After the Crisis: Remembrance, Re-anchoring and Recovery in Ancient Greece and Rome

Description

Crises resulting from war or other upheavals turn the lives of individuals upside down, and they can leave marks on a community for many years after the event. This volume aims to explore how such crises were remembered in the ancient world, and how communities reconstituted themselves after a crisis. Can crises serve as catalysts for innovation or change, and how does this work? What do crises reveal about the ‘normality’ against which they are defined and framed? People living in post-crisis societies have no choice but to adapt to the changes caused by crisis. Such adaptation entails the question of how the relationship between the pre-crisis situation and the new status quo is constructed, and by whom. Due to the reduced possibility of using the immediate past, which is tainted by conflict and bad memories, it may involve revisions of historical narratives about communal pasts and identities, through the selection of new ‘anchors’, and sometimes even a discarding of the old ones. Crises affect all areas of life, and crisis recovery likewise spans different spheres. This volume finds traces of such recovery strategies in texts as well as visual representations; in literary as well as in documentary texts; in official ideology as much as in subaltern responses. The contributors bring together the diverse testimonies for such ways of coping that have survived from antiquity. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Contents Figures Contributors Acknowledgements Part One Crisis: Concepts and Ideology 1 Introduction 1. The term ‘crisis’ and its genealogy 2. Framing a crisis: Rhetoric and narrative 3. Framing a crisis with Cicero 4. Experience 5. Crisis, anchoring and recovery 2 (Not) talkin’ ‘bout a revolution 1. The ‘democratic-revolutionary’ 2. The essentialization of democratic Athens 3. The ‘imperialization’ of the discourse of revolution 4. Counter-revolutionary discourse 3 Security 1. Securitas and the vita beata 2. Securitas imperii Romani 3. The peaceable kingdom 4. The soul political Part Two Crisis Traumas and Recovery: Greece 4 Tragedies of War in Duris and Phylarchus 1. Duris of Samos 2. Phylarchus (of Athens or Naucratis) 3. Purposes and motivations 5 Changes of Fortune 1. Introducing change 2. Crisis and emotion 3. Turning-points 4. Crisis renewed: Resistance in the 140s bce 5. Conclusion Part Three Crisis Traumas and Recovery: Rome 6 Coping with Crisis 1. Florus on Sulla’s civil war: Bloodshed unheard of in Roman history 2. The trauma of Sulla’s civil war 3. Scholarship on the concept of ‘crisis’ 4. Vierhaus and his concept of ‘historical crisis’ 5. Vierhaus’s criteria applied to Sulla’s civil war and Sulla’s acts of violence 6. Cultural trauma: The social dimension of coping with a crisis 7. A social process of cultural trauma: The case of the ‘Sullan crisis’ 8. The ‘Sullan crisis’, cultural trauma and Caesar’s civil war 9. The proscriptions of the triumvirs in 43 bce 10. Conclusion 7 Alternative Futures in Lucan’s Bellum Civile 1. Introduction: Alternative futures, narratology and virtual history 2. Narrative possibilities in moments of crisis: liceat sperare timenti 3. Imagining (counterfactual) aft ermaths and alternatives to civil war 4. Conclusion Part Four Resolving Civil War 8 Caesar and the Crisis of Corfinium 1. The crisis at Corfinium: cedant arma togae 2. A literary allusion to a famous narrative of crisis 3. A historical allusion to a famous civil crisis 4. Conclusions 9 Young Caesar and the Termination of Civil War (31–27 bce ) 1. Approaching civil war 2. The Settlement of 28–27 bce 3. Veteran settlements 4. Conclusion 10 Agrippa’s ‘Odd’ Speech in Cassius Dio’s Roman History * 1. Introduction: Debate, crises, antecedents 2. The wider context I: Dio’s characterization of the Caesars 3. The wider context II: Speeches in the Roman History 4. Agrippa’s role in the Roman History 5. Agrippa’s advice 6. Conclusion Part Five Civil War and the Family 11 The Fate of the Lepidani 1. The so-called ‘Revolt of Lepidus’ 2. After the crisis: Reinventing family history 3. Experiencing crisis in the family: Private relationships versus public obligations 4. Conclusion 12 The Roman Family as Institution and Metaphor after the Civil Wars 1. Grieving matrons in Lucan’s Civil War 2. Exceptional cases 3. The burden of the mos maiorum 4. After the crisis 5. The imperial family Notes Bibliography Index