Art, literature, and politics of identity in the high Roman empire [Ressource électronique] / Mark Nugent

Ph. D. : Classics : University of Washington : 2010

Bibliogr. p. 107-124

This dissertation explores identity politics at the intersection of art and text in the High Roman Empire (ca. 50-250 C.E.). It examines rhetorical and ideological uses of statuary in the writings of Imperial authors -both Greek and Roman-who are concerned with articulating particular cultural narratives and identities. In exploring such discursive uses of statuary, this study foregrounds the variety and complexity of the cultural scene(s) in the High Empire. To this end, authors representing a range of cultural positionalities and affiliations are included: Julia Balbilla, a poet of Syrian Greek and Roman descent; Lucian, a Syrian Greek; Bithynian Dio Chrysostom; Pausanias of Lydia, the tour-guide to Mainland Greece; Apuleius, a Latin sophist from North Africa; Favorinus, a self-styled Gaul who spoke Greek; and Roman Pliny the Younger. The Introduction, entitled "Scribbling on a Colossus," discusses Julia Balbilla's identification of the Memnon Colossus - an artefact subject to competing cultural claims - as a model for her own bicultural identity. Chapter One, entitled "Figures of Speech: Imitative Portraiture and Genealogies of Greekness in Lucian's Images," examines Lucian's use of art as a figurative device for conceptualizing Greek identities under Rome and for (re)considering the dominant modes of cultural reproduction. Chapter Two, entitled "Where Have All the Real Men Gone? Statuary and Virility in Dio Chrysostom's On Beauty and Pausanias' Description of Greece," explores how Pre-Roman sculpture can serve as a locus for anxieties about the emasculating effects of Roman rule. Chapter Three, entitled "Image Troubles: Statues and Reputations in Apuleius' Florida 16 and Favorinus' Corinthian Oration," investigates Apuleius and Favorinus' strategic engagement with statuary as a facet of their public self-presentation. Chapter Four, entitled "Amateur vs. Connoisseur: Ecphrasis and Self-Fashioning in Pliny the Younger's Epistles 3.6 and Apuleius' Florida 15," discusses Apuleius and Pliny's use of ecphrasis as an instrument of authorial self-fashioning. This dissertation represents, then, a contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the identity politics of the High Empire. It pursues a number of themes prominent in recent work on this topic - the practice of imitation, constructs of masculinity, and sophistic self-fashioning - but with an eye to the visual.