Old and Forgotten Ways

The Emperor Nero (r. 54-68 A.D.) extinguished his share of intellectual luminaries. Lucan and Seneca went down over a failed assassination attempt. Leaders of The Way, Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul, were killed as scapegoats for the fire that leveled a third of the city of Rome. While Lucan’s books were best-sellers, insuring the Pharsalia’s survival,* the early Christian communities (as they came to be known) began systematically compiling definitive accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, adding them to the corpus of Saul/Paul’s letters and Acts . In one of these accounts, the Gospel According to Matthew , there is material relevant to our discussion. Matthew ’s account of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth reminds us why the Romans were swift to ban magic, divination, and foreign sects. In Matthew we have the account of Magi honoring Jesus as “King of the Jews.” This act of political prognostication prompted Herod the Great, client-king of Rome, to retaliate by killing the young ...

The Augustan authors (Horace, Vergil, and Ovid) offered a range of literary witches, both fair and foul, that suited the needs of Rome’s first emperor. As the Julio-Claudian Dynasty quickly descended into tyranny and madness, the literary witch followed. Nero’s taste-maker, Lucan, provides us with a witch that would make his forerunner Maecenas proud. In contrast to the great Maecenas, however, Lucan was not interested in producing Imperial propaganda. His epic, Pharsalia , and its witch, Erichtho,* are bitter indictments of the regime: the opening salvo of a failed assassination plot which cost Lucan and his famous uncle, Seneca, their lives.** Lucan’s Pharsalia has posed an interpretive problem since its publication.*** As befitting a poem about civil war (the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey), the language is tortured and often counter-intuitive. It fixates on the mangled bodies of the soldiers that mirror Rome’s mangled body politic. Lucan frequently interrupts the actio...

Having established the three main identifiers I will be looking for in the previous post, my discussion now turns to the works of Homer. The first identifier I will examine is the stereotype of the numberless and disordered barbarian hordes versus the disciplined Greeks. It is a stereotype that unites and reaffirms members of one group by opposing them to a multitude of exoticized “others.” It also stresses the “moral superiority” of the Greeks in their ability to govern themselves. Herodotus famously plays this up in his Histories where he contrasts self-ruling Greeks to “slavish” Persians. [1] Homer’s introduction of the Trojans in the Iliad is exactly what we might expect to find in Herodotus: Now when they were marshaled, the several companies with their captains, the Trojans came on with clamor and with a cry like birds, even as the clamor of cranes ariseth before the face of heaven, when they flee from wintry storms and measureless rain . . . But the Achaeans came o...

The Julio-Claudian dynasty reigned in the Hellenistic style as “Sons of God” and “Saviors,” bringing order to the chaos of the Mediterranean world. As a part of that order, the Julio-Claudians suppressed destabilizing forces such as magic and divination. During the reign of Tiberius, and particularly under his successors, Gaius Caligula and Claudius, a sect within Second Temple Judaism began challenging the official line. Leaders of The Way, such as Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul, defiantly claimed that the true “Son of God” and “Savior” was an obscure backwater preacher by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been executed for political agitation. As one proof of their claim, Peter and Paul didn’t outlaw witchcraft; they declared war on it. Accounts of powerful confrontations between Peter and Paul and ancient practitioners of magic abound in the earliest organized account of The Way, Acts . It is significant that Acts does not show Peter and Paul forbidding magic so much as annih...

My examination of how the Ancient Greeks formed their notion of the “barbarian,” and Persians as the archetypical “barbarians,” has its inspiration in the study of the part played by slaves in Classical Greek warfare in Peter Hunt’s Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians . Hunt argues that there is a pattern of suppression in these works, both conscious and subconscious, of the role slaves played in Classical warfare, rooted in the challenge fighting slaves posed to notions of “free Greeks.” [1] According to Hunt: “In contrast [to free Greeks], slaves are anti-warriors: they are soft, feminine, non-Greek, and cowardly.” [2] Slaves assuming the role of warrior, a part reserved for male citizens, threatened the ideological categories that separated slave from free in the minds of the citizenry: Slavery played an important ideological role in the relations between sections of the free population . . . On the ideological level, slaves were a group against which all...

The Metamorphoses was far from Ovid’s only literary creation. True to form, the poet explored many innovative ways of dealing with topics both classical and contemporary. One of his most interesting compositions, the Heroides , predates Metamorphoses and gives an unprecedented voice to female characters. The Heroides are a series of fictional letters written by the women of classical literature to their mythical (and often misguided) lovers.* For the purposes of our discussion, it is interesting that Ovid includes Dido (Letter VII) and Medea (Letter XII). Letter VII is an impassioned plea from Dido to the departing Aeneas not to leave her. While any hint of a malefic death ritual is absent from the letter, Dido does threaten to commit suicide and, in an interesting twist, asserts that she is pregnant with Aeneas’ child. Killing a child to spite a leaving lover is traditionally Medea’s claim to fame. In Medea’s letter, while she is more than willing to taunt Jason with all her ...