A Cultural History of Education in Antiquity by Christian Laes;

Author:Christian Laes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

CHAPTER EIGHT

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Life Histories: On Roman Imperial Biography

KEITH BRADLEY

INTRODUCTION: THE BIOGRAPHICAL VACUUM

The emperor Caligula was mad. There is evidence to prove it. Or at least there is evidence to prove that men in Roman antiquity believed him to have been mad. The material is relatively abundant and varied, coming from contemporaries who had personal knowledge of the emperor—Seneca and Philo—and later figures engaged in serious commentary on what to them was recent history: Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius. Each authority’s statements can be discounted as adversely disposed and subjective: Seneca because of personal misfortune, Philo and Josephus because of Caligula’s hostility to the imperial Jewish population, Tacitus and Suetonius as dupes of their sources. But the evidence as a whole is consistent. The Greek and Latin terms employed—mania, furor, insania, dementia, terms that have a long history in classical medical writings—are terms that unequivocally signify some kind of mental derangement.1

The nature and history of the derangement, however, are beyond knowledge. The evidence is too imprecise to permit any certain understanding of the onset and course of the impediment, and while many attempts at diagnosis have been made, all fail both from the insufficiency of information available and from the assumption that a solution must be found in modern Western medical terms. The succinct statement that Caligula “possessed savage lucidity and a kind of frantic energy” is safe but hardly consequential. It follows that recovery of how the condition affected Caligula’s day-to-day life, his personal relationships, and the decisions he made as Rome’s emperor is an impossible task. A biographical vacuum opens up: Caligula’s state of mind cannot be known, which means that a true biography of him cannot be written.2

By “true biography” I mean a work such as Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, which, due to the availability of documentary evidence of a sort unknown to ancient historians, allows for a thoroughly detailed account of Wilde’s everyday life from birth to death, together with a sensitive study, through analysis of his poetry, plays, and essays, of the evolution of Wilde’s views on art and esthetics. Not merely a record therefore of the life lived but also an intellectual biography and, through its careful examination of Wilde’s constant struggles with his religious and sexual identity, a penetrating psychological study as well. Biography based on this example emerges as a literary form in which the personality and individuality of a historical subject can be comprehensively portrayed.3

The remit of this contribution is to address the issues involved in writing life histories of figures from Roman antiquity. Given the enormity of the subject, I concentrate on the lives of Roman emperors such as Caligula and the limitations involved, and through references to modern biographies of figures from later periods of history I suggest, by implication, how life histories of emperors might meaningfully be written. In so doing I pay special attention to childhood as a formative phase in emperors’ lives, as seems appropriate for a contribution to a study of the history of education

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