Abduction

                                       Briseis, Helen, Sita and Penelope[i]        

All are beautiful.  All except Penelope were abducted.  All except Briseis are household names, still famous today, even though their stories are thousands of years old.  Briseis was a slave while Helen, the daughter of Zeus, was married to Paris.  Sita was the wife of Rama, the hero in The Ramayana.   Penelope resembles Sita in defending her chastity, resembles Helen in her beauty, and Briseis in having to confront the possibility of an ugly future.  Briseis is much less well known, a footnote in history, known only to scholars of Homer and those who remember her from The Iliad.  Her life story is glimpsed from a few passages of the poem.  She became enslaved while she lived in the city of King Mynes.  She was married.  She was the daughter of Briseus.  Both her husband and her three full brothers were killed in a battle with Achilles, the leader of fifty ships of Myrmidons, Hellenes, and Achaeans, who sacked the town of Lyrnessos.  She is described as Briseis of the lovely hair and “golden Aphrodite”.[ii]

Briseis was beautiful enough to be considered a noteworthy prize.   She was awarded to Achilles by the Greek Army, perhaps the best prize being given to the greatest of the Greek warriors.   She is together with Achilles when The Iliad ends.  According to the poem, Achilles will soon be killed.  What happens to Briseis is unknown, to me, but it is likely that, still a slave, she would have been passed on from dead Achilles to become the concubine of whoever then led the Myrmidons.

We know much more about Helen, Sita and Penelope.  Helen is encountered in The Odyssey, an epic set later than The Iliad when Telemakhos, Odysseus’ son, visits King Menelaus in Sparta.  There is even a story, not in The Iliad, that after death she will not go to Hades, but live in The Isles of Bliss with Achilles![iii]  Another story says that Aphrodite spirited her out of Troy to have a tryst with Theseus.[iv]  Helen was once a byword for shame.  Yet another story, in defense of her tarnished reputation by the Greek dramatist Euripides, has swayed opinion. Perhaps she might really have been chaste, because it was not her, but another Helen, a kind of shadow who went to Troy.[v]   At Indian weddings, songs today are sung about Sita.  Most of her marriage to Rama was blissful but she too, like Helen, had a tarnished reputation, resulting in stories about Sita having doubles and reincarnations, one of them, Draupadi, who was so anxious for a husband that she prayed to Shiva five times and so was made wife of the five Pandavas, famous even today as heroes in The Mahabharata.[vi]  There is story that connects Penelope to an oath binding Helen’s suitors to the defense of whoever was chosen to be Helen’s husband.  This story has it that Odysseus suggests the idea of the oath to Helen’s father while asking him in return to help him marry Ikarios’ daughter, Penelope.[vii]  Penelope has become a byword for faithfulness.

Abduction was common in Classical literature.  Medea, Helen, and Sita are some famous examples, all females; Ganymede, Hylas, and Odysseus all well-known males.   While no rules appeared to govern abduction by the gods, a passage from The Mahabharata illustrates that abduction between mortals was governed by societal rules.   Just before he seizes three maidens and absconds with them in his chariot, Bhishma announces to the King of Kasi’s court that: “Of the several forms of choosing a bride, as the sages have mentioned, the noblest is that in which a maiden is acquired by force from amidst a valiant gathering such as this”.[viii]   From this, it follows that to abduct a woman in the culture of The Mahabharata, a prospective husband would first have announced his intention, then fought for the woman he desired, and by winning the fight, have been able to abduct her legally.  Bhishma’s intention when abducting the King’s daughters was to provide wives for his ward, the young king of Hastinapura.   

The Iliad centers on two abductions, Helen, taken by Paris from her husband Menelaus, and Briseis, a slave girl whom Agamemnnon took away from her master Achilles.  Helen’s abduction led to The Trojan War.   Agamemnon’s action caused Achilles’ prolonged withdrawal from the Trojan War.  Achilles was not in the position of a father whose daughter had been abducted, or a husband his wife.  The Greek army had awarded him the beautiful girl Briseis as a prize.  From hints in The Iliad, we can assume that Briseis, once abducted, was probably a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.  Her own husband and three brothers were killed by Achilles and his men when she was enslaved.[ix]   At the time, she was consoled by Patroclus, who promised her she would become Achilles’ bride.  She was fond of Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend while she was Achilles’ concubine.  The rage that Achilles felt at Agamemnon was not because of losing Briseis the woman but, as he prayed to his mother, the goddess Thetis: “Agamemnon has taken away my prize and dishonored me.”[x]  Achilles does not ask his mother to help get Briseis back.  Instead, he asks her to have Zeus wreak havoc on the Greeks until Agamemnon realizes “what a fool he’s been because he did not honor the best of all the fighting Achaeans.”[xi]  Thetis shows no sympathy for Briseis.  A slave had very little status in such cultures.

From versions of The Ramayana, we gain further insight into the importance of honor to a man in epic poetry.  Like Briseis, Sita in The Ramayana, Rama’s wife, is abducted.  The wily demon who took her, Ravana, contrived to get her husband Rama and his brother Lakshmana away from the house where Sita was left alone.  Like Paris for Helen, Ravana had been afflicted by desire for Sita, in this case, not by Aphrodite, but by his demon sister.  Luckily for Sita, Ravana believes that because of a curse he will die if he touches an unwilling woman.[xii]  Sita refuses to give him such permission and preserves her chastity.  A war will ensue that will result in the fall of Ravana’s kingdom of Lanka, just as the Trojan War will end with the destruction of Troy.   Like Helen, when Sita is re-united with her husband she realizes their relationship has been violated even if she had not.  Sattar’s version of the story provides more explicit details of Rama’s feelings for Sita who dishonored him by being abducted.  He tells her: “I have done my duty by rescuing you from the enemy…I did it to vindicate my honor and to save my noble family from disgrace…I have terrible suspicions about your character and conduct.  The sight of you is as painful to me as a lamp to a man with diseased eyes!”[xiii] 

As with Achilles, honor is worth more to Rama than his relationship with a woman.  Sita must throw herself on a burning funeral pyre to be vindicated by the Sun God and presented back to Rama, before he will accept her again as his wife.   In Sattar’s version, Sita is subsequently exiled to live under the sage Valmiki’s protection because Rama hears that there is unseemly gossip about Sita and Ravana among his people.  Sita is pregnant and people assume that Sita could not have been so long under Ravana’s power without losing her chastity.  “Now we shall have to do the same thing with our wives”, people are saying, “in a similar situation…subjects must do as their king does!”[xiv]  In contrast with Rama, Odysseus clearly trusts his wife Penelope even though they have been separated for twenty years.   For some of that time she has been besieged by suitors wanting to marry her.  When Odysseus returns, disposes of those that were disloyal in his household and kills all the suitors, he accepts his wife without reservation, although, in an unusual demonstration of female power in classical literature, she subjects him to a final test, before she will accept that he truly is her long-lost husband.  Only her husband would know the details of their marriage bed and how it was constructed to incorporate an olive tree.  Odysseus passes the test.[xv] 

Physical beauty is often, of itself, a motivator for abduction.  From sources other than The Iliad, we know that, before Helen was married to Menelaus, she had once been abducted by Theseus and Peirithoös when she was ten, only to be rescued by her brothers Castor and Pollux, still a virgin.[xvi]  Theseus and Peirithoös are also known to have attempted to abduct Persephone from Hades.[xvii]  They are the two heroes Odysseus regretted he was unable to meet before being chased out of the land of the dead by Persephone herself.[xviii]   There is no full description of Helen’s abduction from Greece in either The Iliad or The Odyssey, presumably because such details were told in tales that have since been lost.  Unlike Sita, Helen, who was familiar with the excitement of abduction may have been thrilled to abscond with Paris, no doubt further encouraged by Aphrodite.[xix]  But it seems clear from these epics that when Paris abducted Helen, Paris did not abide by time-honored convention.  Instead, like Ravana, he committed a crime against custom. An example of the correct procedure can be found in Draupadi’s Bridegroom Choice (352-354), a section of The Mahabharata.  Arjuna does not have to abduct Draupadi because Draupadi self-selects him once he has accomplished a necessary feat with a bow.  But Arjuna’s intrusion into the competition does resemble an abduction in that it follows the pattern of publicly announcing an intention to carry off a bride, fighting for her, and winning.  That he had to fight off angry suitors even after being selected by Draupadi in open contest gives further credence to the legitimacy of his prize.  The Trojan war might have been prevented if Paris, instead of snatching Helen away in secret, had come to blows with Menelaus, her husband, or at least some of Helen’s bodyguard, and won in combat the prize with whom he absconded.

The Odyssey, also has many abductions.  Odysseus’ loyal servant, Eumaios, the swineherd was abducted as a child and sold into slavery.[xx]  When Odysseus returns to Ithaca he invents a story that he himself was abducted (the second Cretan lie) to forge a common bond with his loyal servant who has not yet recognized his master.  Odysseus is abducted, first by Circe who fails in the attempt, then by Polyphemus the Cyclops from whom Odysseus is only able to escape due to his guile, and then by Calypso.  Circe’s attempt to abduct him and change him into a pig, was thwarted by Hermes.[xxi]  The Odyssey does not explain what brought Hermes to Circe’s island.  Circe like Calypso invites Odysseus to bed. She subsequently entertained him and his crew for a year before his crew grew restless and she helped him leave.  Calypso will abduct Odysseus for seven years and he will sleep with her at night while pining for Penelope during the day.[xxii]   

In the meantime, Penelope, Odysseus’ faithful wife has been besieged by suitors.  Having kept them at bay for several years they are now pressing her to proceed with a marriage.  They are essentially waiting for a swayamwara, a Sanskrit word given to an event where a bride makes a “self-choice”.  Normally, such an event would be hosted by a King to marry off his daughter.  Penelope is unusual, again, in that she organizes a bow competition on her own, perhaps complicit with her husband who has returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar.  It does not occur to the suitors during their long waiting period that any one of them could abduct Penelope, presumably by fighting off all the others.  Could this be the reason for Penelope’s lavish, hospitality?   She does not forbid the continual feasting on valuable livestock.  Having finished weaving Laertes’ death shroud, she was desperate not to be forced into making a marriage decision.  She was still playing for time.  When Odysseus is reunited with his wife he tells Penelope he will replenish the flocks the suitors depleted by going on raids.[xxiii]  Slaves like cattle had value because their productivity could increase a family’s wealth.  Slaves had no legal status and their abduction probably carried no penalty.  We can speculate that it was by raiding his distant neighbors and abducting their livestock and their women that Odysseus would have gone about replenishing his household staff as well as his flocks.

Meanwhile, we can expect that Briseis is twenty years older and is either still a beautiful slave plucking wool for a loom or now lingers among the throngs of dead in Hades.  Perhaps in Hades she was re-united with her husband.  She is not totally forgotten by poets.  In a 1929 article published in The Criterion IX, Ezra Pound recalled her as part of the “old story of Briseis and Achilles”.[xxiv]

References

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[i] All in epic poetry, Briseis and Helen in The Iliad, Penelope and Helen in The Odyssey, and Sita in The Ramayana.  This paper credits Stephanie W. Jamison's paper: Draupadi on the Walls of Troy. 

[ii] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume 2, 596; Iliad, Lombardo, 190; Iliad, Lattimore, 69 and 94.

[iii] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume 1, 135.

[iv] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume 2, 596.

[v] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume 2, 664.

[vi] Levaniouk, class handout, March 7^th. 2017

[vii] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume 2, 566.

[viii] Mahabharata, Narayan, 4.

[ix] Iliad, Lombardo, 382-383, book XIX, 300-322.

[x] ibid, book I, 369-370.

[xi] ibid, 430-431.

[xii] Ramayana, Narayan 87.

[xiii] Ramayana, Sattar, 633.

[xiv] ibid, 662.

[xv] Odyssey, Fitzgerald, page 435, book XXIII 202-230.

[xvi] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume I 288-291. 

[xvii] Ibid 291-295

[xviii] Odyssey, Fitzgerald, page 205-206, book XI 749-754.

[xix] Gantz, T.  Early Greek Myth, Volume 1, 288-91.

[xx] Odyssey, Fitzgerald, page 280-283, book XV 475-586.

[xxi] ibid, Fitzgerald, page 173-175, book XV 475-586.

[xxii] ibid, Fitzgerald, page 82-85, book X 305-390.

[xxiii] ibid, Fitzgerald, page 440, book XXIII, 401-405.

[xxiv] Pound, Horace, The Criterion IX, 1929-1930, 181.

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?

                                           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.

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[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.

[10] Catullus 64.397-408.                  After Catullus (64.397)

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.

                             Having you close:

Donnelly said to Aphrodite

having you close

creates a situation

a disturbing situation

a breaking of the peace

my peace

tap feather light

caressing a kettle drum

keeping always in time

touch finger light

strumming monotony

striking fresh chords finding rhyme

roses among hedge rows

mossy stone byways

pathways bringing them by

Donnelly and Aphrodite

still seeing each other

eye to eye

tap feather light

caressing a kettle drum

keeping always in time

touch finger light

strumming monotony

striking fresh chords finding rhyme

a blues piano enters

just one mode

of a multi-modal

keyboard
            a pub piano

trembling beer mugs

should it slip into

full frontal

pipe organ mode

an organ in full throttle

with two hands on the keyboard

two feet on the pedal

pulling out all stops

even for a second

monotony is fine

if alone with you

roses among hedge rows

mossy stone byways

pathways bringing them by

Donnelly and Aphrodite

still seeing each other

eye to eye

Copyright © Dick Russell

                 2017

The Glenn Hughes Lectures

https://www.academia.edu/28055193/The_Glenn_Hughes_Lectures