negotiating ideologies
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Karen Bassi (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Architecture and Ideology

In an article entitled "Architecture and the Critique of Ideology," Fredric Jameson begins by asking, "How can space be 'ideological'?" The question pertains to the political implications of practices and concepts that, within a given historical context, take space as a defining feature. It also pertains to space as the producer and product of aesthetic developments, i.e., of architectural forms and innovations. The historical and aesthetic conceptualizations of space that interest Jameson are those of late capitalism and postmodernism respectively. But his question is also relevant for the ancient Greek conceptualization of space, for example, the notions of home as an idealized destination and of the house as its material referent in epic and tragic texts. My paper will begin with a discussion of the concept of nostos or homecoming in the epic and will then focus on the skene (referred to in the tragic texts as a domos, oikos, or stege) as the scene of homecoming and as a material marker of ideological space in the Attic theater.

In the context of Greek social relations and aesthetic practices, the skene is not simply proof of Aeschylus' "inventiveness" (Taplin), a place for actors to change their costumes (Taplin, Padel), or due to the "stimulus" of Odysseus' palace in the Odyssey (Kullman). These appeals to authorial genius, practical necessity, and the influence of the Homeric master plot implicitly view the development of the skene and its role in performance as a result of natural processes. But as a conventional feature of Greek drama, the skene localizes space and spatial orientation within a "whole system of legitimizing beliefs" (Jameson). These include beliefs about class, gender, and citizenship.in the context of what anthropologists and social scientists call the built environment (Papoport, Pearson and Richards). Within this system, the skene is an example of the parallel history of political and architectural developments in fifth-century Athens (Hoepfner and Zimmer). 

It is obvious that the façade of the skene does not represent the house of a bourgeois family, but of an aristocratic or elite family whose threatened stability is a staple of the tragic plot. The skene thus anticipates the early-modern meaning of domestic in which the affairs of state are euphemistically conflated with the affairs of the private household (Orlin). But this conflation is ambiguous in ancient tragedy. On the one hand, it seems to validate aristocratic ideals by equating the royal house with the city or state at large; if the house "falls" the city suffers. On the other hand, it seems to validate democratic ideals; the aristocratic houses fall so that the democratic city-state, with its aggregate of lesser households, may rise (Seaford). These competing views about tragedy's political effects – caricatured, for example, in Aristophanes' Frogs – may be mapped onto the architectural or visual effects of the scene building. As a house, a monumental façade, and a conventional feature of the Attic theater, the skene demonstrates how architectural forms are visible evidence of political ideology.

Bibliography

Hoepfner, Wolfram, and Gerhard Zimmer, eds. Die Griechische Polis, Architektur und Politik. Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 1993.

Jameson, Fredric. "Architecture and the Critique of Ideology." In Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, edited by Joan Ockman, Deborah Berke and Mary McLeod, 51-93. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985.

Jameson, Michael. "Private Space and the Greek City." In The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander, edited by Oswyn Murray and Simon Price, 171-198. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Kullman, Wolfgang. "Die poetische Funktion des Palastes des Odysseus in der Odyssee." In The Homeric Oikos, edited by Machi Paisi-Apostolopoulou, 41-55. Ithaca: Center for Odyssean Studies, 1990.

Orlin, Lena Cowen. Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Padel, Ruth. "Making Space Speak." In Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, edited by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 336-365. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Pearson, Michael Parker, and Colin Richards. Architecture and Order, Approaches to Social Space. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Rapoport, Amos. "Identity and Environment: a Cross-Cultural Perspective." In Housing and Identity, Cross-cultural Perspectives, edited by James S. Duncan, 6-35. Guildford, London, Oxford, Worcester: Billing and Sons Limited, 1981.

Seaford, Richard. Reciprocity and Ritual, Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-state. Oxford: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Taplin, Oliver. Stagecraft of Aeschylus, The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

Wiles, David. Tragedy in Athens, Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
 
 

Jeffery Carnes (Syracuse University)
Pindar, Historicism, and the Aiginetan Imaginary

Epinician, perhaps more than any other ancient genre, wears its class affiliations on its sleeve: created at the behest of the wealthy (whether aristocrats or nouveaux riches), it celebrates traditional aristocratic virtues such as  xenia and  inherited excellence.   Yet  Pindar, perhaps  more than  any ancient author, is often subjected to a purely formalist criticism that  evades, or endlessly defers, questions of history  and ideology.  My paper will  examine the causes of this curious circumstance--in particular the influence of the for- malist, project of Elroy  Bundy--and suggest ways in  which the project of  his- toricizing Pindar can proceed from the  foundations built by Bundy and his  followers.

As Peter Rose points out, we cannot simply return to the Old Historicism of Wilamowitz:   "If we  are to  restore the  ideological content  of the odes as a legitimate aspect of the analysis of  their poetic meaning, it cannot be  on the pre-Bundian level of positing scraps of political allusions divorced from poetic texture or  citing scattered  sententiae out  of context."  (Rose 1992.157)  The challenge for  historically and  ideologically informed  criticism in  the post-Bundian  world  is  to  incorporate  the  best  results  of  Bundy's method--his teleologically based demonstration of the genre's coherence and comprehensibility--while attempting to provide as solid a basis as possible for an inherently speculative enterprise.   Toward this end,  I posit two axioms of non-uniqueness:  first, that political and historical referentiality will,  like
other elements of the epinician, be integrated into its program of victor-praise; second, that the ideological uses of myth in the Pindaric epinician will have, despite the particularities of author, genre, and audience, many points of contact with ideological uses of myth in other authors and genres. 

The first of these axioms means  that I will assume that the  "external" referentiality  of  a  myth  is  consonant  with the epinician telos of praising patrons and their cities.  Allusions to external events will follow  established (if implicit) conventions, and in examining the odes for Aiginetan victors I hope to make tentative steps toward understanding what those conventions may have been.  Analysis of the political import of myth supplements Bundy's  work  by  allowing  us  to  reconstruct,  at least in part, the broader cultural aspects of the Aiginetan  "horizon of expectations."  The  second axiom suggests that comparative study may be the best way to further our  understanding of the  extent to  which ideology  and history  may be  woven into the Aiginetan odes.   For a  variety of  reasons, Athenian  self-representational myths, especially those associated with the Attic Funeral Oration, will provide a  particularly useful parallel set of data.

My approach to ideology is  influenced by the work  of Althusser, especially his  insistence on  the invisibility  and ubiquity  of ideological formations.  Althusser insists that  naturalization is one of the  primary mechanisms of ideology:  that a ruling elite  or class is able to maintain its  hegemony by making such hegemony seem natural, a  matter of assent rather than of  coercion.  In this regard, myth--which also seeks to naturalize what is in fact contingent, particularly in its use as exemplum within the epinician--is particularly  valuable for understanding the ideology of Pindar's Aiginetan patrons. 

Although we lack sufficient data for an examination of the internal ideology of pre-diaspora Aigina, what is possible  is a limited understanding of what we may call the Aiginetans' "external ideology":  their projection of themselves as a polis defined by analogy with,  and opposition to, other poleis.   What Pindar said to the Aiginetans can be presumed (given a Bundian perspective) to be  what they liked to hear said about  themselves.  This discourse was directed  at both internal and external audiences, and  therefore might be in some  respects classified under Althusser's rubric of "interpellation," in other respects as "self-justification" or "propaganda."   Much of  the relevant material,  however, consists of statements  whose ideological functions  are not easily  decodable; and this is  nowhere truer  than in  the case  of myth.   Myth  is the most uniquely Aiginetan  element  within  the  odes:    while  the praise of such aristocratic virtues as xenia or  phye is a Pindaric  commonplace, praise of the  Aiakidai is almost entirely restricted to the Aiginetan odes.  Yet myth in the epinician is used in a variety of metaphorical or allegorical ways, and by its very nature is a form of  discourse which will  have a particularly  large unconscious element.  It is  here that  the value  of Althusser's  Lacanian take  on ideology  is most apparent:  ideology's operations will not be entirely at the level of  conscious thought, nor will they be fully transparent to those who produce and consume it.  Ideology, like myth, operates largely in the realm of the imaginary. 

In Lacanian terms the  imaginary is the realm of the psyche created by  the individual's  ego-development,  with  the  moi  (the  self as object) created in response  to  the  infant's  perception  of  his  image in mirrors (Lacan 1977).  Althusser applies the Lacanian term on a social level to refer to the end result of the inculcation of ideology  in the individual, and the  individual's heeding the call of interpellation and accepting  her place in society.  For  Althusser, "What is represented in ideology is  therefore not the system of the  real relations which govern the existence  of individuals, but the imaginary  relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live." 

In the specific case of Aigina, we are presented with an imaginary which is almost entirely embedded in myth, and much of that myth is explicitly  concerned with the origin  of the individual  and the community.   The last  section of my paper  will  outline  the  ways   in  which  the  Aiginetan  imaginary may be reconstructed based on an examination  of the community's myths of  origin, particularly those  associated with  their founding  hero Aiakos,  and will suggest that  the  Aiginetan  imaginary  developed  partly  in  reaction  to  the  self-representational program of their Athenian rivals.

Select Bibliography:

Althusser, L.   1971.  "Ideology  and Ideological State  Apparatuses," 127-86 in
Lenin and Philosophy.  New York.

Lacan, J.  1977.   "The Mirror Stage  as Formative of the  Function of the I  as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," 1-7  in Ecrits:  A Selection,  trans. A.
Sheridan.  New York.

Rose, P.   1992.   "Historicizing  Pindar:   Pythian 10,"  141-84 in Sons of the
Gods, Children of the Earth.  Ithaca.
 
 

Josephine Crawley (University of California, Berkeley)
Forging community through universal history

This paper argues that Eastern witnesses of Rome's rise to power (c.200-150
BCE) develop conceptions of community and identity in order to understand and
cope with this phenomenon, and explores the different ways in which these
conceptions are expressed and reflected, concentrating on the invention and
subsequent practice of "universal history".

Polybius is the first historian to adopt a synoptic approach to the writing of
history: he describes the events of each year in Italy, then in Greece, then in
Asia, then in Egypt.   This innovation maps onto recent discussions of the
creation of national and nationalist identity, of "imagined communities" in the
modern era.  Benedict Anderson, building on the work of Walter Benjamin, has
written about new ways of structuring novels and the arrival of the newspaper
as dependent on an idea of "simultaneity across time". Simultaneous experience
across a homogenous, empty time period, marked by the clock and calendar,  is,
according to Anderson, a necessary precondition for imagining community. It is
at this point that 'meanwhile' becomes a meaningful concept in the literature
of a society, along with references to the readers' own experience of and
involvement in the events and places discussed.  For Anderson, it is this
change in ways of apprehending the world that "more than anything else made it
possible to 'think' the nation"; as a result of this change, he says, "the
nation is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history".

Polybius justifies his choice of structure in a strikingly analogous way:

"Now in earlier times the world's history had consisted, so to speak, of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of each being as widely separated as their localities, but from this point [220 BCE] onwards history becomes as organic whole: the affairs of Italy and of Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end."  (1.3)

Finally, I examine the development of 'universal history' by other non-Roman
historians (Posidonius and Pompeius Trogus are two striking examples),
focussing on the different constructions of historical community that each
writer assumes, and the extent to which they reflect contemporary Roman
overseas interests, as well the way in which the forging of  Mediterranean
community contributes to and is encouraged by Roman hegemony.
 
 
 

Vincent Farenga (University of Southern California)
Negotiating Democratic Citizenship in Athens: Ideology and Ontology

In recent years historians have adopted a new paradigm in characterizing citizenship in a city-state like Athens as "ideologically" generated and maintained through a finite, stable set of beliefs shared by full-status members of a political community (Ober 1989, 1996, 1998; Manville 1994; Connor 1994).  While an advance over older paradigms, this understanding of ancient citizenship as an ideological construct  risks obscuring its origins in face-to-face interactions that are both communicative and cognitive.  I will propose a model of democratic citizenship whose ideology is derived from a performative relationship utilizing what Bakhtin (1986) called "complex speech genres" and provoking cognitive acts from peers who evaluated and recognized one's social worth or timê.  This communicative and cognitive model, I argue,  succeeds in connecting changes in the ideology of citizenship during the fifth century BC to a shift in Athenians' ontological suppositions about the nature of social reality and the individual during the last third of the fifth century BC. 

To understand this shift, we must first understand how our emphasis today on nomos as the political consensus that confers identity as a full-status member of the community downplays Greek citizenship's traditional dependence on a cultic sense of participation in sacred actions.  In performing these actions, citizens aligned notions of everyday reality with religious- mythological chronotopes learned from oral traditions (Bakhtin 1981; Tyrell and Brown 1991; Farrar 1988; Frost 1994; Sealey 1983; Sourvinou-
Inwood 1988 & 1990).   By the 470s - 460s BC the Athenian empire and the reforms of Ephialtes had weakened the anchoring of political identity in religious-mythological realities, and the Periclean citizenship law of 451/50 rapidly secularized the Athenians' understanding of nomos as the guarantor of a full-status sharing in the city-state.

By the 430s the first generation of sophists was capitalizing on the secularization of nomos to arouse widespread anxiety over the ability of nomos to obtain from peers recognition of a citizen's social worth.  From fragments of his two essays, "On Truth" and "On Social Harmony," the Athenian orator and sophist Antiphon appears to have been the principal engineer of this anxiety.  He was the earliest destabilizer of confidence in nomos as an index to a citizen's social standing (timê); and he accomplished this by demonstrating that nomos was only one "frame" (in Goffman's sense [1974]) among several through which citizens could determine the reality of events and the value, or relative social standing, of their peers.

Antiphon preferred an alternative "frame" for citizens to consider an event in ontologically distinct registers: this was phusis, in the two distinct senses of (1) a universal human nature beyond the scope of any localized and relative sense of nomos, as well as (2) the reality of an inner self whose individual subjectivity and self-interest took precedence over nomos (Decleva Caizzi 1986; Ostwald 1986 &1990).  To this he added probability, or argument from to eikos, as yet a third "frame" (Gagarin 1994 & 1997).  Evidence from Antiphon's two philosophical essays, courtroom speeches, and speechwriting for the assembly suggest that each of these "frames" could be employed to establish the elite citizen's "usefulness" (chrêsis) as the criterion by which his peers determined his worth. 

I will maintain that the cognitive versatility employed in this sort of ontological "frame- switching" redefined for Athenians the ideology of democratic citizenship.  In the 420s-410s Antiphon either encouraged or warned elites to realize that their participation in citizen interactions, whether political or forensic, required them to risk themselves in verbal performances in front of putative peers who were increasingly adept at evaluating moral and political actions under competing ontological registers.  According to this redefined ideology, democratic citizenship was therefore not conferred by or acquired through nomos but transacted or, as Antiphon himself expressed it in "On Social Harmony," something to be "negotiated" (emporeueshai).

One manifestation of the resulting "performance-anxiety" elite Athenians experienced in public life was the prominence of performances by various types of non-citizen in the 420s-410s, among them the metic, the foreigner and the female.  A quick look at Antiphon's portrayal of the non-Athenian Euxitheos on trial for the murder of the Athenian Herodes (c. 419) will illustrate how jurors were expected to implement this revised understanding of citizen ideology by  "frame-switching" in order to determine the respective timai of citizen and non-citizen.
 

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. M.  1981. The Dialogic Imagination.  Trans. C. Emerson & M.Holquist.  Austin.

Bakhtin, M. M.  1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays.  Trans. V. McGee.  Austin.

Boegehold, A. and Scafuro, A. eds. 1994. Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology.   Baltimore.

Connor, W.R.  1994.  "The Problem of Athenian Civic Identity," in Boegehold and Scafuro.

Decleva Caizzi, F. 1986.  "Hysteron Proteron: la nature et la loi selon Antiphon et Platon."   Revue de métaphysique et de morale 91: 291-310.

Farrar, Cynthia.  1988. The Origins of Democratic Thinking.  Cambridge.

Frost, F.  1994. "Aspects of Early Athenian Citizenship," in Boegehold and Scafuro.

Gagarin, Michael.  1994.  "Probability and Persuasion: Plato and Early Greek   Rhetoric," in  Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action.  Ed. I. Worthington.  London.

Gagarin, M.  1997.  "Introduction." Antiphon: The Speeches.  Cambridge.
Goffman, E. 1974.  Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston.

Manville, Philip Brooke. 1994.  "Toward a New Paradigm of Athenian Citizenship,"   in  Alan Boegehold and Adele Scafuro.

Ober, Josiah.  1989. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens.  Princeton.

Ober, Josiah.  1986. The Athenian Revolution.  Princeton.

Ober, Josiah.  1998.  Political Dissent in Democratic Athens.  Princeton.

Ostwald, Martin.  1986.  From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law.    Berkeley.

Ostwald, Martin.  1990.  "Nomos and Phusis in Antiphon's Peri Alêtheia," in Cabinet of the Muses:  Essays in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer.  Eds. M. Griffith and D.J.  Mastronarde. Atlanta.

Sealey, R.  1983.  "How Citizenship and the City Began in Athens."  AJAH 8:97-129.

Sourvinou-Inwood. C.  1988.  "Further Aspects of Polis Religion."  A.I.O.N. 10:259-74.

Sourvinou-Inwood. C.  "What is Polis Religion?," in The Greek City from Homer to  Alexander.  Eds. O. Murray and S. Price.  Oxford.

Tyrell, W. and F. Brown.  1991.  Athenian Myths and Institutions.  New York.
 
 
 

Richard King (Purdue University)
Mounting Ambition: Dissimulating Political Desire in Fasti 2

This paper argues that Book Two of Ovid’s calendar poem, the Fasti, engages in a reflexive critique of Augustan power relations, simultaneously discovering and covering them by manipulating “veils” of discourse. While scholars have tracked literary themes to evaluate Ovid’s view of Augustan rule (Herbert-Brown, Newlands and Barchiesi), no one has isolated dissimulation as key to Ovid’s discourse (cf. Vasiliy Rudich, Political Dissidence Under Nero). 

This paper first illustrates Ovid’s methods of demystifying Augustan authority, under the title pater patriae (granted to Augustus on 5 Feb. 2 B.C.E.). While outwardly Ovid praises the title as marking fatherly concern (2.119-144, 635-38), he juxtaposes outward praise in the rest of the book with stories of abusive patres, or sons imitating such fathers. A summary of outward praise leads to a discussion of stories of paternal abuse (Jupiter-Callisto, Feb. 12; Amulius, Feb. 15; Romulus-Mars, Sabine women, Feb. 17; Jupiter, Mercury and Larentia, Feb. 21; and the Tarquinii, father and son, Feb. 24). Ostensibly, Ovid’s comparison of Augustus with Romulus contrasts the two rulers in their methods of rule (141), their treatment of women (139), and their treatment of the “foreign” dangers (140). Ovid’s remarks on his own weak, inappropriate tone (2.123-26) imply, however, that he risks the ambiguity of using the word nomen ironically (127, 141-144) to mean “mere name” – a “verbal guise” covering the true nature of Augustan rule (OLD 15). Ancient discussion of delivery and tone support this argument (Quintilian and Cicero, e.g. de Or. 2.67.272 on dissimulatio).

Next, the paper shows that narratives throughout the book exploit “guises” or “masks” as a major theme. Every major story of Fasti Two turns upon veiling-unveiling, masking-unmasking in the face of violence.  For example, Arion dons feminine clothes to sing, delay death and ultimately be saved (Feb. 3); Callisto’s oath constructs her identity as virgin, but doffing veils (velamina) exposes her pregnancy (after rape; Feb. 12); Pan attempts to rape Hercules, cross-dressed in Omphale’s clothes (Feb. 15). The paper analyzes these narratives using three axes of power in Ovid’s praise of the pater patriae – politics (2.127-138), gender (2.139-141; violence against women), and Roman vs. “other” ethnicity – and concludes that dissimulation in Fasti Two is key to the negotiation of power.

The last section shows that dissimulation of masculinity in feminine garb enables reversals of privilege.  Analysis focuses upon sexualized violence in the Lupercalia (Faunus’ attempted rape of Hercules) and the Regifugium (Sextus Tarquinius’ rape of Lucretia). As previously shown, Roman invective represented political domination in terms of rape (Roman Sexualities; Queer Representations; Richlin, Garden of Priapus).  In the Hercules and Lucretia episodes, gender-consistent masks or veils are not able to prevent attempted domination by rapacious desire (of Pan and Sextus). The language of gender in the stories of Hercules-Omphale and Lucretia shows that timely dissimulation of male identity and, then, its sudden display prevents or avenges the “rape” of identity.  The revelation of “masculine” traits in Lucretia’s physical gender (her suicide) and beneath Brutus’ humorous stupidity (exploitation of the rape) enables the foundation of a republican order.  Conversely, concealment and sudden discovery of Hercules’ masculinity within feminine garb prevents Pan from raping “Omphale.”

The paper concludes by interpreting the Fasti as a poetic “veil” covering Ovid’s free, independent identity as a citizen.  Images of equestrians as Luperci and in the imperial review of equestrians provide explicit visual forms by which to evaluate Ovid’s self-portrayal in his preface to Fasti Two.  Fasti Two functions as Ovid’s feminized, elegiac (poeticized) version or mask for his free equestrian status (cf. Ov. Am. 3.15; Tr. 4.10).
 
 

Michael Koortbojian (University of Toronto / American Academy in Rome)
Divus Iulius in 36 B.C.

In January of 42, the Senate legally sanctioned the deification of Caesar.
Thus a temple to his divinity, together with the required cult statue, was vowed. It was to be built on the site of the improvised altar that marked his cremation by the Roman crowd that had spontaneously disrupted his official funeral. There is no record that anything was done until the year 36, when Octavian issued a pair of coins that displayed an image of the original altar, the projected temple, and the planned statue within. Analysis of these coins, in their historical and religious context, demonstrates that the cult statue posed a very specific, and unprecedented problem: How was Caesar to be represented as a god? How might this be done so that the resulting monument would be comprehensible and taken seriously; that is, that its depiction of Caesar as divus might be understood literally. There were no pre-existing models, as there were no men, save for figures of mythic history (Romulus, Hercules), who had similarly been elevated to divine status. Solutions were proposed at least twice, and in neither case were they either compelling, or from a religious point of view, sufficient to the task. While the actual statue does not survive, there are subsequent monuments whose conventionality demonstrates that they echo Caesar's lost representation. Nevertheless, these too suggest the failure to find adequate visual form to the new ideology, in which the deceased emperors might survive in the realm of the divine.
 
 

David Larmour and Jason Banta (Texas Tech University and SUNY Buffalo)
Complex Contestations: Ideology and Greek Athletics

This paper discusses the ideological structures of Greek athletic competition, and argues that we need to replace the essentially monolithic, univocal view of these signifying displays, which has prevailed until recently, with one that takes account of the diverse ideological strategies in different cultural formations (Olympia, Athens, Sparta) and of the contradictions within these strategies. Ideology is taken here not as false consciousness but in the broader Althusserian and Foucauldian sense of a social group’s collective, as well as individual, forms of self-representation. This paper aims to establish a methodology for reading the athletic performance, space, and body in ideological terms; to do so it is necessary to accommodate diversity, not only in the types of source material available (literary, epigraphic, artistic and archaeological), but also in the cultural regimes which promoted, changed, or regulated these activities.

As agonistic spectacles, Greek athletic practices can certainly be connected with over-arching Greek discourses of male citizen self-definition (which designate women, foreigners and slaves as Other), but the picture is much more complex when we examine these practices in the specific—and substantially different—contexts of Olympia, Athens, and Sparta. A case in point is the Athenian torch-race, which constitutes a recurring aporia in accounts that assume all athletic agones promulgate and reinforce the same ideological structures.  The torch-race is, in fact, located within a nexus of competing and rapidly shifting discourses of self-definition in Athens during the period of the Peisistratid tyranny and the democracy.  The combination of tribal and individual elements, and the conjunction of sport and ritual in this spectacle ensure that its ideological "message" is particularly fractured and contradictory.  The paper will argue that similar kinds of discontinuities are to be found in other athletic displays and that the ideology of Greek athletic practices is more complex than has traditionally been thought.

Select Bibliogrpahy

L. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York 1971), 127-193

Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London 1991)

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York 1985), especially Ch. 2 (“Dietetics”), and The Care of the Self (New York 1988), especially Ch. 2 (“Cultivation of the Self” and Ch. 4 “The Body”

Leslie Kurke, “The Economy of Kudos,” in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece (Oxford 1998), 131-163

David H. J. Larmour, Stage and Stadium: Drama and Athletics in Classical Greece (Cologne 1999), ch. 5 “The Agon and Ideology”
 
 

Emily Mackil (Princeton University)
Toward an Analysis of Aristotle's Ideological Thinking

Aristotle’s Politics can properly be defined as a sober, rational work of historically informed political philosophy.  Yet within that text is a theory that is as deeply rebarbative as it is difficult to defend on philosophic grounds alone, i.e., the theory of natural slavery.  The philosophical problems posed by the theory of natural slavery led to a discussion by Malcolm Schofield of whether it can and should be considered a theory that arises not from political philosophy but rather from ideological thinking.   His conclusion was that indeed it should not.  I propose to re-examine the question, for Schofield’s analysis raises several promising avenues for understanding this notoriously difficult problem.  In order to get round some of the difficulties he faced, I shall employ a different conception of ideology, one that responds to but is very distant from, the traditional Marxist conflict-theory of ideology, and that is the conception worked out in great detail and nuance by Michael Freeden in his book, Ideologies and Political Theory. The advantage of this approach is that it proceeds in the first instance on an analysis of the function and morphology of ideological thought.  These are things that a text of classical antiquity does make accessible to the modern reader, while issues of intentionality and consciousness, central to the Marxist (Marxish?) theory employed by Schofield, are difficult if not impossible to address in the study of an ancient text.

Schofield demonstrated certain extremely important aspects of Aristotle’s political thought (a) as stemming from an awareness of the fact that (especially political) ideas tend to form in clusters determined by sociological groups, and (b) itself displaying the result of that tendency.  I hope to show that these observations hold good, and to take the analysis further by arguing that it reveals certain essential characteristics of political thought which apply as fully to ancient texts as to modern.  Freeden argues that far from being necessarily associated with exploitation, alienation and irrationality, ideologies are an essential and pervasive element of political thought which has certain positive functions, including the forging of group identities, the legitimation of intellectual and social positions on political questions, and the orientation of individuals holding those ideas toward political action. I hope the inquiry may tell us something about the elements that go into the forging of a particular position within political discourse, which has its basis in the structures and limitations of human thought and its relationship to action.  Specifically, I hope to draw attention to the existence of elements of political thought that are not formulated upon a largely rational, philosophically rigorous basis, and to show that, by becoming aware of their functions in political life, these elements should not be thought of pejoratively, as something to be escaped, not only by ‘all good philosophers’ but also by ‘the alienated masses’ or those ‘suffering under the delusion of a false consciousness.’

I shall argue that Aristotle himself is not only aware of the kind of thinking that we call ‘ideological’, and that he criticizes it for being such, but also that his own endoxic method of inquiry is particularly susceptible to the adoption of ideological thinking in the midst of philosophical argumentation.  For Aristotle, the only feasible way to provide the citizens of a polis with the leisure rquired to pursue the final end of human life, eudaimonia, is slavery; the development of a theory of natural slavery provided a rational system by which a socially determined interest could be protected and justified.  By utilizing in a sociological context the concept of nature developed in his scientific treatises, Aristotle developed the force of that concept from being purely descriptive to being simultaneously normative.  It thus served, in very philosophical claims, to exert the same kind of force that ideological claims have.  By expressing cultural preferences in terms of a universalizing rationality, and by disseminating those ideas in an academic context, which is itself inherently political and ‘public’, Aristotle developed a philosophical construction of the best politiea, informed, quite literally, in crucial ways by his own ideological thought.

Select  Bibliography

Demont, P., ‘Le loisir (skholé) dans la Politique d’Aristote’, in P. Aubenque, ed., Aristote Politique.  Etudes sur la Politique d’Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 209-230.

Freeden, M., Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

Gallie, W.B., ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, PAS 56 (1955-6), 167-198. 

Lloyd, G.E.R., ‘The Idea of Nature in Aristotle’s Politics’, in Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 184-204. 

Pellegrin, P., ‘La Théorie aristotélicienne d’esclavage: tendances actuelles de l’interpretation’,  RPhilos CLXXII (1982), 345-57. 

Schofield, M., ‘Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Theory of Slavery’, in G. 
Patzig, ed., Aristoteles’ “Politik”.  Akten des XI. Symposium Aristotelicum 
Friedrichschafen/Bodensee.  25.8. - 3.19.1987 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 1-27.

Taylor, C., ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, in Taylor, ed., Philosophy and the Human Sciences.  Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15-57.
 
 
 

Josiah Ober (Princeton University)
Taking Positions and Making Points: Tyrant-killing and Stasis in Athenian Political Discourse and Iconography

This paper begins by positing a close relationship between Athenian demotic ideology and political literature written by dissident (although not necessarily anti-democratic) intellectuals -- a relationship I have explored in a recent book. There I argue that democratic ideology, with its quasi-hegemonic tendencies, was challenged in texts produced by members of an informal yet self-consciously critical "community of interpretation." Athenian dissident intellectuals were not necessarily oligarchic in their sympathies, but they were unconvinced by democracy's claim to be either "the best of all possible policital systems" or even "the best we can hope for." I suppose that situating Athenian political texts in the argumentative context of a debate between proponents of democratic ideology and its critics can clarify the force of Aristophanic comedy, Thucydidean history, and political philosophy as practiced by Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle (among others). In this paper I attempt to sketch out how the contest between demotic and critical sensibilities informed a few distinct moments in the long and intellectually fertile Greek engagement with the concept of tyranny. The sources are both literary and iconographic.

The general issue of "the tyrant, his nature and what to do about him" was conceptually very important within both Athenian demotic ideology and for the "critical sensibility." My point here is that the tyrant issue was important for the *relationship between* democracy and political critics from the early fifth century B.C. through the late fourth. Both democrats and dissidents agreed in general terms on why tyranny is at once morally and politically unacceptable: the tyrant is wicked because he uses illegitimately acquired public power systemmatically to alienate from "us" that which is most dear to us. Tyranny, by embodying a political extreme, the intolerable politeia (or non-politeia), in turn helps to define what "we" require "our own" politeia (present or hoped-for) to secure and ensure for us. And it may also help us to think in utoptian terms about the opposite political extreme, the ideal or best-possible polititeia.

But certain questions arise: Who is the (actual or potential) tyrant? Who are "we"? What should we do about actual or potential tyrants? The answers to these questions help to trace some conceptual similarities between democrats and their opponents and to distinguish democratic ideology from critical political thought. In brief summary: For classical Greek democrats, the tyrant is anyone who would seek to overthrow "we the demos." This demotic definition therefore equates oligarchic revolutionaries with tyrants. An obvious example is Thucydides' reference to Athenian demotic fears of an "oligarchico-tyrannical conspiracy" (sunomosia oligarchike kai tyrannike: 6.60.1). This association is, I suppose, a primary reason that tyranny remained a very live issue for the Athenians, long after the threat of "actual" tyranny (of the archaic Greek sort) was past. Notably, that same equation between the oligarch and the tyrant was, at least implicitly, accepted by some actual and would-be oligarchs. I will suggest that their tacit acceptance points to a weakness of forthrightly oligarchic (as opposed to critical/dissident) ideology. Finally, I will argue that certain intellectual Athenian critics of democracy, recognizing the flaw in the oligarchic ideology of tyranny, sought to redefine the tyrant as the demos itself.
 
 
 

Eric Orlin (Bard College)
Foreign Cults and Roman National Identity

This paper examines the treatment of non-Roman cults in Rome during the Republic as a means of exploring the evolution of a Roman sense of identity.  Roman religion, sitting at the nexus of political, social and cultural concerns, provides an ideal field in which to examine Roman elite attitudes towards foreign cultures, and the variety of reactions to foreign traditions reveals a number of different and in many ways contradictory impulses.  On the one hand the Romans appeared deeply conservative, jealously guarding their civic and religious boundaries and adhering to the mos maiorum.  On the other hand they recognized themselves as composed of an amalgam of peoples with few indigenous claims and on occasion admitted foreign peoples and cults within their city. By analyzing the Roman religious system, I propose to explore how the Romans negotiated between these two positions and developed a sense of national identity which helped to resolve some of the tensions created by their growth into an imperial power. 

A number of different aspects of the treatment of foreign cults reveal how the very notion of foreignness in Rome was contested, and ultimately how the redefinition of this notion made possible the development of that identity .  One of the most perplexing aspects of Roman religion is the way in which the praxis of a particular cult may have changed over the years.  Italian cults provide one interesting example; although not conventionally considered foreign by modern scholars, the sources make it clear that the Romans did view many of these cults as foreign at the time of their introduction to Rome, as in the case of Juno Regina from Veii. That the Romans may have later chosen to overlook or even obscure the fact of foreign origins in these cases is highly suggestive in its attempt to incorporate Italian cults as fully Roman. 

On the other side of the ledger, the Romans did not necessarily treat cults of Greek origin as completely foreign from the outset, even if modern scholars have been inclined to so treat these cults. More revealing for our purposes, however, is the development of these cults in Rome after their introduction, for there is evidence to indicate that as the Romans became more acquainted with Greek culture, some of these cults were treated as more foreign through association with a Greek counterpart.  For instance Ceres, who appears to have been originally an Italian goddess, became more Hellenized as the Romans came to identify her with the Greek Demeter; the importation of priestesses from Magna Graecia in the third century is perhaps the clearest sign. 

The issue of priests is particularly germane to this study, for in the case of Ceres the Romans explicitly made the priestess a Roman citizen, while in the case of the Magna Mater, the Senate refused to allow Roman citizens to become priests, and the imported galli were disparaged and socially scorned.  Thus the Italian cult was given an Italian priestess who was made a citizen, while the eastern cult was specifically forbidden to have citizens as priests.  Here we see a willingness to consider some aspects of a foreign society as Roman as well as to recognize some foreignness in Roman society, but we also see the limits to that willingness which serve to demarcate a sense of Romanness.

In analyzing the treatment of foreign cults in Rome I have found recent work in classics by John Scheid (HSCP, 1995) and Thomas Habinek (The Politics of Latin Literature) to be extremely useful.  As a historian, their work led me to make connections to the work of Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm.  In re-imagining the bounds of their community, the Romans seem clearly to be inventing traditions; the mos maiorum, surely the dominant ideology of the Roman Republic, may be understood in these terms as tradition which can be constantly reinvented to suit changing circumstances.  I am not proposing that the Romans were always conscious of remaking their traditions, as when they remade the notion of foreignness, and that may be precisely what makes them so revealing of Roman culture.
 
 

Josiah Osgood (Yale University)
Playing with Ideology: Roman Dolls and Their (Wo)men

Ideology has been thought of as an apparatus in society that "forms members of various classes into social subjects who are unlikely to consider rebellion" (Kavanagh, 309).  Such a definition is framed in Marxist terms, but feminists have suggested how ideology can police gender differences as well.  Ideology gives us an image of ourselves as men or women.  These acts of representation "precede and underline any ways in which social subjects 'think about' social reality, and this 'seeing' is as likely to be shaped through a relaxed fascination with the page or screen" (Kavanagh, 310).  In my paper I wish to look at ideology in this light and examine one set of representations by which women's place was more explicitly formed in Roman society: the use of dolls as play objects.

Literary references to dolls are scanty, so we will primarily examine archaeological remains of dolls, which have turned up in excavation.  Examples I will discuss include: (1) a jointed doll in bone from the tomb of the Vestal Cossinia depicting a tall, elegant young woman with helmet in the style of Julia Domna and a gold necklace and wrist and ankle bracelets; the doll is accompanied by a small jewel casket made of red glass (Rinaldi, 118-119, Ricotti 57-8);  (2)  a jointed doll in ivory found by the tomb of Creperia Tryphaena (who lived in the mid-second century AD); the doll sports the tower coiffure favored by Faustina the Elder and she wears two gold bracelets and a ring from which a key hangs (Elderkin, 471-72; Rinaldi, 116-17; Reith, Väterlein 29-30, Ricotti 54-6);  (3)  two ivory dolls of Maria, Honorius' child bride (Elderkin, 475; Ricotti, 58-9).

Many dolls given to children are baby dolls, and psychologists have shown how girls are prepared for their nurturing role as mother by mimicry of their own mother's actions.  These baby dolls, however, are for the most part modern -- as, to some extent, is the image of the solicitous mother (cf. Rawson, 20).  Roman dolls are closer to Barbie -- they are of full-grown women, slender, with elaborate coiffure and jewelry.  Wiedemann has argued that these dolls prepared girls "to identify with the ideal of an (attractive) wife" (149).  They served as physical embodiments of an ideological image (cf. Ducille).  And just as baby dolls were not produced, neither were dolls of men.  Only women were objects to be passed around and displayed and with objectification came concepts related to women's place in Rome: fungibility, ownership, denial of subjectivity and so forth (cf. Nussbaum, 218).  The possession of the dolls themselves, however, served to mark the girl's status as child and virgin and was part of a program that strictly demarcated the transition from girl to woman at the time of marriage.  Before her wedding, a girl dedicated her dolls to Venus.  This accounts for the findspots of dolls: shrines or tombs (in the latter case, to mark the deceased's status as virgin).  Toys not only prepare for adult roles but also enforce distinctions between adult and child.

I wish to complicate this reading of dolls in two ways:  first, do we need to believe that these images are, in some Platonic sense, always per se harmful to behold because they objectify (cf. Nussbaum)?  Rand has pointed out that despite some feminists' objections, the Barbie doll, as object, can open up a range of fantasies for young girls (cf. Washburn).  One limit on many ideological representations (plastic arts, literature, and films included) is the human capacity for imagination.  Representations alone might not maintain a sociocultural hegemony (cf. Cassell and Jenkins, 28).  A potential weakness of ideology theory, especially in cases (such as mine) where contextual evidence is limited, lies in its tendency to make cultures appear as monolithic, thereby erasing individual experiences (exciting anthropological work such as Washburn's is precluded by a classicist's evidence).

Second, if dolls are simply a vehicle for ideology and are always subject to a variety of imaginative (re-)uses then my (or any) reading of them is a variation on child's play.  That is, when we look at ancient artifacts and try to place them in some sort of context, we cannot but be influenced by whatever ideological categories happen to 'fascinate' us.  This, I would argue, is the pleasure of scholarly effort.  Ancient Rome supplies material to us for the play of ideas.

Select Bibliography:

J. Cassell and H. Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Combat (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

A. Ducille, "Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference."  Differences 6 (1994) 48-68.

K. Elkerkin, "Jointed Dolls in Antiquity." AJA 24 (1930) 455-79.

J. Kavanagh, "Ideology" in F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, eds.  Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago, 1995), 306-20.

M. Nussbaum, "Objectification" in Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, 1999), 213-39.

E. Rand, Barbie's Queer Accessories (Durham, 1995).

B. Rawson, "Adult-Child Relationships in Roman Society" in B. Rawson, ed., Marriage, Divorce and Children in Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1991), 7-30.

E. Ricotti, Vita e costumi dei romani antichi 18: Giochi e giocattoli (Rome, 1995).

A. Reith, "Die Puppe im Grab der Crepereja." Atlantis 33 (1961), 367-69.

M. Rinaldi, "Ricerche sui giocattoli nell' antichità." Epigraphica 18 (1956) 104-29.

J. Väterlin, Roma ludens: Kinder und Erwachsene beim Sport im antiken Rom (Amsterdam, 1976).

D. Washburn, "Getting Ready: Doll Play and Real Life in American Culture, 1900-1980" in A. Martin and J. Garrison, eds., American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterhur, 1997).

T. Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London, 1989).
 
 

Michael Peachin (New York University)
How to Run an Empire -- the Roman Way

On March 11, 1920, H. Stuart Jones the newly appointed Camden Professor of Ancient History in Oxford, delivered his inaugural lecture: "Fresh Light on Roman Bureaucracy."  In concluding this talk, Jones described the high imperial bureaucracy thus:  "the most finished system of fiscal and administrative network in which humanity has ever been enmeshed."  Half a century later, one of his successors in that same chair published a book, which takes its readers in rather a different direction altogether.  Fergus Millar's The Emperor in the Roman World (Ithaca and London 1977) reveals a world of government that was not much planned, hardly systematised, one that reacted to the desires of subjects in an ad hoc fashion, rather than attempting to direct this world form on high.  More recently yet, a handbook on the Early Roman Empire includes a chapter called "Government Without Bureaucracy;" and the blurb to another monograph reminds us that, "...recent research...highlights how flexible, casuistic, personal and (sometimes deliberately) ill-defined the principles and methods of Roman imperialism were"(1).   Where administration is concerned, then, it is rapidly becoming clear that, in the words of Ronald Syme, "The Romans did very little of it" (2). 

We now see pretty clearly what the Romans did (or did not) do.  What has not received so much attention, however, is the question as to why they functioned as they did.  Part of the answer to this question has to do with the Roman imperial elite's conception of -- or, it as it were, ideology of -- administration.  In this paper, I intend, via a few examples, to illuminate that feature of Roman imperial thinking. By doing this, we can begin to understand how and why the ideology of the Roman aristocrat's position and function in the world directly affected the day-to-day running of the early empire.

1.  Respectively:  P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire. Economy, Society and Culture.  (Berkeley 1987) chapter 2 and A. Lintoot, Imperium Romanum. Politics and Administration (London and New York 1993) i.
2.  R. Syme,  "The Career of Arrian" HSCP 86 (1982) 195, "Some students of the Principate are prone to a set a high value on administration.  The Romans did very little of it."
 
 

Andrew Riggsby (University of Texas, Austin)
Building a (Better?) Roman: de Bello Gallico as Ideological Instrument

This paper considers two ideological positions offered by Caesar's de Bello Gallico to its audience; it focuses on the long speech of Critognatus (BG 7.77.3-16), which crystallizes both. The first involves a redefinition of virtus whereby the notion comes to support submission to a monarchical political order. The second is a questioning of the distinction between Roman and other. 

Roman aristocratic society was nothing if not competitive. One of the things that enforced this competition was a gender system which made submission to another incompatible with manliness, virtus. Yet, like most ideologically loaded terms, virtus had multiple associations. Throughout BG the narrative points to potential contradictions among these associations. This series comes to its logical conclusion in the speech of Critognatus, where the term is explicitly redefined. The mastery inherent in virtus becomes that over self, not others. Obedience in the face of hardship is then the sign of the true man; the conventional virtues of self-assertion are effeminate mollitia animi. Though this redefinition takes place in a context in which the need for obedience was already, if exceptionally, well-recognized (the military), the appeal to the internal logic of the cultural system gives it potential appeal beyond this context. This has obvious advantages for Caesar's later career. While BG points towards this redefinition virtually from the beginning, it is only made explicit in a speech by a Gaul, and that leads us to the second ideological move. 

Caesar stood in the middle of a century (at least) marked by contestation of the notion of Romanness. Most of the secondary literature on this topic has treated the relationships-subordinate, coordinate, identity, or other-offered between "Roman" and "Italian" at this period (e.g. Toll [1997], Wallace-Hadrill [1997], and Habinek [1998]). This instability is the precondition for the different, and potentially much more radical, reconception of Roman identity offered in BG. This Romanness is a learned skill, potentially extendible anywhere within the empire. As in the case of virtus, there are hints of this throughout BG, but Critognatus' speech again provides the crowning moment (in this case a demonstration rather than an argument). By a detailed reading of Critognatus' rhetoric I show that Caesar has effected a rigorous transposition of Roman values to a Gallic site without any corresponding transformation of those values. This move, while populist in a certain formal sense, can be shown to arise from a position in the core aristocracy as opposed to the margins of the ruling class (cf. Hallet [1989] for similar conflict in terms of the female other). 

In these two instances the contestation of ideologies proceeds in somewhat different ways. The former follows fairly closely a Gramscian model--the articulation of individually essentially contestable elements (i.e. ones that are not inherently connected to particular positions) to establish the hegemony of an overall view which is tied to the interests of a particular position (cf. Mouffe [1979]). The latter is better described in the terms of Geertz's "Ideology as a Cultural System" - a construction which does not so much compete with other systems of meaning as fill a gap between them. In both cases, however, Caesar largely avoids advancing explicit doctrine (contra some theories of ideology) in favor of offering a world view, a possible "imaginary relationship to one's lived experience."
 
 
 

Matthew Roller (Johns Hopkins)
Is the Emperor a 'Father' or a 'Master'? Aristocratic Ideology and Imperial Authority in the Early Roman Empire

This paper examines a pair of competing metaphors by which the Roman emperor's relationship with his subjects, especially aristocratic ones, was widely modelled in the early imperial period: namely, the relationships of master to slave and father to son.  Each of these paradigms involves a particular set of expectations about the character of the relationship so modelled, and about the specific roles that the participants will play in respect to one another.  Social historians have shown that the master-slave relationship was stereotyped by Roman elites as adversarial, exploitative, and oppressive, while that of father to son was stereotyped as normatively warm and affectionate.  Thus, to apply the paradigm of father or master to someone in a position of great power was to make one or another of two opposed ethical implications about the character of that person's power-about the rightness or wrongness of how that power is exercised, and consequently about the desirability (from the subordinate party's point of view) of that person's power persisting in that configuration.  In this paper, I survey literary texts and other media (notably coins) ranging in date from civil wars of the late Republic through the Julio-Claudian period, along with later materials that attest the use of these paradigms for this period.  I show how these contrasting paradigms for authority were strategically applied to late Republican warlords, and subsequently to emperors, by groups or individuals with competing interests, each seeking to advance its own agendas.  There is never any question of one model winning out, or being more true than the other, in any particular situation, much less universally: their utility is precisely in their opposed ethical implications, hence their ability to marshall support or resistance on an ad hoc basis.  Now, certain theorists have argued that ideological effects are found where signifying practices get tangled up with issues of power.  On this view, the competing models for authority traced in this paper are clear manifestations of Roman aristocratic ideology at work.  This ideology emerges as not only reactive--i.e., a set of descriptive conceptual responses to changed social and political conditions--but also as constructive and prescriptive, since the very deployment of these paradigms, by encouraging acquiescence or resistance, imposes pressure upon the emperor/warlord to pattern his behavior in one way and not another.
 
 
 

Peter Rose (Miami University of Ohio)

forthcoming
 
 

Vincent J. Rosivach (Fairfield University)
The Ideological Discourse of New Comedy

In contrast to Old Comedy, New Comedy, at least as we know it from the extant plays and fragments, was not overtly political.  It is the argument of this paper that New Comedy was nonetheless profoundly political on an ideological level, and more precisely that New Comedy presented a consistent image of Athenian society informed by a coherent set of assumptions about society which supported the primacy of the wealthiest (male) Athenians.  This point should be of particular interest to social historians since New Comedy was state-sponsored mass entertainment, its plays written to be performed before the largest single annual assemblage of Athenian citizens of the day, two to three times the number who attended even the most well attended meetings of the ekklesia.

We do not know how the Athenians selected the plays they would present to their  citizens, but the result of the process is obvi-ous: much like fifth-century Attic Tragedy, New Comedy is elitist drama, in the sense that members of the upper class are inevitably the focus of its attention (sending the unspoken message that these are the only people who really count).  If members of tragedy’s upper class owed their status to birth (being predominantly kings, queens, or princes), New Comedy’s upper class owes its status exclusive-ly to socially acceptable wealth.  There are few “honorable" poor in New Comedy; rather the poor who interact with the dramas’ wealthy leading characters belong, with rare exceptions, to socially marginalized groups (prostitutes, bankers, “parasites,” etc.).

Put simply, New Comedy shows us how, in one context, Athens’ elite unconsciously represented Athenian society to itself and to others.  In this paper, however, my interest lies less in this repre-sentation itself, and more in the assumptions about society which it reflects, in particular (a) the primacy of the city (where most of Athens’ “grandees” lived) over the khora (which the grandees visited to inspect the estates that were the basis of their wealth); (b) the unimportance of physical labor (the Dyskolos is an exception here); (c) the overriding importance of wealth; and (d) the natural ordering of society so that the poor deferentially depend upon the rich.  My argument is that these assumptions underlay social relations particu-larly in the rural demes, where most poor Athenians continued to live.

Like all hegemonic discourse, the plays of New Comedy were not written with the conscious aim of indoctrinating society at large, or even of making the elite feel good about itself.  Rather, the authors of New Comedy instinctively portrayed the world and their place in it as they had been col-lective-ly raised to see both (through the example of their elders, through education, etc.).  The effect, however, even though unintended, was still one of indoctrination in the interests of the elite, indoctrination of the greater society, but also indoctrination of themselves.
 
 
 

Suzanne Said(Columbia University)
Alexander's Costumes

The ancient historians writing either in Greek- Diodorus, Plutarch or Arrian -- or in Latin -- Trogus which survives in the epitome of Justin and Curtius -- have left us many contradictory descriptions of Alexander's costume. Modern scholars have often tempted to assess the value of these testimonies combining these texts with the descriptions of Alexander's painted portraits or these texts with the descriptions of Alexander's painted portraits or statues, existing portraits of the king on coins, gems or marble and to reconstruct the 'true' appearance of the king. Focusing mostly on texts -- and more precisely on the descriptions which are included in a continuous narrative -- I propose an ideological interpretation of this complex material which reflects different interpretations of Alexander's role:  Macedonian, Greek promoting hellenization or, on the contrary, becoming thoroughly orientalized or founder of the 'mixed civilization' celebrated by Droysen.
 
 

Alexander Thein (University of Pennsylvania)
The Urbanism of Athens and the Piraeus: Sea or Land?

This paper argues that the urban appearance of Athens in the mid 5th century--an almost schizophrenic amalgam of the grid-planned Piraeus with the Upper City and its haphazard arrangement of streets punctuated by Periclean prestige projects, both linked by the Long Walls--represents a compromise solution to an ideological debate that divided Athenians in the decades after the discovery of the silver deposits at Laurium in 483/2 B.C.: Did the future of Athens (and its past) lie with the sea or with the land?

It was precisely the new-looking appearance of the Piraeus with its Hippodamean plan which appealed to both parties. For conservatives it was a clear indication that Athens' involvement with the sea was recent and did not subvert their true essence as an autochthonous people with strong roots in the land; this denial of Athenian naval heritage is most clearly expressed in the "archaeology" of Thucydides. Pausanias, at a much later time, received quite a different impression when he toured the Piraeus. The ancient cult sites and monuments that he saw proclaimed Athens as an ancient sea-faring nation. But the Piraeus itself did not pretend to be old--Themistocles was even honoured as its founder--and this is the essence of the compromise. The Piraeus and the Upper City proclaimed different messages, but they were part of one and the same city--when stasis broke out in 411 and 403, the opposing factions divided along the physical fault lines of the city, but the democrats in the Piraeus never sought permanent secession.

At its best, the contrasting appearance of Athens' two halves could express the essence of the Athenian character. Visitors arriving by sea would experience a cosmopolitan and modern city, the entrepot of the Mediterranean. But they would also realize that the Piraeus was the showcase of Athenian naval imperialism, for there were over 350 shipsheds in its three harbours which dwarfed the facilities for commercial trade. Those with business in the upper city would receive a subtler and more nuanced picture: the showcase architecture of the acropolis and agora bore witness to Athens' wider influence in the Mediterranean; but its narrow and irregular streets revealed the true image of the Athenians, as an autochthonous people for whom naval dominance was only a recent phenomenon.

The 5th-century Athenian debate between the land and the sea has so far been treated, successfully, as a purely political phenomenon exercised through the medium of speeches in the assembly, pamphleteering, or the writing of history (notably by N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens, 1986). This paper adds to the discussion of Athenian self-identity with an urbanistic and historical analysis of the urban fabric of the city: the Piraeus and Upper City, joined together by the umbilical cord of the Long Walls.
 
 
 

Mahalia Way (Northwestern University)
Violence as Exchange on the Comic Stage

That violence is a form of exchange seems almost intuitive.  Financial idioms like "to pay the price" and "to have it coming," as well as universal concepts like revenge and punishment, owe their existence to the idea that there is a rational and measured system of violent response to the actions of others.  In this paper I describe one such system at work; the lopsided exchange of punches for touches in Plautus' Rudens (710-838).  I argue that in his staging of violence, Plautus gives material and physical form to what would otherwise be an intangible social status.  This can be seen 1) in how transgressions are measured and "repaid", and 2) in what boundaries are, and are not observed around various characters.

In this scene the pimp Labrax is attempting to reassume ownership of two meretrices, one of whom is, of course, a freeborn citizen.  The girls have taken refuge upon the altar of Venus, and the senex Daemones, an archetype of good citizenship and fairness, is attempting to keep the pimp at bay.  He stations two burly, club-wielding thugs on either side of the pimp with orders to start swinging should Labrax make the slightest motion toward the girls.  What results is a kind of choreography of status in which what is "fair" and "equal" depends more upon the social capital of victim and aggressor than upon their physical actions.  Threats to an otherwise intangible citizenship, no matter how slight, are met with harsh, immediate and corporal punishment.  This physical representation of status is reenforced by Plautus' use of terms like aequom, par and satis which are given prominent social meanings throughout the play.

Another way in which Plautus gives a material form to social status is by his use of physical space and boundaries.  Plautus highlights Daemones' ability to hurt Labrax from a distance, with a mere word or nod of the head, even having him leave the stage at one point with no let up in the pimp's torture.  Conversely, Labrax is constantly so crowded that even his words cannot escape.  The observed boundaries that define Labrax and Daemones -- those which are acted upon and put into practice -- are not the same as their physical boundaries.  Daemones' boundaries are larger than his physical body, extending to the edges of all those under his authority.  Labrax's boundaries, however, are smaller that his physical body, making him inherently penetrable.  What happens when these boundaries meet and one yields to the other is a performance of the Roman concept of impenetrable citizenship.  This too is captured in the concept of exchange, since each experiences their defining limits through the other.

Violent exchange obeys a "cultural logic" in its weighting of characters' actions according to their social capital.  The logic which causes one blow to be repaid with another is itself based upon Roman constructions of citizenship, authority and masculinity -- of what boundaries yield and what stand firm.  Needless to say, violent exchange on stage is both visual and material culture and is a telling example of how the Romans represented themselves to themselves.

Select Bibliography:

Bourdieu, Pierre.  The Logic of Practice.  Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. 1990.

Mauss, Marcel.  The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.  Norton,  New York.  1967.

Turner, Victor.  The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure.  Aldine Pub. Co., Chicago  1969.