Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: I examine Roman ideas of public and private and their relationship to the conception of absolute power. My study synthesizes a wide range of literary and material sources, including tragedy, epic, philosophy, historiography, and the novel, as well as Roman palatial architecture, domestic frescoes, and visual depictions of the Julio-Claudian family. I define privacy as the ability to avoid scrutiny and to act without public consequence, and I argue that lack of privacy became central to understanding the emperor’s role in the early imperial period. Focusing on the public/private dichotomy reveals the complexity of the conception of power relations in the mid-first century CE. While the significance of the imperial domus in political life has been a prominent concern in recent scholarship, I focus on how the public/private dichotomy illuminates the relationship between ruler and ruled: the publicity of the ruler makes him uniquely vulnerable, and this vulnerability threatens the community as a whole. I argue that the ruler is not only an all-powerful father figure, but also a potential target, vulnerable to those closest to him and to the community at large. Furthermore, the vulnerability of the ruler is a concern both for him and for the security of the community. Ultimately, one-man rule produces an intimacy between ruler and ruled that results in the transformation or disruption of all other bonds between members of the polity. I first examine exposure to public view as the defining feature of the ruler’s position in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and On Clemency and in Nero’s palace (the Golden House) and the implications of this exposure for the life of the community. Next, using domestic frescoes with theatrical imagery and Seneca’s Thyestes and Agamemnon, I focus on the ruler’s need to be seen and thus his dependence on and vulnerability to his subordinates. Then, drawing on dynastic sculpture groups, domestic art and architecture, Tacitus’ Annals, Seneca’s tragedies, Petronius’ Satyricon, and Lucan’s Civil War, I analyze the relationship between the house and family of the ruler and the wider community and how the rise of one-man rule creates a new kind of communal identity.
Author: Harriet Fertik
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W170413123