after the creation of the world, the land
Anaknac (Mexico) was peopled with giants. All those who did not
perish, with the exception of seven, escaped into holes, and were
transformed into fish. When the deluge was over, one of these
giants, Xelhuaz by name, the builder, went to Cholula, and built a
pyramid on Mount Tlalok, to commemorate his having been saved
thereon along with his six brothers.”[239]
The inhabitants of Mechoacan related that, on account of the iniquity
of men, a flood was sent to sweep them all away; but a priest,
named Tezbi, along with his wife and children, were saved in a box
of wood into which they had entered along with all kinds of seeds
and animals. After some time Tezbi, wearying of his confinement,
sent forth the vulture, which however did not return to him; then he
sent forth other birds, but they did not come back; finally, he sent out
the Colibri, which returned with a branch in its beak.[240] And of this
event they had paintings in their temples which they showed to the
white men who arrived amongst them.
The Indians in Cuba told a similar story, so did those at St. Domingo
and the Antilles.[241]
Nor is South America without a rich crop of similar legends.
Humboldt says, “This belief (in a deluge) is not found merely among
the Tamanaks, but is a portion of a whole system of historical
traditions of which the scattered accounts are to be gathered from
the Maipures of the Great Cataract, the Indians of Rio-Crevato,
which pours into the Cauca, and almost from all the races in the
Upper Orinoko.”[242]
This is the tradition of the Tamanaks. “At the time of our ancestors
the whole earth was overflowed. Then two persons alone were
saved, a man and a woman, who remained on Mount Tamanaku,
which is not far from the Cucivero river, where our ancestors formerly
dwelt. They lamented sore over the loss of their friends and
relations, and as they wandered sadly about the mountain they
heard a voice which told them to cast the kernels of the nuts of the
Palma Mauritia backwards over their shoulders. They did so, and out
of the nuts cast by the woman rose females, and out of those cast by
the man sprang males.”[243]
The Peruvians related that their first king and founder of their nation,
Manco Capak, along with his wife Mama Ocllo, after the great deluge
left their land, and came from the holy island in the lake Titicaca, on
which the sun cast its first beam when the flood drained away.[244]
A Brazilian legend is that the Evil Spirit Arbomoku, and the spirits of
the air, made a compact together to destroy mankind. The former
opened all the fountains of the earth, the latter poured the clouds
upon the ground and inundated it, so that only one mountain-top
appeared above the water, and on that took refuge two persons, a
brother and a sister, from whom all the new generations sprang.[245]
XVI.
THE PLANTING OF THE VINE.
Bowed under his toil, dripping with perspiration, stood the patriarch
Noah, labouring to break the hard clods. All at once Satan appeared
and said to him,—
“What new undertaking have you in hand? What new fruit do you
expect to extract from these clods?”
“I plant the grape,” answered the patriarch.
“The grape! proud plant, most precious fruit! joy and delight to men!
Your labour is great; will you allow me to assist you? Let us share the
labour of producing the vine.”
The patriarch in a fit of exhaustion consented.
Satan hastened, got a lamb, slaughtered it, and poured its blood
over the clods of earth. “Thence shall it come,” said Satan, “that
those who taste of the juice of the grape, shall be soft-spirited and
gentle as this lamb.”
But Noah sighed; Satan continued his work; he caught a lion, slew
that, and poured the blood upon the soil prepared for the plant.
“Thence shall it come,” said he, “that those who taste the juice of the
grape shall be strong and courageous as the lion.”
Noah shuddered. Satan continued his work; he seized a pig and
slaughtered it, and drenched the soil with its blood. “Thence shall it
come,” said he, “that those who drink of the juice of the grape in
excess, shall be filthy, degraded, and bestial as the swine.”[246]
The Mussulman tradition is somewhat similar.
“When Ham had planted the vine, Satan watered it with the blood of
a peacock. When it thrust forth leaves, he sprinkled it with the blood
of an ape; when it formed grapes, he drenched it with the blood of a
lion; when the grapes were ripe, he watered it with the blood of a
swine.
“The vine, watered by the blood of these four animals, has assumed
these characters. The first glass of wine makes a man animated, his
vivacity great, his colour is heightened. In this condition he is like the
peacock. When the fumes of the liquor rise into his head, he is gay,
leaps and gambols as an ape. Drunkenness takes possession of
him, he is like a furious lion. When it is at its height, he is like the
swine: he falls and grovels on the ground, stretches himself out, and
goes to sleep.”[247]
Mohammed, to justify his forbidding his disciples to drink wine, cites
the history of the two angels, Arot and Harot.
“God,” says he, “charged them with a commission on the earth. A
young lady invited them to dinner, and they found the wine so good
that they got drunk. They then remarked that their hostess was
beautiful, and they were filled with love which they declared to her.
This lady, who was prudent, replied that she would only listen to their
protestations when she knew the words by which they were enabled
to ascend to heaven. When she had learned these words, she
mounted to the throne of God, who, as a reward for her virtue,
transformed her into a shining star (the Morning Star), and
condemned the two drunken angels to await the day of judgment,
suspended by their heels in the well of Babel, near Bagdad, which
Mussulman pilgrims visit.”
According to Tabari,[248] Ham, for having laughed at his father’s
drunkenness, was cursed by Noah, that his skin should become
black, as well as all the fruits which were to grow in the land he
should inhabit, and thus the purple grape arose. It was the white
grape that Ham transplanted, but it blackened in his hands.
Abulfaraj relates that after the Deluge, Noah divided the habitable
world between his sons. He gave to Ham the country of the Black, to
Shem that of the Brown, and to Japheth that of the Red.[249] Noah
also, he continues, said to his son Shem, “When I am dead, take the
bier of our father Adam from the ark, and, together with your son
Melchizedek, who is a priest of the Most High, go with the body of
Adam whither an angel shall guide you.”
This they did; and an angel directed them to mount Breitalmakdes
(Jerusalem), where they deposited the bier on a certain hill, and
instantly it sank out of their sight into the ground. Then Shem
returned to his home, but not so Melchizedek, who remained to
guard the body of Adam: and he built there a city called Jerusalem,
and he was called Melek Salim, the King of Peace, and there he
spent the rest of his life in the worship of God; he touched not
women, nor shed blood, but offered to God oblations of bread and
wine.[250]
Eutychius, the Egyptian patriarch of Alexandria, in his Annals, which
are rife with Oriental traditions, gives a fuller account of the same
incident.
When Noah was near his death, he bade Shem take the body of
Adam, and go with Melchizedek, son of Peleg, whither the angel of
the Lord should lead. “And,” said he, “thou shalt enjoin on
Melchizedek to fix his habitation there, to take to him no wife, and to
spend his life in acts of devotion, for God has chosen him to
preserve His true worship. He shall build himself no house, nor shall
he shed blood of beast, or bird, or any animal; nor shall he offer
there any oblation save bread and wine; and let the skins of lions be
his only vesture; he shall remain alone there; he shall not clip his
hair, or pare his nails; for he is a priest of the Most High. The angel
of God shall go before you, till ye come to the place where ye shall
bury the body of Adam, and know that that place is the middle of the
world.” Now Noah died on Wednesday, at the second hour, in the
second month of Ayar, which is the same as Bashnes, in the nine
hundred and fiftieth year of his age. And this year Shem was aged
forty-five. The sons of Noah buried him, and bewailed him forty days.
[251]
The wife of Noah is said by some to have been called Bath-Enos, or
the daughter of Enos; but the Rabbi Gedaliah says her name was
Noema; others say it was Tethiri, or Tithœa, the nurse of men, as
Eve was the mother of men. The Gnostics called her Noria. She is,
however, generally supposed by the Rabbis to have been Naamah,
the sister of Tubal-cain.[252] But Eutychius, of Alexandria, says she
was called Haical, and was the daughter of Namus, son of Enoch;
and that the wives of Shem, Ham, and Japheth were the three
daughters of Methuselah. Shem’s wife was named Salith; the wife of
Ham, Nahlath; and the wife of Japheth, Arisivah.[253]
The nurse of Noah was an important personage, and must not be
forgotten. She was named Sambethe, and was the first Sibyl.
Suidas, the grammarian, says, “The Chaldee Sibyl, named Sambethi
by the Hebrews, and identified with the Persian Sibyl, was of the
race of Noah. She foretold those things which were to befall
Alexander of Macedon. She also predicted the coming of the Lord
Christ, and many other things, through divine inspiration.”[254]
XVII.
THE SONS OF NOAH.
Ham, the accursed, the third son of Noah, was the inventor or the
preserver of magic. As we have already seen, he buried the books of
magic which existed in the world, before the Deluge swept over the
globe; and when it abated he exhumed them. Cerco d’Ascoli, in the
fourth chapter of his “Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrabosco,”
declares that he had seen a book of magic which had been
composed by Ham, “which contained the elements and practice of
necromancy.” Certain it is that apocryphal books of alchemy and
conjuration of spirits existed in the Middle Ages, which purported to
have been composed by Ham.
Ham was turned black, according to the Talmud, because he did not
maintain himself in perfect continence whilst in the ark;[255] other
authorities say his skin became sooty in consequence of his scoffing
at his father’s drunkenness; and Japheth, for having smiled, says the
Mussulman lost the gift of prophecy from his family.[256]
Berosus supposed that Ham was the same as Zoroaster.
Japheth, according to Khondemir, was given by his father all the land
to the east and north of Ararat; he was the progenitor of the Turks,
the Sclaves, of Gog and Magog, says Tabari. Before he started with
his family to people these countries, Noah gave him a stone, on
which was written the great name of God. The Turks say that, by
means of this stone, Noah was able to guide the course of the ark
without sail or oars. The Turks have similar stones, which, they
pretend, came by a process of generation from the parental stone
given to Japheth.[257] He is said by the Mussulmans to have had
eleven male children: Sin or Tchin, the father of the Chinese; Scklab,
the ancestor of the Sclavonian races; Manschug or Magog, the
parent of the Scythians and Kalmuks; Gomari, the father of the
Franks; Turk and Khalos, the ancestors of the Turks; Khozaz, from
whom the Khozarans trace their pedigree; Rus, father of the
Russians; Souffan, Ghoy, and Tarag, from whom the Turcomans
derive.
Ilak, son of Turk, discovered the use of salt by having let fall a piece
of meat he was eating on the ground covered with saline deposit.
Of Shem the Rabbis have somewhat to say. “I have found in the
Midrash that the Rabbi Johanan, son of Nuri, said: ‘The holy, ever-
blessed God took Shem, son of Noah, and consecrated him priest of
the Most High, that he should minister before Him; and He let his
Majesty dwell with Him, and He gave him the name Melchizedek, a
priest of the Most High God, king of Salem. His brother Japheth
learnt the law of him in his school, till Abraham came, who learnt it in
the school of Shem. For this Abraham obtained, praying to God that
his Majesty should remain and dwell in the house of Shem,
wherefore it was said of him, Thou art a priest for ever after the order
of Melchizedek.’”[258]
Shem learned his knowledge from the Book of Wisdom which
Raphael, the holy angel, gave to Adam; but Shem’s instructor was
the angel Jophiel.[259]
The Rabbi Gerson writes in his book called “Sepher geliloth erez
Israel,” that having travelled through the lands of Og, king of Bashan,
he saw there a grave which measured eighty ells, and it was
indicated to him as the sepulchre of Shem.[260] A curious tradition that
Shem, Ham, and Japheth fell asleep in a cave, and woke up at the
Nativity of Christ, and that they were themselves the three wise men
who came to adore Him, shall be mentioned more fully when we
treat of the legends connected with the New Testament characters.
Shem is said to have received the priesthood instead of Noah,
because Noah was bitten by the lion as he was leaving the ark, and,
being suffused with blood, became incapable of receiving the
priesthood.
Shem is believed to have written many books, and apocryphal
writings of his exist.
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