SCS-82: Roman Historiography

This paper explores the record of Cato’s Origines in relationship to ancient scholarship as practiced at Rome in the second and first centuries BCE. The branch of scholarship in question is that high-stakes mode of inquiry which constructs relationships between present enigmatic phenomena (be they manifest in lexical form, in material remains, in the practice of cult and custom, or by any other means) and the past, purporting thereby to explain salient realities.

This paper demonstrates how the lives of bad emperors in the Historia Augusta (HA) expand our understanding of the rare rhetorical form, the self-standing invective. Riskier than panegyric, which catered to imperial sensibilities, invective invited censure or revenge. Despite being named in most guidebooks to rhetorical training, invective form was rarely discussed, added as a footnote to panegyric with the vague instruction to do the opposite (e.g. Quint. inst. 3.7; Nixon and Rodgers 1994).

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.

Under Nero, Rome experienced a period of ongoing crisis, threatening oppression, and enduring trauma that challenged what it meant to be a Roman. In this atmosphere of upended social values, elite Roman women had to determine how to endure and survive. Disappear into dissoluteness? Detach in order to tolerate? Or participate, disrupting the traditional ideal of Roman womanhood?

In this paper I use the reception of Cato the Elder’s In Galbam to illuminate the effect on readers of Cato’s self-quotation of his own speeches in the Origines.