Mary Somerville (Bryn Mawr College)
Nec modus est lacrimis: Weeping Military Leaders in Latin Civil War Epic
Scholars of imperial Latin epic have often discussed the nature of mourning in civil war epics as contrary to the usually celebratory, monumentalizing nature of epic poetry (e.g. Augoustakis, McClellan 2019, Voigt). While these examinations have done much for our understanding of genre and gender, they often imagine mourning and emotional behaviors only within the literary sphere, and imagine tears rather strictly as indicators of feminine mourning or grief. Men also weep, and tears can be associated with a much wider range of emotions than simply grief. In this paper, I will present a reading of the men's tears in these epics from an angle previously unexplored: by setting them in the context of men's tears as a socialized behavior which is explained in a specific cultural context by regular discourses. This perspective looks beyond literary convention and thematic patterns alone, turning to lenses more common to the cultural historian. Scholars studying emotion as a culturally-contingent aspect of human behavior have long suggested that ancient emotional expressions, gestures, and behaviors are best understood within cultural context (Corbeill, Rey, Vekselius 2018). I will contextualize my discussion by outlining various salient forms of men's tears which appear in these epics. Cultural discourses spanning literary and extraliterary evidence will serve as a foundation for my argument. Although male mourning behaviors, especially crying, in previous epics attest to heroes' humanity, their connections to others, and honorable vengeance, in civil war epics, they become tied to the inevitable horrors of civil war.
In the imperial Latin epics which focus on civil wars, namely Lucan's Bellum Civile and Statius' Thebaid, the usual bonds which hold together the social fabrics dissolve in the wake of nefas, the crime of civil war. So too do proper emotional behaviors. The tears of these epic generals highlight the complete destruction of the prevailing world order, especially familial structure, political structures, and interpersonal relationships. Lucan's men hardly shed tears at all. When they do, their tears are illegible within imperial social and epic contexts, reflecting the Lucanean sense of nefas: unspeakable and chaotic. Cato, for instance, sheds tears during his eulogy for Pompey (Luc.BC.9.49-50) which challenge his characterization as Stoic and Republican. Caesar sheds tears which suggest his complete inability to properly empathize (Luc.BC.9.1035-43; 1046-8). Statius' leaders, by contrast, weep in accordance with the sorts of virtues which had failed in Lucan, but they cannot connect these emotional expressions to wider networks of action that would functionally fix the broken system, or even prevent its destruction. Eteocles never weeps, but Polynices sheds tears that exemplify tension between family and enemy ties which is characteristic of civil war (Bernstein). I will pressure the limits of Augoustakis' claim that death and mourning in Statius' Thebaid mark "the darkest aspects of monarchical, despotic, and tyrannical power," and argue that political power is only one aspect of the systems broken by civil war.