Zachary Herz (The University of Colorado-Boulder)
In this talk, I argue that an oddly persistent urban legend of Vedius Pollio feeding people to lampreys can shed light on the gradual accumulation of imperial adjudicative power over the first century C.E. According to a story preserved or referenced in several imperial authors (e.g., Fasti 6.643-48, de Ira 3.40.2-4, de Clem. 1.18.2, NH 9.77, Ann. 1.10.5, Dio Cass. 54.23, de Pall. 5.6.2), Augustus prevented his courtier Pollio from feeding an enslaved child to specially trained man-eating lampreys. Most contemporary scholarship has considered Pollio as part of the history of Roman slavery (as Hopkins 1993) or as part of a broader prosopography of Augustan administration (Berdowski 2017, Dalla Rosa 2018, Syme 1961). That said, Pollio is important evidence of the ideological mechanics that underlay imperial jurisdiction, and has not yet been discussed in that context. I first describe the mechanics through which the Pollio story spread and took hold within imperial elite culture, before exploring its implications for how Romans understood and were prompted to understand the authoritarianism of the Principate.
Pollio did not become famous by accident. Ovid and Dio both portray Augustus pointedly razing his estate in order to build the Portico of Livia; as Kristina Milnor notes (2006: 61-62), Augustus thus made the Pollio story hypersalient in the Roman imaginary even while refusing to commemorate the man himself. Furthermore, our earlier accounts of the Pollio story (Ovid and Seneca) both link it with imperial power; it seems likely that Roman audiences understood the story to be about Augustus as much as about Pollio or his lampreys. If, as appears likely, “team Augustus” (Morrell 2019: 12-13) helped promulgate a version of the Pollio story, that reveals a great deal both about the mechanics of Augustan messaging and about how the morally freighted exemplary narratives that Romans used to think through ethical problems (on which see, e.g., Langlands 2018, Roller 2018) could spring up in the more centralized communicative milieu of the Principate.
Next, I consider how the Pollio story influenced the development of imperial jurisdiction. While it does not carry an obvious legal valence, the conflict between Augustus and Pollio clearly implicates something like a “right to decide”—is Pollio the final authority on matters of discipline and punishment (as suggested by Westbrook 1999), or is Augustus? Seneca’s telling, in particular, uses legal terminology like imperas and placebis to demonstrate how Pollio was transgressing what would develop into norms of imperial supremacy and supervision. I end by analogizing the Pollio story to the Augustan marriage legislation, another case where Augustus took it upon himself to correct the decadence of his contemporaries and one more traditionally understood (e.g., Milnor 2007) as a jurisdictional power grab. Comparing the two shows how the moral revival of the Augustan period sweetened and confused broader projects of authoritarian control. The shift from decentralized aristocratic governance to imperial supervision left its mark on Rome’s literature and built environment, but also on its gossip.