Abstract

Augustus lived into his 70s but began his public career at just nineteen years of age. This is a well-known fact, but little consideration has been given to its significance. How did his age shape the representation of his actions? How did older men react to a nineteen-year-old with an army? What were their expectations, and how did their ideas influence Octavian and the development of the imagery of the later Augustan age? The paper will examine this problem with a view to identifying how age shaped the first princeps’ identity.

Keywords: Augustus, identity, life stages, memory, representation, youth

Introduction

The modern conception of Augustus has been shaped by the considerable work on imagery that so often reproduces the statue of the Apollo-esque young man. The interpretation of this material and its presence within modern scholarship creates a subconscious illusion that Augustus was forever a young man – who ‘at the age of nineteen’ (Res Gestae 1) reshaped the nature of Roman history. Using sources from the High Empire, our paper sets out to locate a sense of memory of the Deified Augustus as a nineteenyear-old and those who might have influenced him in his youth, as well as suggesting that some of the most famous imagery of the Augustan Age has its origins in the late 40s and early 30s BCE. It is the interaction between Octavian and older men that is the focus of our paper: how did they react to a nineteen-year-old with an army? What were their expectations, and how did their ideas influence Octavian and the development of the imagery of the later Augustan age?

Octavian is one of the best documented youths from the ancient world. Here we examine the reactions to him at the age of nineteen to understand how ancient concepts of youth and maturity shaped the actions of men in 43 BCE and the subsequent decade. In so doing, we challenge the notion (put forward, for example, by Parkin 2010) that the division of the human life span into stages was simply a literary topos.

The Eastern Polynesian speech form which was to become the Māori language was brought to New Zealand as long as 800–1,000 years ago, and so far as we can tell spread rapidly over the whole of both major islands. Even assuming for the moment that this arrival was originally of a single group of people bringing a completely homogeneous speech form with them, it is not surprising that over time differences began to appear in this language in different areas. That is, Māori is not a single speech form, but has dialects. As will be seen, the differences lie predominantly in the lexicon and in some aspects of phonology, and are never such that mutual intellegibility is impaired.

That the language showed such variation has been noticed and commented on ever since there have been written records. Joseph Banks, for instance, included in his journal of the first voyage of the Endeavour (1769–70) lists of words labelled ‘northern’ (forty-two items) and ‘southern’ (twenty-six items) along with Tahitian equivalents. In fact, most of the items in the two Māori lists are clearly the same, but it is significant that even after such short contact with the language Banks was aware that there were regional differences he felt needed recognising.

Since that time, missionaries and writers of grammars and dictionaries, among other commentators, have all referred to the existence of regional variation, and in many cases given some few examples.

It will be neither possible nor desirable to give a detailed account of Māori syntax in this chapter; for this, the reader is referred to the grammars which are available (especially Bauer 1993, 1997, also Harlow 2001). What this chapter will do instead is provide a sketch of the main characteristics of Māori sentence structure, with excursuses as this approach leads to points which are of interest for typological reasons, which raise problems of analysis, or which have excited discussion in the linguistic literature.

The Phrase

Since Bruce Biggs' (1961, see also 1969) detailed treatment of the phrase (in Biggs 1961 called a ‘contour word’, see Mutu 1989:399–400), it is universally recognised as a fundamental unit in Māori grammar in both phonology and syntax. Phonologically, phrase boundaries are the sites of potential (and in careful or slow speech, actual) pauses, and the phrase has a diagnostic intonation pattern of high tone on the last prominent syllable, followed by a low tone. In syntax, not only are phrases coterminous with predicates, arguments and adjuncts, they are also the units in terms of which variations of order within clauses are to be stated. That is, where variant orders are possible, it is phrases, not words within phrases, whose order varies.

Biggs' Item and Arrangement account of the phrase is very ‘flat’ and emphasises the similarity of structure found across all phrasal categories.

Parts of Speech

As in all languages, the words of Māori do not all behave the same way either morphologically or syntactically; there are word classes, grouping together those items which share privileges of occurrence and/or can undergo the same morphological processes. On this, all writers on Māori would agree, but from that point on there is a bewildering diversity in the analyses proposed. This state of affairs is partly due to the range of paradigms within which descriptions of Māori have been composed. Partly, however, it is due to the fact that in Māori, as also in other Polynesian languages, there is relatively little in the way of inflectional morphology which would contribute to class assignment, while very many lexical items can appear systematically in a variety of syntactic environments.

To take the former point first, ‘prior to 1960, all published grammars of Polynesian languages were “traditional” grammars, sometimes referred to as Latinate’ (Mutu 1989:399). While this brief summary glosses over some useful discussion by earlier individual writers, it is essentially correct in that early accounts of, say, Māori grammar rely heavily and largely uncritically on the parts of speech, and the criteria for assignment of words to them, familiar from traditional European grammars. Even Maunsell (1842), who ‘would … insist in reply to those who would bind him down to the model of some of the European grammars, that Maori, like Hebrew, is altogether different from those languages in structure’ (1842:xii), uses noun, adjective, verb, adverb and preposition as the categories under which he discusses morphology and syntax.

Like most PN languages, Māori has relatively few segmental phonemes, very simple phonotactics, and little in the way of phonological rules apart from the regularities of the phonetic detail of the phonemes. Nonetheless the phonology of Māori has some features which are not without interest and which raise questions of analysis.

What little morphophonemic alternation Māori exhibits, mostly between long and short vowels in processes such as reduplication and passive suffixation, and the literature on these phenomena, is dealt with in chapter 5. Accordingly, this chapter will restrict itself to the treatment of the phoneme inventory, the phonetics of the realisation of these phonemes, stress, and phonotactics. Included in phonotactics is the matter of which prosodic units are relevant to which later rules, and the relationship between such units.

The development of the writing system(s) now used for Māori parallels to quite a degree the growing awareness of the structure of the Māori sound system. An account of this representation of Māori concludes the chapter.

Phoneme Inventory

The Māori system seems to have been relatively conservative, compared with its closest relations, and reflects the phonology of Proto-Central Eastern Polynesian fairly closely. Most dialects of Māori have ten consonant phonemes and five distinct vowel qualities. Sets of contrasting ‘minimal decuplets’ for consonants, and ‘quintuplets’ for vowel qualities are very easy to find.

The various types of records referred to in the previous chapter allow us to gain some picture of what has happened in Māori over the last two centuries. As will be seen later in this chapter, it is mostly in the area of vocabulary that developments have occurred over this period, though there is evidence of some change in details of phonology and grammar. In all three areas, contact with English has predictably been a major factor. At the same time, there have been extensive changes in the domains in which Māori is used. These will be discussed in chapter 7.

For an idea of the development of Māori before this period, we are reliant upon the reconstruction methods of historical linguistics. As mentioned, Māori is the most southerly member of the Austronesian (AN) language family. There has been very considerable research carried out on the subgrouping relationships within this language family, as well as on the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian (PAN) and of the proto-languages of lower-order groupings, especially, in our case, Proto-Oceanic (POC) and Proto-Polynesian (PPN). Such research, along with the investigation of the movements and cultures of the speakers of these languages, sheds a great deal of light on the history and origins of Māori.

Space precludes a thorough account of all aspects of the remote history of the language family, for which there are in any case very good, accessible sources in the linguistic and anthropological literature.

Māori is not the Polynesian language for which we have the oldest written records; that honour goes to Niuatoputapu and East Futunan. However, it is the subject of substantial documentation over the last 200 and more years. Over the same period, Māori has become a written language, not only through such documentation, but also through the transcription of its rich oral tradition and its use in the nineteenth century, and again increasingly in the present, in domains which are typically literate.

Chapter 4 will sketch the development of the writing system now used for Māori. What this chapter will present is an account of the documentation of Māori since first contact with Europeans, and of the nature of Māori literature, traditionally oral, but in recent times forming an ever increasing, and ever diversifying, written corpus.

Literature on Māori

As noted, Māori is one of the best-documented of the Polynesian languages with written sources on the language dating from the earliest contact period. Word lists compiled during James Cook's first voyage (1769–70) are simply the first of many such documents (see chapters 3 and 4). The first fuller documentation of the language was also the first publication in or on Māori (Kendall 1815). This was an attempt to provide a resource for Thomas Kendall's missionary colleagues and contains alphabets (rejoicing in the title Na Letteree), word lists and expressions.

Māori is the indigenous language of New Zealand. Like all languages, it is in some respects unique, and in others quite typical. It is a member of one of the largest language families in the world, was brought to New Zealand by Polynesian voyagers, and so shares features with other members of its family. However, it has also its own history through its isolation in the most southerly regions of the South Pacific. Like many other minority languages, it has suffered through contact and competition with a major language, and its present situation and the issues involved in attempts to ensure its survival and revitalisation thus show similarities with those affecting many other languages around the world. At the same time, the circumstances surrounding all such disadvantaged languages are not identical, and there are unique aspects, and unique responses, to the place of Māori in New Zealand society.

In this book, aspects of Māori, its history, structure and present sociolinguistic situation, will be discussed in a way which is intended to provide the general reader with a good overview. In addition, however, the book aims to provide discussion of, and full bibliographical references for, the now considerable body of literature which exists on Māori. Some of this discussion will necessitate use of the technical apparatus of modern linguistics, which may make some sections rather less accessible to readers other than professional linguists and senior students of the subject.