Echoes of Authority: Quotation and the Performance of Wisdom in Cicero, Horace, and Seneca
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Classics
First Advisor
Freudenburg, Kirk
Abstract
This dissertation traces the relationship between the verbal act of quoting and the performance of authority in ancient Rome. I elucidate the intersecting aesthetic, moral, and social norms that governed Roman quoting practices. In Roman thought, it was not precise source citation nor verbatim renderings that made for effective quoting, as we might assume. Rather, Roman quoters learned to creatively shape and adapt quoted material according to tastes for formal cohesion, pithy literary devices, and excerptible expressions. They also learned that one’s social status determined what quoting habits were deemed appropriate. By demonstrating facility with these subtle, mostly unspoken, and at times contradictory codes of quoting, Romans attempted to perform their wisdom, knowledge, and authority.In Chapter 1—“Practice, Performance, Perception”—I add quoting practices to the toolbox of elite public performance in the 1st centuries BCE and CE. By surveying examples of Romans quoting in social settings (e.g. the schoolroom, the theater, a dinner party), I emphasize how quoting complements other well-known, external markers of self-fashioning (e.g. dress, diet, gesture). As much as quoting offered means to display one’s own wisdom or wit, it also provided an exercise in judging others. Even though quotations were a fixture of Roman school curricula, proper quoting was not a matter of conforming to a fixed rubric. Quoting was a matter of decorum. In particular, cases where the performance falls short or fails in some way reveal inconsistencies in the logic of appropriate quoting, such as a tension between nature and training. Overall, this chapter highlights how Roman quoters accounted for (or failed to account for) the dynamics of a given setting or audience situated within a wider cultural performance. Chapter 2—“Between Familiar and Foreign”—complicates the relationship between quotation and culture through a case study of Cicero’s letters to Trebatius. The quotations in Cicero’s letters are often viewed as marks of friendship that draw from a repository of a shared, elite, Roman culture. Instead of understanding quotation as an exchange between one stable text and/or author and another, this chapter locates ancient quotations between the two extremes of past original and present reproduction. While they may at times seem to represent fixed tokens of elite Roman culture, Cicero’s quotations actively negotiate the very constructions of “eliteness” and “Roman culture.” As he writes to Trebatius in Gaul, these negotiations are particularly concerned with conceptions of Romanitas and foreignness and the clash between political expediency and personal ethics. Far from conveying stable meaning, Cicero’s short, aphoristic, standalone quotations gain multiple meanings both across quoted contexts and within the same context. The issue of how quotes convey meaning is the focus of Chapter 3— “Learning to Contain Yourself.” Horace’s container metaphors in Ep. 1.1.2 provide a framework for understanding how a sententia’s form and content interact. This chapter challenges the assumption that the poem rattles off proverbs as part of a straightforward didactic program. Instead, I illuminate the formal and intertextual creativity of Horace’s sententiae. As he leverages these quotable one-liners, Horace presents mimetic moral messages in which the self-contained form of a sententiae overlaps with problems of contentment and self-control. Likewise, he evokes educational genres such as the anthology of quotes in order to critique the pedagogy of elementary moral instruction. Ultimately, Horace turns the process of theorizing quotability into an ethical exercise. Chapter 4—“The One-Sided Approach to Authorship in Seneca Ep. 33’s Quotation Theory”—concentrates on the reciprocal problems of excerption and attribution. Even as the letter discourages Lucilius from continuing to obsess over the quotes of others, Seneca does expect his addressee to become quoted by others. I show how Seneca upholds this asymmetrical approach to quotation by rewriting the typical part-to-whole relationship of quoting in Stoic texts and by building a reception-oriented model of authorship. At times, Seneca draws a sharp distinction between more conventional Roman lines of thought and Stoic worldviews, while at other times, his quotation theory relies heavily on Roman ideologies of property, law, and economics. Throughout, he is deeply invested in the question of how the practice of quoting enacts knowledge and authority. This chapter accentuates two sides of the quoting dynamic: quoting others and being quoted by others. For Seneca, cataloging “who said what” poses a serious threat to one’s independence and personal freedom. Yet, positioning oneself on the right side of the quoting, as the one being quoted, serves as an ultimate mark of authority.
Recommended Citation
Grant, Anna Elizabeth, "Echoes of Authority: Quotation and the Performance of Wisdom in Cicero, Horace, and Seneca" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1345.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1345
