CUP (2016) h/b 312pp £80.00 (ISBN 9781107105966)
Roman society is usually regarded as heavily masculine and patriarchal. More ‘feminine’ concepts such as vulnerability and dependency were acknowledged, but not often avowed by men in search of masculine approval. D. laments the chauvinism in the sources and the difficulty (even now) of writing authentically as a ‘male feminist’, but his book is a (largely successful) attempt to qualify this institutional sexism of the Romans by means of a detailed analysis of the words of some of their most perceptive philosophical writers. This is not just another book on gender roles in society—and D. takes it as axiomatic that ‘masculine….is predicated on the exclusion of the feminine’ (p.140). More importantly, as George Steiner memorably reminded us: if ever we become a truly feminised society, then much of ancient culture will ‘slip below the horizon of our real understanding’. D. is aware of this and is ready to acknowledge even now the limitations of our ability to understand how the Romans understood themselves (pp. 164-5).
Personification is as old as literature itself, and it is not surprising that grammatically feminine nouns will be personified as sexually female types, even though grammatical gender is not (of course) the same as sexual identity: Germans do not think girls are sexually neuter just because they say ‘das Mädchen’ and the issue of re-coining words to accord with biology was wonderfully sent up in Aristophanes Clouds (658-694). D. is not arguing that the grammatical gender is important in itself: but he is right to point out the literary use made of this and to wonder what the effect is of these patriarchal Romans so often personifying good qualities—Philosophia, Ratio, even Virtus—as women, even giving them an erotic charge, as Augustine does with Wisdom (pp. 246-247). Males who viewed real women as weak, tender and nurturing often also personify scary authority figures as female—Nature, for instance, in Lucretius (3.931-963) or the Laws in Plato’s Crito—and the philosopher even sees his craft as the feminine one of midwifery. Lucretius’ poem begins with a dominant Venus and subverts masculine supremacy with her subjection of Mars. Clearly the Romans had more than a little awareness of girl-power, and the use of language gives away more than the Romans perhaps thought.
One of the puzzles in Lucretius is why he denies divine agency in any teleological sense, but still personifies Nature as a sort of super-god who can act of her own accord (2.1090-92, 5.77 natura gubernans), and D. discusses this issue well. Many see this as part of the poet’s ‘remythologising’ of the world which goes hand in glove with his urge to ‘demythologise’ things and thus remove the superstition without removing the poetry. ‘Nature’ is thus his short-hand for ‘the way things are’—i.e. passive atoms subject to external forces such as gravity and clinamen (2.1019-22) —but the poet will always make his portrait of nature vivid by his metaphorical personification, just as Horace was to do later (Epistles 1.10.24). ‘Nature’ is for him in fact impersonal and superpersonal—which means that the personification and propopopeia is engendered by literary rather than philosophical motives and requires him to correct his catachresis at (e.g.) 2.646-60. Metaphor of course clouds the imagery and may give us the wrong impression—one reason why Epicurus was no fan of poetry—but it is worth the risk, and D. is good on the close-reading of Lucretian metaphors (e.g. dominari pp. 157-9).
One theme running through the book is the Stoic idea of oikeiôsis: a form of ‘ownness’ which (D. argues) underlies their concepts of personhood and relationships. Chapter 3 looks (inter alia) at infancy in Seneca and Cicero (but could have perhaps made more of Lucretius 5.222-7 which is a typically tart riff on the same theme). As we grow up we see our ‘ownness’ and the externality of the self as a precondition of developing personhood, and we all recognise our dependence on others—especially (Cicero de Amicitia 74) the women who were crucial in our earliest years, the Nanny Hawkins to the Roman Sebastian Flyte.
D. moves on to discuss Lucretius’ concept of animus/anima. animus is masculine, volitional, directive, anima is the feminine principle in closest proximity to the body—and the poet also posits the mysterious ‘fifth essence’ (anima animae) which he uses to somehow bridge the mind-body divide—a divide which still bedevils materialist mental philosophy. Feminine again—and well discussed as such.
Chapter five develops the thinking behind the sense of self in Stoic thought, bringing in Augustine and Descartes along the way and some witty Stoic language games to alert us to the gap between words and reality (pp. 188-9). D. shows the ways in which language struggles to conceptualise and express our sense of self and how (in particular) words do not touch grief. Consoling yourself is as hard as trying to tickle yourself (Cicero ad Att. 12.14) —and there is a theme in Roman thought that even the bodies we stand up in are on loan (cf. vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu (DRN 3.971)) and the ‘self’ is more like an aesthetic artifact. The first-person is both ‘I’ and ‘me’; personhood is the experience of oneself through the eyes of others (p.216).
In the final chapter D. looks at the elision of propriety into property, of ownness into ownership, of decorum (as what is ‘proper’) into the concept of moral property in so far as the wise man lives in accord with what is fitting and does not fight against nature. The conclusion takes a look at our response to the classical world and our tendency to either romanticise the past as a lost domain of antique simplicity or else to condemn the past as a brutal age from which we are right to recoil.
This is a very closely argued book and the quality of proof-reading is excellent—even though my copy was in places poorly printed with letters crushed together as if photocopied from a crumpled sheet. Do not, however, expect an easy read, and the Latin is always easier to understand than the English. All Latin and Greek quotations are translated, and footnotes rather than endnotes are welcome. D. has some nice turns of phrase—his ‘cake principle’, for instance, nicely describes the way these writers advance opposing views at the same time. (p. 148). The odd thing about this highly modern book, couched in the latest forms of feminist, Marxist and critical language, is that his binary focus of male/female sounds oddly out of date in these gender-fluid times, and the next generation of scholars on this subject will have a whole new slant on it where it no longer works to talk about gender at all.
John Godwin