Satirizing Rome

In the last two chapters we have seen how the polarization of ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ — as though the two entities were discrete — is fraught with an ironic awareness of the mutual implication of the two. The texts on exile articulate an alienated distancing from Rome into the canonical past of free-speaking Greek autonomy, but in a self-conscious manner that knowingly bespeaks the Romanness of their authors. The tradition of imperial pedagogy is similarly playful: the roles of emperor and adviser are manipulable, even (in the cases of Marcus Aurelius and Apollonius of Tyana) partially reversible. What is demonstrated by these narrative attempts to construct paradigmatic subject-positions for ‘Greece’ (literature, intellect, ‘culture’) and ‘Rome’ (authority, power) is the degree of slippage involved in the construction of identity. The two are defined and constituted by an ongoing process of differentiation from one another through discourse, but this process is subject to ironic play, contestation, and subversion.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Distancing · Emperor · Epistemology · Intellect · Literature · Motif (music) · Narrative · Politics · Subject (documents) · Subversion · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

• Des mœurs sexuelles des Sélénites (Lucien, Histoires vraies, I, 22)

  Michel Briand•Archimède. Archéologie et…•2018

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