Concerns regarding political ‘enslavement’ and imperial constraints on free speech are especially palpable in the literature that follows the emperor Domitian’s assassination in 96 C.E. Under his successors, Nerva and Trajan, authors worked to differentiate the post-Domitianic age from the prior era of metaphorical enslavement and suppressed speech. Scholars have studied some of the ways in which Neronian and Flavian authors employed literary accounts of the Saturnalia, a festival characterized by temporary license and the notional transformation of social roles, to criticize individual rulers and thematize issues of imperial control. Yet they have not fully appreciated the pervasive use of literary Saturnalia in Flavian and post-Flavian political discourse.
I examine the Saturnalia as a political metaphor in five texts: Martial’s Domitianic Epigrams 5 and Nervan Epigrams 11, Pliny’s Trajanic Epistles and Panegyricus, and Dio Chrysostom’s Trajanic fourth Oration. In Epigrams 5, Martial thematizes the circumscription of Saturnalian freedom to highlight limits to his poetic expression under Domitian. Later, in his Epigrams 11, Martial’s presentation of the Nervan regime as an age of ‘Saturnalia,’ a festival whose freedoms are inherently temporary, signifies anxiety about whether post-Domitianic freedom from imperial ‘enslavement’ will be short-lived. In the Panegyricus, Pliny praises Trajan for reasserting the social hierarchies that had become troublingly eroded under the dystopic ‘Saturnalia’ of Domitian. Through Pliny’s depiction of domestic Saturnalian celebrations in Epistles 2.17, the senator proves that the perverse ‘Saturnalia’ that plagued imperial life before Trajan are no more. Finally, in Orations 4, Dio Chrysostom uses circumscribed Saturnalian freedom not only as a metaphor for the limited political authority available to Greeks, but also to valorize his own Greek wisdom as essential to Trajan’s correction of shameful ‘Saturnalian’ rule.
The authors in this study, although writing from different personal and generic perspectives, depict metaphorical Saturnalia to articulate the distressing limits of freedom under imperial rule or—in the case of Pliny and Dio—to burnish the image of the anti-Saturnalian ruler Trajan. My dissertation demonstrates that literary representations of the Saturnalia occupy a far more important role in imperial Greek and Roman understandings of autocracy than has been previously appreciated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46963 |
| Date | 20 September 2023 |
| Creators | Pasco, Ryan |
| Contributors | Uden, James |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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