Working Papers on Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.27 (17/3/15)

‘Just Friends: Talking about Patronage with Plutarch and Pliny’                          Dana Fields

Abstract for a paper given at the project’s 3rd Literary Interactions conference, in Boston, 18-19 June 2015:

Greek and Roman elites in the age of Trajan inhabited an increasingly shared social environment, as reflected in literary works like Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions. This paper uses Plutarch and Pliny to test the limits of cultural sharing on the subject of patronage, within that shared social world.

Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend focuses on unequal relationships between elites and proclaims that it will help its reader (at first presumed to be a man in an exalted social position) detect flatterers among his inferiors. However, the last third of the essay consists of advice that is aimed rather at helping the inferior man in such a relationship negotiate the tricky gap between the Greek aristocratic (and especially sympotic) ideal of equality and a reality in which Roman hierarchy has created greater stratification between members of the elite.

I set this work beside Pliny’s Letters to contrast the ways in which these authors discuss (or avoid discussing) aristocratic patronage. While both authors couch their references to patronage among elites in the language of friendship (which Richard Saller has identified as a way of avoiding the demeaning associations of the cliens), Pliny talks much more about mutual obligation, acknowledging the social ties of patronage even as he avoids its name. He is clearly aware of hierarchy in such relationships (see e.g. Letter 7.3, with its reference to “amicitiae tam superiores quam minores”), but this in itself does not seem to be a source of concern. By contrast, Plutarch’s text suggests discomfort with the very existence of such inequality and dependency among elites, owing in part to a deep-seated Greek conception of freedom as rooted in individual self-sufficiency (autarkeia).

Working Papers on Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.26 (17/3/15)

‘Cato the Elder and Cultural Memory’                               Martin Dinter

Abstract for a paper given at the project’s 3rd Literary Interactions conference, in Boston, 18-19 June 2015:

Cato the Elder holds a privileged place in Roman cultural memory. Not only do we have his image defined (or let’s say distilled) early on by Cornelius Nepos’ mini-biography but he was also evidently such a prominent figure in the public consciousness that Cicero in his Cato Maior de senectute could presume him to be well known to his audience and draws upon his character accordingly.

This paper will address Cato’s reception towards the end of the first and beginning of the second century AD. Whilst frequently referenced in Quintilian’s and Frontinus’ writings – so obviously Cato was still part of the cultural matrix of the time – I shall trace the ‘image’ of Cato (or what remains of it) in the works of Martial and Juvenal in particular and then provide a link to the extensive and detailed lore that Plutarch provides in his appreciation of Cato’s life (one would not want to call it a biography). Martial references Cato twice in the prefatio to his first book of epigrams alone and numerous times throughout his epigrammatic oeuvre. Juvenal evokes Cato just twice but his brief references tab into much the same cultural memory Martial’s epigrammatic wit relies upon. Comparison with material provided by Valerius Maximus on the one hand and biographical lore embellished by Plutarch on the other will demonstrate how the image of Cato the Elder has been adapted, compressed and then expanded again under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian.