Sallust's treatment of Sempronia reminded me of how Hillary Rodham Clinton was treated by parts of the U.S. and Russian media. It struck me then, that her treatment by her Republican opposition was comparable with how Roman literature, in general, treated women.
Sallust's description of the Catiline conspiracy also illuminates the great divide between Left and Right in those days, similar to today's lack of bi-partisanship.
Could we speculate that, two years later: A. O. C. has inherited Hillary's mantle?
Sallust's description of the Catiline conspiracy also illuminates the great divide between Left and Right in those days, similar to today's lack of bi-partisanship.
Could we speculate that, two years later: A. O. C. has inherited Hillary's mantle?
Before the Age of Chivalry
In Bellum Catilinae, Cicero, a Roman
consul, learns details about Catiline’s conspiracy from Fulvia, a woman Sallust
describes as of noble birth, although another source dismisses her as merely vilissimum scortum, a cheap price whore.[1] Fulvia
betrays her impoverished lover’s boastings to her circle of friends, who,
alarmed by hearing about dire threats to the Republic, endeavor to have Cicero,
their new man, elected Consul to deal with this situation. Fulvia’s informant is one of Catiline’s close
conspirators who can no longer afford to buy her expensive gifts.[2] He is, in fact, a disgraced former
Senator. From this, we can infer that
Fulvia was a courtesan with access to influential people in Rome. Cicero finds Fulvia invaluable in spying on
Catiline’s intentions (Sallust 23).
If Fulvia was
married, she was committing adultery, no doubt excused because of the value of
her information and the general permissiveness towards educated women of her
time. In any event, at the time Sallust
was writing, adultery was less of a crime than it became later under Augustus.[3] If a prostitute, she was merely conducting
her legitimate business. There were
strict divisions between women at that time.
“Roman society had almost no honorable place for women who never
married.”[4] By providing sexual services as well as
entertainment, women could have a recognized profession even if it was one
considered dishonorable. Fulvia as a
legitimate citizen, is likely to have had servants and staff who were
illegitimate (mostly slaves).
In Sallust’s
telling it is remarkable how many supporters Catiline’s conspiracy had. Yet from among this vast multitude none were
prepared to betray his cause for money when it was offered (Loeb 36.5). Thus, the conspiracy was initially betrayed,
he makes clear, by the agency of one person alone, Fulvia, who continued to act
as Cicero’s spy. It is interesting that
to accomplish the plot of what he called an historical monologue, Sallust
required the services of a woman, a meretrix;
and, in Chapter 25, the passage on Sempronia, he describes one in detail.
Sallust spends an entire chapter describing
Sempronia. Some see in Sallust’s
description a resemblance to Catullus’ poems about Lesbia.[5] This essay also suggests that Sallust and
Catullus were both influenced by Roman comedy, particularly in the way that
women are portrayed.[6] Sallust depicts a stereotype of a courtesan,
recognizable from Plautus’ play Menaechmi
and others. Whatever his intent, this
chapter provides a diverting interlude in an otherwise somber story. In any event, Sempronia has proven to be good
box-office as Sallust’s work has survived!
Chapter 25
comes as a surprise to readers of Sallust’s Bellum
Catilinae. Sallust has been writing
about the perils of allowing laziness and a luxurious mode of living to usurp
virtues like those of hard physical work and integrity. He has been critical of Rome’s moral
decline. This has been a constant theme
throughout his work. As discussed below, in this he was echoing a
contemporary of his youth, the poet Catullus, who had written scathingly about the
corruption of one of Caesar’s associates as well as the current depravity of
Rome.[7] Plautus, whose works were being performed a
hundred years before Catullus and Sallust were born, also took up this
theme. For example, In Menaechmi, Plautus criticizes “the
dubious practices of contemporary Roman businessmen” and the prevailing culture
of Rome (Plautus 571-601). In the same
play, Plautus also depicts a meretrix,
Erotium, who has similarities to Sallust’s Sempronia.
Sempronia is
depicted as a woman of high social standing with a scandalous reputation. Sallust alleges that Sempronia was one of
those women who supported Catiline. Such
women he says had “first met their expenses by prostitution but later, when
their time of life had set a limit to their traffic but not their extravagance,
had contracted a huge debt” (Loeb 24.3).
He typecasts Sempronia as beautiful, a gifted musician and dancer,
learned in both Latin and Greek, promiscuous, proactive in seeking sexual
affairs with men, a liar, a debtor, immodest in language but, notwithstanding
all her defects, excellent company.
Sallust allows nobody to come to her rescue with an opposing point of
view. Thus, it is possible an old woman
still living at the time of Sallust’s writing could have been offended by his
detailed description, his lack of chivalry, if chivalry to women existed in
Rome then. Sempronia is associated with
the Catiline conspiracy on only one specific occasion in Sallust’s history as
he mentions her husband’s house once being used for a meeting place, although
Sempronia herself presumably played hostess for the conspirators, alone, as,
Sallust writes, her husband, Decimus Brutus, was away from Rome at the time
(Loeb 40.5).
By choosing to
write about Catiline, Sallust used a convenient story from recent history to
mirror a contemporary, ongoing conflict between political factions in Rome,
perhaps one in which Sempronia’s husband and children played an important part. It is likely that Sallust was writing at a
time when it was dangerous to take sides among competing factions.[8] Among those dangerous to offend were those
loyal to Octavian, Caesar’s heir, who would subsequently become sole ruler of
Rome; senators, like Brutus, complicit in Caesar’s murder; those loyal to Mark
Antony, or to Crassus, Cassius, other generals.
Catullus is
thought to have died about ten years before Caesar’s assassination, but he
would have lived to witness the Catiline conspiracy also, creation of the First
Triumvirate.[9] The
twelve-line coda which Catullus wrote to end his longest work, an epyllion,
Poem 64, credits the bad behavior of Roman citizens with driving the gods away
so that they no longer honored mortals with their presence at events,
festivals, state marriages.[10] It
has been suggested that Catullus used a famous marriage in mythology, that of
Pelius and Thetis, as a vehicle to write, safely, about the marriage of
Caesar’s seventeen years old daughter, Julia, to Pompey, thirty years older, in
59 BC, a marriage sealing the establishment of The First Triumvirate in 60 BC.[11] Whether the bad behavior Catullus has
in mind in this passage alludes to the uprising prompted by Catiline, or
whether this was an editorial comment on the wedding of Pompey and Julia, or
not, the passage would certainly resonate with Sallust. If Sallust died in 35BC, after the turmoil of
Catiline’s conspiracy he had seen both a Civil War eventually won by Caesar,
then the struggles post-Caesar, including massive proscriptions, leading up to
the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC and the marriage of Antony and Octavia
(Octavian’s sister), reminiscent of the marriage of Pompey and Julia, in 40 BC.
Sallust credits
Catiline with one of the crimes listed by Catullus in two lines of his coda, a
father’s guilt at murdering his adult son to clear the way for a marriage to a
young woman. He cites Catiline’s
subsequent guilt at murdering his son as driving Catiline in his conspiracy to
lead a revolution against the State (Sallust 15.2-15.3). Sallust
is likely alluding to the Catullus lines when citing this same charge against
Catiline. Both Catullus and Sallust
would have been in their youthful twenties at the time of the conspiracy.[12] Sallust writes that Catiline was generally
believed to have murdered his grown son to facilitate a marriage to Orestilla
who was hesitant to marry when Catiline’s stepson was about her own age. In Sallust’s account, he attributes to
Catiline an acknowledgement that Orestilla’s wealth (and that of her daughter)
had helped him clear away not only his own debts “but those incurred by others.” (Sallust 35.3)
Catullus’ short
coda is a condemnation of some of the same immoralities that Sallust will go on
to enumerate throughout his much lengthier prose work. By extolling long dead, hard-working, virtuous
great grandfathers and older, who had built the Republic and its tributary
empire, Sallust could indirectly imply criticism of current events, perhaps the
excesses of the Second Triumvirate.[13]
Clearly, Sallust
had a purpose when devoting one of his sixty-one chapters to Sempronia. A plausible reason could be that she was
illustrative of how much support Catiline was alleged to have among the
ancient, powerful, families of Rome. Passages
in Sallust indicate that both Crassus and Caesar could have been sympathetic or
supportive of Catiline (Sallust 48.9, 49 and 52.1). Also, her son, D. Junius Brutus Albinus, was
later a conspirator against Caesar and one of those contending for power
following the death of Caesar. So
Sempronia is more than a courtesan, she symbolizes Rome’s most powerful
families.
Finally, there is
the suggestion that if Sallust’s Bellum
Catilinae is historical fiction, rather than an historical monograph, then
Sallust was throwing in some spice to interest his readers, pointing out that
women as well as men were jointly responsible for Rome’s moral decline. After Sallust’s death the Emperor Augustus
passed laws encouraging marriage and procreation as well as proscribing serious
penalties for adultery.[14] If Sallust was employing fiction to convey a
story based on known facts, he could either have been writing propaganda for
Caesar’s successors in Rome; or attempting a readable, definitive history, with
some invention on his part, along the lines of what Cato was likely to have
said in rebuttal to Caesar, when punishment for the conspirators was debated in
the Senate, or, how Catiline might have addressed his troops before the death
of all of them in battle. Whatever his
motive, he would have been influenced by the literary culture of his time when
comedies by Plautus and other playwrights were popular. In such comedies, women are often depicted
as prostitutes, usually self-employed.[15] In Menaechmi,
Erotium is depicted as a business woman in control of her own house, presumably
in a good part of town as she is the next-door neighbor of her wealthy client,
Menaechmus, whose long-lost twin brother, also called Menaechmus, has just now
arrived in town seeking his abducted brother.
Plautus gives us a vivid impression of Erotium. We can assume she is attractive. She has a professional cook working for her,
as well as at least one maid and other attendants. Like Fulvia and Sempronia, she enjoys
receiving expensive gifts from her clients, even if they have been stolen from her
client’s wife. The character that
Sallust presents named Sempronia is essentially the same woman as Erotium with
the main difference being that Sempronia has a husband, albeit often
out-of-town, and she is well educated in Latin and Greek whereas Erotium is
described as stupid and ignorant by newly arrived Menaechmus II (Plautus 439). In his
time, women are thought to have had less access to education than at the time
Sallust was writing. If so, it could be
said that Plautus provided a template of a typical meretrix that Sallust embellished in his history by bringing her up
to date with an education and a husband.
Sempronia was presumably in a form of marriage that allowed her to be
independent of her husband and in control of her assets.[16]
Some Plautine
imagery from the same comedy is also reflected in Catullus’ poems. For example, in a footnote, the editor of a
work on Plautus compares Erotium to a bird intent on a tasty morsel (Plautus
193 Commentary 158-9); suggesting that the word passer (masc. sparrow) would have been a better word for Plautus to
use than meretrix (fem. prostitute), in the line meretrix tantisper blanditur dum
illud quod rapiat videt (a whore fawning all over that which she sees as
prey) thereby linking Plautus with Catullus, Poem 2. In another footnote, a line or two later, the
same editor contrasts Plautus describing how Erotium is so promiscuous as to
smother a man’s face, almost bite off his nose, with kisses in appreciation of
a gift (Plautus 194-195), with Catullus who wonders whose lips his former girl
will bite instead of his (Cat. 8.18).
In Chapter 25,
Sallust, despite devoting a full chapter to her, gives us only a list of the
complexities inherent in a character like Sempronia. She is merely a diversion from the main plot
of the story he is telling. Women at the
time of Plautus are disposed of just as easily in the comedies. In Menaechmi, a happy ending is two twins
becoming re-united and deciding to return home to their birthplace together,
leaving the women of one of them, Erotium and the aggrieved wife, behind with
presumably no care for their future. Sometimes they might marry, sometimes they
might get their freedom, only rarely are they dominant and powerful as in the
play Truculentus.[17] Sallust
does not tell us what fate has in store for Fulvia and Sempronia. We should probably assume that aspects of
Sempronia and Fulvia resemble Catullus’ Lesbia, a married woman who had illicit
affairs, one of which Catullus documented.
For Catullus and Lesbia there is no happy ending except that their
relationship marks the first time in literature that a love affair was
subjected to examination in a series of “mutually deepening poems.”[18]
What meaning does
Chapter 25 add to Sallust’s work? Sallust
dates Rome’s moral decline as beginning after the final destruction of Carthage
when: “Fortune began to be cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs”
(Loeb 10.1). He also suggests that
Roman manliness was contaminated by prolonged contact with the effeminacy of
the East (Loeb 11.6). He suggests that a
man’s natural ambition to succeed in Rome’s increasingly confused culture made
it easy for avarice to destroy honor and integrity (Loeb 10.1). But, by his own example, admitted at the
outset of Bellum Catilinae, he
demonstrates that while he once let ambition compromise his own morals, he,
himself, reverted to a higher standard (Loeb 3.3-3.5). Thus, from the vantage point of Sallust’s
peak of redemption, perhaps Sempronia is a reminder of his own misspent youth,
of his own adulterous affairs, which are said to have included an affair with
Fausta, daughter of the dictator Sulla, for which he was caught and flogged by
Fausta’s husband.[19] He craves a time when Rome was great, so that
is why he is a supporter of Octavian, Caesar’s heir, whom he believes will make
Rome great again.
Copyright © Dick Russell, 2017
Bibliography
Boardman, John, Jasper
Griffin, and Oswyn Murray eds. The
Oxford History of the Classical
World.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986
Boatwright, Gargola,
Talbert. The Romans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Catullus. Catullus, The Complete Poems. Trans. Guy Lee with an Introduction and Notes,
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Lowe, N.J. Comedy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Plautus. Menaechmi. Ed. A.S. Gratwick with an Introduction and
Commentary. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Sallust. Bellum Catilinae. Ed. J.T. Ramsey with an Introduction and
Commentary, Oxford:
Oxford
University Press, 2007.
[1]Florus who wrote about
100 years after Sallust, probably in the time of the Emperor Hadrian. (Bellum Catilinae, Commentary 23.3, page
128). An interesting research topic
might be how a woman of Fulvia’s standing is treated in literature starting
with Greek comedy through the present.
[2] Quintus Curius. He is noteworthy for having been expelled
from the Senate for immorality (Sallust 23.1
[3] The Romans, 211.
[4] Ibid 209.
[5] Claus CLAS461 lecture
on Sallust 25.
[6] For example, in an
analysis of 21 comedies attributed to Plautus, fully 13 have plots that involve
a meretrix: Asinaria, Bacchides,
Casina, Cistelaria, Curculio, Epidicus, Menaechmi, Mercator, Persa, Poenulus,
Pseudolus, Rudens, Truculentia. Source: Comedy.
[7] Catullus xix
[8]
As Sallust refers
to Caesar in the past tense, we can assume Bellum
Catilinae was written after his death in 44 B.C (Loeb 53.6).
[9] Catullus, Introduction,
xviii.
The gods will not come now impiety stains us
now that nobody desires justice for injustice
brothers killing brothers parents un-mourned
they will not come now to funerals
for a father wished death on his grown-up son
so he might marry her hesitant of his heir
they will not come now to marriages
for they see auguries in incest
even household gods flee such pollution
an evil mix blended thoroughly with madness
has turned them away they will not mind us
they do not want to dignify our feasts
not suffer their clear brilliance to be
stained.
[11]
The Glenn Hughes
Lectures. Dick Russell Senior Paper for
Professor J. J. Clauss. Summer 2016.
University of Washington. https://www.academia.edu/28055193/The_Glenn_Hughes_Lectures
[12] Jerome’s Chronicle provides dates of birth for
both Sallust and Catullus. Catullus died
aged 30, while Sallust lived to be 51.
Sallust was comparable in age to Catullus, possibly two years older than
Catullus.
[13] Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, Introduction, page
5: Retirement from Public Life.
[14]
The Romans, 211.
[15] For example, in an
analysis of 21 comedies attributed to Plautus, fully 13 have plots that involve
a meretrix: Asinaria, Bacchides, Casina, Cistelaria, Curculio, Epidicus,
Menaechmi, Mercator, Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, Rudens, Truculentia. Source: Comedy.
[16] The Romans 209. A woman could elect for a manus marriage in
which case she had no independence.
[17] Truculentus provides an example in Plautus of a dominant meretrix
juggling three men at once.
[18] Catullus xxiii
[19] Sallust 4.
