James Uden, Boston University
It is easy to forget how radical Roman declamation was. As part of rhetorical training, elite young men dramatized moments of extreme crisis in domestic or political life, while impersonating people more socially vulnerable than themselves. Recent work on the genre has shifted away from a ‘norm-based approach’, according to which declamation taught men the values of patriarchal mastery and self-control, and has focused instead on the genre’s propensity for melodramatic excess (Connolly 2015), or its elements of class and gender transgression (Stoffel 2017). This paper studies a particular emotion that has attracted surprisingly little attention in scholarship on Roman declamation: pity. I argue that the declaimers in Seneca’s Controversiae used their speeches to construct a new affective space in public life, in which it was pleasurable for men to evoke and to experience the pity of their peers. Moreover, this reciprocal exchange of pity (misericordia) was, I argue, an implicit rejection of the more hierarchical mercy (clementia), a word that had been coopted as an official, imperial virtue, and which was still polluted by the memory of the civil wars.
The appeal to pity, or argumentum ad misericordiam, was a standard weapon in the arsenal of any Roman orator (Konstan 2001: 27-48). In declamation, it became a primary motivation. ‘Have pity’, says Publius Asprenas, imagining himself as a son disinherited by both father and uncle, because ‘fortune is fickle’ (miserere: mutabilis est casus, 1.1.5). Declamation scenarios frequently revolve around pity as a cause of social or domestic turmoil; declaimers defend the compassionate actions of young men against the strict commands of an older generation. ‘I am prone to pity’ (misericors sum), many of Seneca’s declaimers confess (1.1.4; 1.5.1, 7.1.1, 9.3.10). In an earlier generation, Julius Caesar had trumpeted his mercy (clementia) as a mark of political power, and Seneca the Younger later distinguished manly clementia from misericordia, a weakness from which the Stoic sage is exempt (De Clem. 2.6.4). By contrast, the declaimers value misericordia over clementia, invariably associating the latter with the exercise of tyrannical power (2.4.4; 7.8.6; 9.2.20).
The positive embrace of this ‘softer’ emotion has important implications for our understanding of gender in the early Imperial period. Rhetoric was an ‘all-male game’ (Richlin 1997: 108). Yet just as Latin love elegy allowed men to assume disempowered social positions as part of a wider reformulation of masculine identity (Miller 2004), so declamation offered a space for Roman men to test out new modes of masculinity and less hierarchical forms of social connection with their peers. The genre encouraged the assumption of vulnerable social positions, albeit only as rhetorical play. I argue that Seneca’s declaimers transformed the exchange of pity into the basis of a new affective community, reconstituting homosocial bonds in an environment scarred by the violence of the civil wars.