Paul Hay, Hampden Sydney College
This paper examines the surviving fragments of Fenestella and argues that Fenestella’s antiquarian interests should be interpreted alongside broader intellectual trends under Tiberius regarding the rhetoric of time and the periodization of history. Fenestella is often overlooked among the Roman writers of the early Empire, despite being widely read in antiquity and considered important enough to be epitomated. Previous scholars (Reitzenstein 1900, Marshall 1980, Levene 2007, Cornell 2013) have noted Fenestella’s antiquarian attentiveness to the origins of cultural institutions such as dress and dining, as well as his interest in precise dates. But there remains a need for scholarship which situates Fenestella within Tiberian literary and intellectual trends. This oversight prevents us from understanding Fenestella's historiographic project as a product of the temporal discourse in the Roman intellectual world in the decades leading up to the reign of Tiberius. In this paper I demonstrate how Fenestella represents a new temporal consciousness among Roman writers, and how his historiographic writing (alongside Tiberian peers such as Velleius Paterculus, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Seneca the Elder) exemplifies an innovative temporal rhetoric borne out of earlier developments in Roman intellectual culture.
Although fragmentary works may be difficult to characterize via fragments alone, scholars such as Smith 2016 have noted that many of Fenestella’s fragments, such as F5 (Cornell), F13, and F23 focus on precise time calculations, as does F11 (on Terence’s floruit) in a parallel way. Fenestella also seems to place particular focus on describing various sociocultural firsts in Roman history (F9, F14-15, F24-28), a method which, as Smith 2018 writes, seems to combine a traditional historiographical approach with an emphasis on the “first founder” trope. Following Hay 2019's work on the rise of periodization in first century BCE thought, we can read these fragments as a product of this idea: Fenestella carefully calculates the dates of epoch-changing moments and describes era-defining cultural innovations in the long narrative of moral decline.
This adoption of historical periodization as a temporal mode unites Fenestella with his Tiberian contemporaries. As Sumner 1970 argues, Velleius also deploys this temporal rhetoric by dating multiple historical events to the consulship of his addressee (and possible dedicatee) Marcus Vinicius. Velleius also uses a periodizing temporal framework to discuss artistic talent in various literary genres (1.16-18); Bispham 2011 has emphasized the important of time and chronology throughout Velleius’s work. Similarly, the chronological structure of Nicolaus’ universal history divided kingdoms and peoples into periods, and the period divisions were aligned with significant events (Toher 1989); moreover, Nicolaus like Fenestella was interested in the idea of specific dates corresponding with episodes of Roman moral decline (Cornell 2013). Seneca the Elder’s division of Roman history into aetates, with clear markers between periods, further illustrates this temporal discourse (Renda 2020). An analysis of the fragments of Fenestella which situates his periodizing tendencies within the temporal rhetoric of Tiberian literature can elevate Fenestella's project beyond antiquarian trivia and can help us better recognize the intellectual aims linking these Tiberian historiographers.