Imperial Anti-sublime: Aristides’ Roman Oration
From Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire
Susan C. Jarratt, University of California, Irvine
(work in progress, May 2011)
Photo above: Fumicino Airport, Rome (taken by sj)
Image: sketch of the Temple of Venus and Rome where it was thought that Aristides delivered his address; planned by Hadrian in 121, finished in 141 under Antoninus Pius
This study grows out of my interest in reading Greek rhetoric in the imperial period with an eye for power relations. This inquiry expands the analytic capacity of phantasia, applying it to a second sophistic performance piece within what Helen Morales has termed the “supremely spectacular society [of the Roman empire]. . . a visually voracious and violent world, in which there was a heightened . . .awareness of the pleasures and dangers of spectatorial relations” (Morales 10). Foregoing on this occasion explorations of ancient optics, questions of cognition, and the disciplinary agon between visual and verbal arts, I am using phantasia as a means for considering the political force of visuality, drawing on its capacity to act as a hinge between rhetorical production and ideology critique.
Those historians who chart the continuity of epideictic rhetorical practice from the democratic rhetoric of the classical era to Greek rhetoric under empire (Pernot; Walker) provide support for what might be termed the ideological function of visuality in ceremonial rhetoric. Ned O’Gorman, for example, in a recent article on phantasia and epideictic in Aristotle, follows this line of thought, claiming (forcefully) that “the primal function of public discourse is the phantasmatic” (O’Gorman 34, emphasis in original). Remarking on the significance of spatial logic in epideictic speeches, and on the role of vision and phantasia in Aristotle’s discussion of the pathê (25), O’Gorman reminds us of Nicole Loraux’s treatment of Athenian democracy as “imagined,” operating not only via a set of political policies (citizenship, assembly, courts) and speaking procedures (homonoia, isegoria), but on a social-psychic level as an envisioned or imagined state of freedom and participation.
To give an example from the classical period of this phantasmagoric rhetoric, we may look to Thucydides’ funeral oration as “Pericles” exhorts his listeners to look at the city (passage 1):
I could tell you a long story and you know it as well as I do about what is to be gained by beating the enemy back. What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and should fall in love with her. . . . (¶43.1, trans. Rex Warner, p. 145)
(ἣν τί ἄν τισ πρὸσ οὐδὲν χιρον αὐτοὺσ ὑμᾶς εἰδότας μηκύνοι, λέγων ὅσα ἐν τῷ τοὺς πολεμίουσ ἀμύνεσθαι ἀγαθὰ ἔνεστιν;) ἀλλά μᾶλλον τὴν τῆς πὸλεως δὺναμιν καθ’ ἡμέραν ἔργῳ θεωμένους καὶ ἐραστὰσ γιγνομένουσ αὐτῆς, (Marchant 47-48)
While visualization as an ideological maneuver can operate in any genre, the funeral oration served as the prime classical opportunity to deliver the “psyche-sight” of a city. In the imperial era, the city encomium provides a parallel genre, but the shift in power relations changes the heuristic. We are no longer discovering how the citizen-rhetor brings Athens before the eyes of his countrymen but are led to ask now, what visions does the Greek rhetor bring before an imperial audience? To reframe the question of enargeia as an ideological act under colonial relations, we may ask: Can the power of the [Greek] rhetor to bring an image vividly before the eyes of a mixed audience be understood as a response to or even a challenge to Roman imperium?
Phantasia/Ideology in Greco-Roman Rhetoric
The Greek rhetor under empire speaks from a curious position--compromised, unsafe, assimilated, complicit—both inside and outside Roman intellectual and political life. Scholars of the second sophistic are bringing into view more and more clearly the colonial relations shaping Greek rhetorical practice in the period, sometimes by tracing references to cultural conflict and the assertion of a Greek identity (Goldhill). Another approach concentrates on genres that allow for direct commentary on governance and advice to rulers, such as Dio’s kingship discourses (Whitmarsh). My methodology on this occasion draws on the stylistic analysis of Frederick Ahl, who finds in “figured discourse” (eschêmatismenos logos) subtle commentary on the conditions of empire through allusions to classical literature. His influential essay “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome” (drawing on Demetrius) makes possible a reading through the highly wrought and strongly typified structures of Greek rhetoric of the period to uncover a shadow set of power relationships embedded within each intertextual reference.
Indeed, figuration in Ahl’s sense often involves revisualization. Oblique references, very often to the Homeric epics, evoke through a line or at times even a single word, narrative scenarios, often accompanied by strong visual markers, which are then reimagined by listeners within the current speech situation. If the “Pericles” of Thucydides demanded a loving look directly at the city of Athens, what kinds of looking and from what perspectives are staged in the orations of the second sophists? What scenario could offer a more pointed staging of the changed political circumstances than an encomium of Rome delivered by a Greek rhetor? Thus I look to Aristides’ Roman oration, finding not only a phantasm of the imperium but also a technê of viewing.
Snow, bats, walls: An Imperial Anti-sublime
Delivered in 144 C.E., during a period of relative tranquility and Hellenophilia, the Roman oration is a discourse rich with scopic vocabulary and over-flowing with figures. Already a “theatre of memory” (Edwards and Woolf 8), the city within which and about which Aristides spoke, with its architectural splendor and monumentality, has comes to stand for the empire. Strabo comments (at the beginning of the imperial era) that, seeing this built world, one “would easily become oblivious to everything else outside. Such is Rome” (Geography 5.3.8, quoted in Edwards and Woolf 5). Edwards and Woolf track this trope through multiple sources: “The world as it is represented within the city displaces the actual world beyond it” (5). As Estelle Oudot observes, the city encomium cannot dispense with bringing the city into view in a gaze, and the genre demands praise, specifically in terms of magnitude and grandeur. And yet the force or style, the atmospherics of this description—one might say, the phantasm—in any particular case is not a given. There is much in Aristides’ oration that can be read unproblematically as a factual account of the accomplishments of Rome the empire, but a network of uncanny visual references strung throughout the speech unbalances its straight-forward encomiastic force, giving us the skeleton of a case for a rhetorical style I will call an imperial anti-sublime.
Visuality enters as a negated activity with the introductory modesty trope which here becomes an especially forceful, and convincing, assertion of impossibility: Not only can I say nothing in the face of the greatness of the city of Rome, Aristides says, but the city, which becomes an empire, cannot be seen (Oudot). Referring throughout to the city and her inhabitants in the second person, Aristides writes (passage 2):
For it is she who first proved that oratory cannot reach every goal. About her not only is it impossible to speak properly, but it is impossible even to see her properly. In truth it requires some all-seeing Argos--rather, the all-seeing god who dwells in the city. For beholding so many hills occupied by buildings, or on plains so many meadows completely urbanized, or so much land brought under the name of one city, who could survey her accurately? And from what point of observation? (¶6, trans. Oliver 896)
Ἡ γάρ δὴ πρώτη λόγου δύναμιν ἐξελέγξασα οὐκ ἐπὶ πᾶν ἐφικνουμἐνην ἥδε ἐστί· περὶ ἧσ μὴ ὂτι εἰπειν κατὰ τὴν ἁξίαν ἔστιν, ἀλλ᾿ οὐδ᾿ ἰδιν ἀξίως αὐτήν, ἀλλ᾿ ὡς ἀληθῶς ᾿΄Αργου τινὸσ πανόπτου, μᾶλλον δὲ τοῦ κατέχοντος αὐτὴν πανόπτου θεοῦ δεῖ. τίσ γὰρ ἄν τοσάσδε ὁρῶν κορυφὰς κατειλημμὲνας ἢ πεδὶων νομοὺς ἐκπεπολισμένος ἤ γῆν τοσήνδε εἰσ μιἀς πόλεως ὄνομα συνηγμένην, εἶτα ἀκριβῶς καταθεάσαιτο; ἀπὸ ποίας τοιαύτης σκοπιᾶς; (Oliver 982, emphasis added)
The passage constitutes a veritable catalogue of terms for seeing (in bold): idein, panoptou, horon, theoria, skopis. And yet with all these visual practices, the city cannot be seen by the Greek rhetor. The question of perspective caps the series. As Oudot has pointed out, the point of perspective throughout in Aristides’ account of the city-become-empire is superhuman. It is a Homeric frame of reference for viewing “from the summit of a mountain or another high place”; a perspective of a god or of the stars, not a human perspective (182-83). Where does the rhetor stand in this scenario? He may imply for himself the superhuman or god-like perspective; such a gesture would certainly be within the repertoire of the second sophist—consistent with the rhetorical power described in Longinus’ Περι Ὑψσοuς, the power to transport the audience by casting a spell, bringing power and invincible force to bear and putting the audience in its place, displaying the power of the orator in all its plenitude:
The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. . . . Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer . . . sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays the power of the orator in all its plenitude (I.4, ll. 9-20. Roberts trans.)
οὐ γὰρ εἰς πειθὼ τοὺς ἀκροωμένους ἀλλ’ εἰς ἔκστασιν ἄγει τὰ ὑπερφυᾶ. . . . εἴγε τὸ μέν πιθανὸν ὡς τὰ πολλὰ ἐφ ἡμῖν, ταῦτα δὲ δυναστείαω καὶ βίαν ἄμαχον προσφέροντα παντὸς ἐπάνω τοῦ ἀκροωμένου καθίσταται. . . . ὑψοσ δὲ που καιρίωσ ἐξενεχθὲν τά πράγματα δίκην σκηπτοͷυ πάντα διεφὸρησεν καὶ τὴν τοῦ ῥήτορος εὐθὺς ἀθρόαν ἐνεδείξατο δύναμιν.
On my reading, the figured vision shadowing Aristides’ Roman oration, in fact, turns this sublimity inside out; it is the negative of the photograph, the absence carved out by empire where the polis would have stood, for as Aristides remarks a few paragraphs later, “what one does not see neither did nor does exist” (¶13). Let us pursue this negative.
Aristides follows his introductory gesture in the recommended fashion with the beginning of an account of the physical space of the city. But because such a description has been termed impossible, he replaces visual description with figured discourse: an echo of Iliad XII. 281-84, in which Homer imagines volleys of stones thrown over Troy’s walls by both Achaeans and Trojans as an all-covering snow:
[When Zeus] brings on a snowstorm
and stills the winds asleep in the solid drift, enshrouding
the peaks that tower among the mountains and the shoulders out-jutting
and the low lands with their grasses, and the prospering work of men's hands,
and the drift falls along the grey sea, the harbours and beaches
and the surf that breaks against it is stilled, and all things elsewhere
it shrouds from above . . . (Homer, Iliad 12.279-86.
Lattimore trans.)
. . . πιφαυσκόμενος τὰ ἃ κῆλα:
κοιμήσας δ' ἀνέμους χέει ἔμπεδον, ὄφρα καλύψῃ
ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων κορυφὰς καὶ πρώονας ἄκρους,
καὶ πεδία λωτεῦντα καὶ ἀνδρῶν πίονα ἔργα,
καί τ' ἐφ' ἁλὸς πολιῆς κέχυται λιμέσιν τε καὶ ἀκταῖς,
κῦμα δέ μιν προσπλάζον ἐρύκεται: ἄλλά τε πάντα
εἴλυται καθύπερθ',
Like this snow, Aristides says, Rome covers all—mountain peaks, land intervening between towns, and down to the sea, indeed all of Italy: it is a figure for a deathly or at least stifling and cold homogeneity and envelopment. There is an eerie stillness to the Homeric passage: the snow stills winds “asleep” in drifts, enshrouds peaks, stills and shrouds the surf and “all things elsewhere” (l. 285). The oddity of the figure—surely snow is a rarity in Rome—with its eerie stillness generates an alien atmospherics from which the orator then announces that “Wherever one may go in Rome, there is no vacancy to keep one from being, there also, in mid-city” (¶7).
Movement like vision is negated within this dream-like, labyrinthine city-state where everyplace is the same place and the same time: the time of the oration gives over to timeless space (Cassin). Under the seeming praise of a great and expansive city lurks the violence and brutality of imperial acquisitiveness covered over with the unnatural quiet, order, and harmony of the pax Romana. It is the antithesis or inversion of the sublimity described by Longinus, flashing forward and scattering everything before it like a thunderbolt (I.4). It is rather like the orator who, according to Longinus in Book XV.8 moves away from reality and truth and into a mode of speech “poetical and fabulous . . . [breaking] into every kind of impossibility, [and thus creating] digressions [with] a strange and alien air” (XV.8). Perhaps the figure qualifies as the “hyperbole upon hyperbole” identified by Pernot in his discussion of style in Greek epideictic, which, he writes, achieves “un ton spécialement outré” (405). Froma Zeitlin likewise remarks on the uncanny quality of visual encounters within Homeric figures and places in the second sophists’ rhetoric (in Goldhill).
From physical geography to political organization: a major section of the oration contrasts Rome with former hegemonies—Athenian and Lacadaimonian, with reference to Persian and Egyptian—all to the advantage of the Romans. At about mid-point, after praising common citizenship and the actual colonization of cities, and noting that identity is now understood not in ethnic terms but rather as Roman over against non-Roman, Aristides ventures that it is actually best to be ruled by one’s betters and denies that a city or people would think of seceding, “any more than those at sea” would secede from the helmsman. This could be a safe example of the ship-of-state metaphor, as old as Alcaeus, and yet the idea enters as a praeteritio: who was thinking of seceding? Through another disturbing figure, the ship of state develops as another eerie instance of the “outré,” the anti-sublime. Roman colonists, Aristides ventures, “As bats in caves cling fast to each other and to the rocks, so all from you [the Roman empire] depend with much concern not to fall from this cluster of cities, and would sooner conceive fear of being abandoned by you, than abandon you themselves” (¶68). The Homeric instance of clinging like a bat to a rock is found in the Odyssey at XII.426 in the Scylla and Charibdis episode. It takes very little to work out the analogy: the subjects of empire are placed precariously on a ship, the empire as crashing, destructive rocks; and the only escape, a plunge into the chaotic vortex. In the lines following, Aristides claims, in this era of peace, wars are forgotten, or if remembered seem unreal, or like shadows; they are without explanation and make citizens only wonder at the present. They awaken from dreams to a sudden vision and presence of genuine blessings (¶69).
Conclusion
Bizarre figures proliferate in this famous and well-received oration: Rome is like an engulfing sea, hiding all rivers that flow into it; Rome is a net dragged over the world; all citizens, nations, and armies are spun by Rome into a single thread. It is common to find in the second sophists a tendency toward excess and exaggeration, and it is easy enough to say of Aristides’s Roman encomium, here is another case: to explain the style as merely the second sophistic habit of reaching for the improbable and novel. I would suggest, rather, taking more seriously the logic of figuration in the oration as a phantasm of the city—more specifically a network of images that produce a vision of the failure of political fantasy. One cannot love what one cannot see; Oudot observes that the perspective in this oration “constrains the visitor to being a witness . . . of the city’s power” (192). The rhetor’s power here, I suggest, does not compete with the power of empire manifest around speaker and audience in a monumental temple, seeking to match the visual presence with verbal performance, over-mastering listeners with beauty and plenitude. It lies rather in the orator’s ability both to lay out the historical achievements of the empire and simultaneously to flatten and deaden them, to give them the voice of the aulos, which “after a thorough cleaning, plays as single note. The harmony of a single “keynote” “taken by all, everywhere, in the same way” (¶29-30).
This power is not the counter-revolutionary power of a colonized subject but the critical power to reveal the failure of substance and naming: Roman empire (Zizek 89-100). By introducing not only the phantasia of empire but by exposing the techniques of envisioning, the Greek rhetor claims power, opening at key moments a door onto the uncanny and repeatedly evoking through figure the violence of imperial power that brings citizens and colonials together in the city.
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