Extending Roman Personhood and Authorship

Among the most potent metaphors in Roman authorial discourse is the “personification” of a literary work as a slave or freedman (Fitzgerald 2000). The trope has received ample attention for its prominence in Horace Epistulae 1.20, Ovid’s exilic poetry, and Martial’s epigrams. Each author addresses his libellus in language that conflates the physical characteristics of the book and the body of the enslaved.

Admonitores non nimis verecundi: Personification and Personhood in Cicero’s Letters

Blending personae – Hybrid Speakers and the Performance of Authorship in Cicero’s Dialogues

The paper analyses instances of dynamic and ambiguous speaker-modelling in Cicero’s Dialogues. Focusing i.a. on the Academici libri, De divinatione, De senectute, and De amicitia, it asks what notions of persona and authorship can be derived from this modelling and what purpose it might have in the context of the late Republic.

This paper reveals the systematic dissolution of personae and embodied emotional experiences into the natural world in Senecan texts. Such dissolution represents an authorial technique that serves to organize the memory of emotional experiences in accordance with Stoic principles. In this paper I engage primarily with Margaret Graver’s (2007) tome on Stoic emotion and Thomas Habinek’s 2007 and 2011 works on Stoicism and the nature of physical reality.

Roman conceptions of personhood do not easily intersect with our contemporary delineations of what personhood is or means; we now tend to define personhood in a more malleable, elastic way that is less grounded in particular cultural values such as honor or masculinity (Barthes (1967), Foucault (1978, 1982), Butler (2004)). One striking example of people who possess an identity that is not stable and individual but is embedded in a community are martyrs, especially the early martyrs before the Church became hierarchical.