The Violence of the Form: Violence and the Political in Greek and Latin Historical Narrative
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Classics
First Advisor
Kraus, Christina
Abstract
This dissertation endeavors to provide a new account of the Greco-Roman historical tradition, one focused on its consistent interest in violence. Reading across the corpus, from its beginnings until late antiquity, I argue that Greco-Roman historiography is a form of political thought concerned with the violent production and reproduction of political collectivities in historical time. Violence, founding social formations, persists. After the introduction, which surveys the problem of violence and the politics of history-writing, Chapter 1 analyzes how Herodotus uses kings to imagine the political whole: regnal violence exemplifies how normative institutions such as law and ritual accept or disavow different forms of violence. Comparison with contemporary anthropological and historical theorists of sacred kingship illustrates how Herodotus’ text actively builds, across narratives, a theory of the relationship between king, custom, and violence. The second chapter scrutinizes the legacy of these dynamics in Livy. The chapter hinges upon the metaphor of the Roman citizenry as a body in the speech of Agrippa Menenius from Book 2. There are, I argue, two bodies politic in Livy. One is the headless, fleshy body politic, bound to the synchronic flows of violence that nourish the political community. The other is the monumental body, tied to Rome as caput mundi (“head of the world”): this body is the body of the diachronic economy of prestige. Ultimately, Livy’s theory of Roman republican greatness reveals how the differential exposure of citizen bodies to violence and depletion knits these two bodies politic together, as emblematized in the ritual of deuotio. Chapter 3 compares the civil war narratives of Tacitus and Josephus, demonstrating that both historians embed the spectacular “event” of civil war in lasting structures of familial and social antagonism. Both historians use stories of kinslaying to highlight how civil war emerges from a fundamental logic of antagonism. The two, however, contrast in the overarching lessons of kinslaying. Josephus uses kinslaying (in particular, Mary, who eats her own baby in Book 6) to highlight the profane catastrophe of the Judaean revolt and its suppression. Tacitus uses the violent antagonism of brothers against brothers, sons against fathers, to suggest a continuity between civil war and uncivil peace. Chapter 4, the final chapter, sets Procopius of Caesarea in dialogue with the earlier historians Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Polybius. Procopius’ aesthetic and historical program uses metaphors of corporeal dismemberment to untether Roman history from Roman narrative: the logic of Mediterranean organicism that sustained Roman empire has disintegrated. The Roman body politic, analyzed in chapter 2, has been reconfigured. History must move on without its previous, sustaining logic.
Recommended Citation
Lahiri, Raymond, "The Violence of the Form: Violence and the Political in Greek and Latin Historical Narrative" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1419.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1419
