Martial offers not only an anatomy of Roman sexuality but an ideology of it.

J. P. Sullivan, Martial: The Unexpected Classic

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.

T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction

John Sullivan's last public engagement was to deliver a paper at the third USC-UCLA Seminar in Roman Studies on St. Patrick's day 1993. The subject of the seminar was ‘Literature and Ideology’, and featured Tom Habinek (USC), Carole Newlands (UCLA), myself as moderator, and John himself, who was to speak on ‘Martial and Flavian Ideology’. John's deteriorating condition prevented him from attending the seminar and a timely replacement was found in the person of a fellow ‘Patrician’, Patrick Sinclair of UC Irvine. The seminar was crowded with John's southern Californian friends and colleagues, and the three and a half hours of lively, rigorous, intellectually tough but friendly discourse were very much in the spirit of the missing speaker, whose absence was incontrovertibly the defining presence. I approached the speakers later with the idea of a Festschrift for John, built upon the theme of the seminar and containing revised versions of their own papers. They warmly agreed. Such is the germination of this volume. To those initial three papers have been added two papers (those of Malamud and Winkler) from the Pacific Rim Roman Literature seminar organised by Frederick Ahl in honour of John at Cornell in August 1993, five specially commissioned pieces from other friends and literary colleagues, and the text of the first J.P. Sullivan Annual Lecture in Classics held at UCSB in March 1994. The aim has been to treat a topic which was becoming central to John Sullivan's own inquiries and to produce a volume with more intellectual and critical cohesion than is often the case with honorific collections. I wanted the result to be as worthy as is possible of the man and the values he embodied in work and life.

I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me.

If you like a right mess, then Plautus' Poenulus (‘The Little Carthaginian’) is the play for you. When it is not being slatered, it is konstanly passed by, rarely translated [& then only for completeness' sake: one series or another] and left out of the chiefest recuperations of the oeuvre, of the chicest innovations of the genre (viz. Konstan, 1983; Slater, 1985: but do see Endnote). Poen. gets written off as ‘One of the least successful…’. [Only successful, it may be, in getting waves of Orientalist experts to brush up our Mediterranean languages. If that counts: little Latine, lesse Greek—and now beginners' Punic.] Otherwise, study of Poenulus has centred on two projects: ‘logical’ analysis of the unacceptabihty of the structuring of the plot and ‘archaeological’ dialysis of the text as botched, contaminated, interpolated miscegenation. That is, in both cases, everything that can hardly be dumped on the Greek dramatist Alexis, if it was his lost ‘Karkhēdónios' play that first Plautus mauled and meshed, then in succession his theatre-companies thrashed and threaded and through time his scribes sliced and stitched. Even its warmest admirers must hack Poenulus to bits, for a start, in order to suture some sort of text to admire (Maurach 1975, Zwierlein 1990). And the finicky pundits of this play impugn away with impunity, their fun the display of pungent finesse. Try reading them for laughs—and smile through the Poen.

Ideology is a process as well as a product. To extract a set of political principles or mystificatory arguments from a text and call them ‘ideology’ is to overlook the fact that a text is ideological only insofar as it seeks to affect an audience. As J.B. Thompson has written, in a passage cited with approval by Terry Eagleton, ‘to study ideology…is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ The ideology of a text, such as a dialogue of Cicero, cannot therefore be understood except in strategic relationship to a particular context. And the question that allows us to explore that relationship and thereby to begin to reconstruct the ‘relations of domination’ underwritten by the text is cui bono: to whose advantage is this text constructed and situated as it is?

nam saepe ego audiui Q. Maxumum, P. Scipionem, praeterea ciuitatis nostrae praeclaros uiros solitos ita dicere, cum maiorum imagines intuerentur, uehementissume sibi animum ad uirtutem accendi. scilicet non ceram illam neque figuram tantam uim in sese habere, sed memoria rerum gestarum earn flammam egregiis uiris in pectore crescere neque prius sedari, quam uirtus eorum famam atque gloriam adaequauerit.

For I frequently heard that Quintus Maximus and Publius Scipio, along with other famous men of our state, were in the habit of saying that when they looked upon the images of their ancestors, their minds were most powerfully kindled towards virtue. Clearly they were not saying that the wax likeness of itself has so much power, but that through the memory of past achievements a flame grows in the breast of outstanding men of a kind that is not put down until their own virtue has won an equal fame and glory.

In a discussion of the rhetorical styles of Caesar and the early principes, Fronto formulates the maxim that imperium…non potestatis tantummodo uocabulum, sed etiam orationis (‘’command’…is a word connoting not only power, but also oratory’ [p.123.16-17 van den Hout]). This essay will explore the political background and implications of trends and shifts in Roman ways of thinking about language and oratory in the transition from Republic to Principate. The word declension in my title functions in two senses: literally, in the case of Caesar's discussion of the nature of the Latin language (in De Analogia) and his rivalry with Cicero's views on oratorical style; and figuratively, in the perception of decline in oratory expressed by the elder Seneca and other writers of the early Principate. I hope to be able to present a new approach to, and understanding of, both these aspects.

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

When applied to the Augustan age, the term ‘ideology’ has frequently carried the same negative associations that it often bears in general use. Sir Ronald Syme was influential in creating a picture of Augustus as the deliberate founder of a monarchy who manipulated traditional sources of power for his personal ends. In his chapter ‘The Organisation of Opinion’ in The Roman Revolution, Syme argued that Augustus appropriated literature, coinage, festivals and monuments in a calculated attempt to create an impregnable system of autocracy. Although Paul Zanker in his The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus provided a more positive view of Augustus as an astute and benevolent monarch, the instigator of a great flowering of the arts, he followed Syme in seeing Augustus as the mastermind of a system of ideas and imagery specifically calculated to promote his personal power and ideals.

A great virtue of Petronius, it seems to me, is his ability to say everything simply, which makes his language appear healthy and in touch with the living, spoken language. The Satyricon is marked by casual simplicity or off-hand stylishness which we envy because it appears to have cost nothing to achieve. Though this simplicity is, I believe, the end product both of labor limae and ingenium, it is imbued with such confidence and maturity that it embraces the reader as naturally and perfectly as erotic rapture or coming to terms with one's mortality. Whatever Petronius intends for the Satyricon (if anything) or means for his reader to see (if anything), he is in complete control of its language: the coercive strength of his rhetoric encourages the adventurous reader to carry through to the end, even if some of the subject material is disturbing.