Politics and Papers

Top sign that you’re reading too many political blogs (classics grad student edition):

Your two seminar papers are vaguely about themes regarding the spinning of negatives into positives and conservative pushback to liberal ideas.

Item one: Spinning

For a class on Archaic Greek poetry, I’ve been drawn into the issues surrounding Pindar’s Aiginetan odes, putting forward an argument that, basically, the oligarchs who were winning at these Panhellenic competitions were using Pindar (and Bacchylides) as a medium through which they could counteract Aigina’s negative reputation after medizing during the invasion of Darius and the general reputation for piracy. The epinician poets essentially use certain buzzwords that carry heroic connotations to present Aigina as a valiant place that is good for business (aka stuff you’d see put out by a chamber of commerce or Christine O’Donnell saying “I’m not a witch”).

Item two: The defense of conservatism

For a course on the Fragmentary Roman Historians (thrilling topic, I know), I'm presenting a reading of Cato's Origines as being essentially a reaction to the publication of Ennius' Annales. For those of you not hip to mid-second century (BC) Roman politics, Ennius was attached with the Scipios and other liberally-minded Greek-inclined Roman aristocrats and it seems that, based on extra-textual factors, Ennius' Annales was rather pro-Scipio. Now Cato was a staunch upholder of the Roman traditions (and a political rival of the Scipios) and so it seems that Cato was spurred on by this "liberal propaganda" to publish a fair and balanced account of Roman history. This is, I admit, not the most tenable idea, given the fragmentary state of each text, but given the circumstances (and my perhaps modernly-skewed reading), it is possible.

When it comes to current events and classics, the general rule of thumb is to stay away from them. The one excellent exception is Syme's The Roman Revolution (Oxford: 1939) that traced the events in the Roman Republic after the assassination of Caesar in a way that paralleled the Roman state with the fascist regimes that were sprouting across Europe. It's a masterful book that makes a strong case that Octavian's restoration of the Republic was merely a sham constitution that promoted a monarchy and cloaked it in panegyrical propaganda. I'm no Syme, but I do think that there is something can be said about using modern analysis of figures and events to understand ancient motivations and themes. Will I do anything more with these papers? Probably not...they are rather rush jobs at the end of the semester. I like the ideas but so much of it (particularly with the Cato piece) is based on an argument from silence that the theses are essentially unable to be proven sufficiently. Still, they're fun papers to write and think about, at any rate.