Kyle Khellaf (University of California, Riverside)
Why do so many ancient historical digressions take place at sea? In his short novella, Watermark, Joseph Brodsky declares, “There is something primordial about traveling on water, even for short distances...Water unsettles the principle of horizontality” (1992, 14). The same could be said for digressions: they frequently delve into the murkier “plupast” (cf. Grethlein and Krebs, 2012), and unsettle the seeming horizontality of historical narrative time.
In this paper, following Brodsky’s observations, I examine Livy’s excursus about the Spartan mercenary Cleonymus’ fleet in the Adriatic (10.2). I contend that the relation between paradoxographical nautical events and digressions developed as a historiographical response to epic mythoi: Roman historians such as Livy, when recounting bizarre episodes in maritime spaces, employed earlier poetic models to underscore the nebulous quality of pelagic events, wherein “the sea” serves as “testimony to the force of the archaic” (Taussig 2000, 257). By examining this relationship more carefully, we can perhaps begin to understand such fluid narratologies as a literary reflection of the Mediterranean’s geological role in shaping the histories of its peoples (e.g. Braudel 1998, Horden and Purcell 2000, Broodbank 2013, Manning 2018).
Livy’s account of Cleonymus invokes primordial mythoi by borrowing elements from Odysseus’ wanderings. The story of the Spartan mercenary’s naval itinerancy begins with a Scylla and Charybdis dilemma: Cleonymus’ fleet is terrified (terrerent) by the harborless coasts of Italy on their port side (laeua), and, on their starboard side (dextra), by “savage peoples (gentes ferae)...infamous for their piracy (latrociniis maritimis infames)” (10.2.4). The subsequent narrative echoes Odysseus’ account of the Cicones: a Spartan exploratory party pillages (inflammant tecta; cf. πόλιν ἔπραθον, Od. 9.40), plunders (hominum pecudumque praedas agunt...dulcidine praedandi, 10.2.8; cf. ἀλόχους καὶ κτήματα πολλὰ λαβόντες, Od. 9.41), and wanders too far inland, which eventually draws their Patavian neighbors, more seasoned in war (semper eos in armis accolade Galli habebant, 10.2.9; cf. οἵ σφιν γείτονες ἦσαν, ἅμα πλέονες καὶ ἀρείους, Od. 9.48). The majority of Cleonymus’ fleet is destroyed in the ensuing naval engagements.
The narrative also makes use of temporal destabilization, blending digressive interruption (eodem anno, 10.2.1) with various layers of past and present. Livy informs us that his present day sources include certain annalistic histories (in quibusdam annalibus inuenio, 10.2.3), ongoing commemorative naval reenactments (Monumentum naualis pugnae...sollemne certamen nauium), as well as living Patavian eyewitness (multi supersunt qui uiderunt Pataui, 10.2.15). We also see reflected a complex mirror of Roman historical hybridity (Hellenic, Transpadane Italic, Punic) through Patavian monuments typically associated with the First Punic War (i.e. the Columna Rostrata C. Duilii; cf. Leigh 2010), and divinities associated with the myth of Aeneas in Carthage: “the beaks of the ships (rostra nauium) and the spoils taken from the Spartans, affixed in the ancient temple of Juno (in aede Iunonis ueteri fixa)” (10.2.15). Finally, the narrative setting along the Venetian coastline (10.2.4) recalls an additional Trojan mythos for our Patavian historian, involving both Antenor (1.1.2-3) and Gallo-Etruscan settlements from an earlier digression (5.33.10-11; cf. Oakley 2005, 54-55, 61).