Following his account of the conquest of Egypt (332 BC) by Alexander of Macedon, the Greek historian Arrian, who wrote an account of Alexander’s expedition almost 500 years after the event, compares the administrative arrangements used to govern Egypt by Alexander and those used by the Romans in his own day (Anabasis 3.5.7):
Alexander is said to have distributed rule over Egypt among many men, amazed at the country’s physical character and strength, because it did not seem safe to entrust rule over all Egypt to one man. The Romans, in my view, learnt from Alexander to keep a watch on Egypt and to send as governor those classed as Knights and not senators.
Arrian (who was appointed to the Roman senate by the emperor Hadrian) here suggests that Rome learnt from Alexander how to govern Egypt, without any regard for the temporal gap between Alexander’s reign and the establishment of a Roman province in Egypt (30 BC). The Romans’ successful use of the past conforms to the agenda that Arrian sets out at the close of his account of Alexander. There he suggests that he has praised and criticized Alexander both for the sake of truth and for the utility of humankind: ‘it was for this reason that I embarked on this history, myself too [sc. like Alexander] not without god’s help’ (7.30.3).
The gap between past and present that Arrian seems to neglect is very present for the historian Peter Brunt in his edition of Arrian’s Anabasis. For the passage where Arrian claims the Romans learnt from Alexander how to keep the threat posed by Egypt in check, Brunt offers the laconic note: ‘in fact the circumstances and Roman organization were different’.1 Brunt’s rebuke of Arrian speaks to his feeling for the particularities of different historical periods.
For Arrian, by contrast, the idea that the Romans learnt from the past fitted his own adhesion to a distinctive model of exemplarity. He shaped his literary career after the Athenian historian Xenophon (c. 430–c. 350 BC): like Xenophon, he wrote works on hunting, philosophy, and military tactics, and the very title he adopted for his account of Alexander’s expedition, Anabasis (March Upcountry), was modelled on Xenophon’s account of the march of the Ten Thousand (already established as a classic in Arrian’s time); he even adopted Xenophon as a name.2
Arrian’s valuation of exemplarity was typical of writers working within the Roman cultural context with which he was familiar. Roman writers carried with them a mental repository of military and domestic figures (both male and female) who could be invoked as either positive or negative paradigms. A passage from the satirist Juvenal suffices to show how the power of an exemplary narrative could be condensed in a bare name. In Satires 2, the poet’s persona attacks the sexual mores supposedly prevalent at Rome, including the vaunting of same-sex marriages in which men were not ashamed to assume a passive sexual role. Accepting for poetic effect what he calls the childish belief that the dead are able to perceive what is happening in the world above, the poet asks: ‘What does Curius feel, and the two Scipios, Fabricius and Camillus’ shade?’ (153–4). The men mentioned here by name are great military figures from the Roman republic: Marcus Furius Camillus was thought to have saved Rome after the city was sacked by Gallic invaders early in the fourth century BC; Manius Curius Dentatus and Gaius Fabricius Luscinus were heroes of the war against Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, in the first half of the third century BC; while Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus elder and younger (the latter a grandson by adoption) were seen as responsible for the Roman victories over Carthage in the Second and Third Punic Wars. The names of these men are enough to evoke the manly virtues of the Roman republic that have supposedly been betrayed by Juvenal’s contemporaries.
The early history of Rome also provided female exemplars. The exemplary status of women was variously linked to the fulfilment of gender norms. Livy’s account of the rape and suicide of Lucretia (1.57–9) begins by presenting her as an exemplary wife, celebrated for domestic activities such as wool-working as well as for chastity and fidelity; as we shall see (p. 165), in her response to her rape Lucretia takes on a much more active role. Active displays by female exemplars were often presented as instances of virtus, ‘courage’ or ‘virtue’, a word etymologically related to vir, ‘man’, and typically applied to male military heroes (though it came to be used more broadly of the capacity to endure suffering).3 In adherence to Roman gender norms, such displays were sometimes presented as inspiring for men or else tamed in other ways: thus while Cloelia was widely celebrated for escaping from the Etruscans by swimming or riding across the Tiber, Valerius Maximus presents her as a ‘light of virtus for men’ (3.2.2) and Livy notes her ‘decorum’ as a hostage in choosing only boys rather than young men to be freed alongside the girls (2.13.9).
For Romans, their abundance of historical examples was a source of pride. When the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (first century AD) makes a distinction between precepts (sayings) and examples (deeds), he concludes with the assertion that ‘The Romans are as strong in examples as the Greeks are in precepts, and examples are more important’ (Oratorical Education 12.2.30). Roman military deeds, he suggests, outdo Greek theorizing.
The ancient attachment to exemplarity has played an important part in discussions of the development of the concept of anachronism. Zachary Sayre Schiffman has suggested that historians in antiquity ‘never thought to question the utility of one age’s lessons for another – or even to frame the issue in this way’, and attributed this failure to the fact that ‘they did not have a systematic and sustained idea of anachronism’.4 Similarly David Lowenthal writes that up to the nineteenth century ‘since past circumstances seemed comparable and hence relevant to present concerns, history served as a source of useful exemplars’.5 This exemplary view of history is often conveyed through the Ciceronian tag historia magistra vitae (On the Orator 2.36), which suggests a view of the past in which history ‘does not yet have the modern sense of a sequential, unitary process but is rather taken as an aggregate of instances designed to serve as guides for behavior and action’.6
Historians interested in conceptions of the past often suggest that exemplarity was a stable concept until the Renaissance.7 An increasing sensitivity to anachronism is thought to have led to the collapse of modes of exemplarity based on the idea of an unchanging human nature. According to many accounts, the hold that exemplarity exercised on the early modern imagination was self-defeating. When people attempted to put the model into practice by imitating the ancients (whether in literature, law or military tactics), the outcome was a stronger appreciation of their historical distance from antiquity.8 Further weakening of ancient exemplarity arose from objections to non-Christian models and from a recognition of the profusion and complexity of ancient exempla. Collections of exempla are thought to have led to a sense of their various historical contexts and to have revealed that some individuals were credited with conflicting character traits – a particular problem given that metonymy was one of the dominant modes of exemplarity: if the very name of an ancient figure such as Alexander was shorthand for particular qualities, what to do when those qualities included drunkenness and lust as well as courage and daring?
A second crisis of exemplarity is often located around the time of the French Revolution. On the one hand, the sense felt by contemporaries that the Revolution itself was a break with the old order was marked by the introduction of a new calendrical system. On the other hand, the very fact that the revolutionaries drew so much on the ancient heroic attachment to liberty drew criticism from conservatives, particularly in Britain: the authors of a volume on Antiquities of Ionia wrote that ‘we cannot but smile at the presumptuous ignorance and temerity of those pretended politicians and philosophers of modern times, who are perpetually recommending their wild and impracticable theories of equal liberty, and pure democracy, by the glorious examples of Athens and Rome’.9 The revolutionaries’ stress on ancient liberty was countered by the spectre of ancient slavery. As during the Renaissance, attempts to replicate antiquity led many to the conviction that such projects were necessarily futile.
These supposed crises of exemplarity have not totally destroyed the power of the exemplary model itself. At one level, the historicist notion of the period can be seen as a continuation of exemplarity by other means. In Alexander Gelley’s formulation, ‘whereas the classical sense of historia envisioned a series of instances linked inductively to produce a conclusion, history in the modern (or at least Hegelian) sense situates particular events in a totalizing schema that assimilates the exemplary function’.10 With the onset of historicism events or people were themselves seen as representative of a period,11 and the classical Greek polis itself remained exemplary in both academic and popular writing for its supposed integration of private and political realms.12 This exemplary identification with antiquity is still propagated, moreover, in modern education as well as popular culture. Books and university courses promote the ‘leadership lessons’ that can be learnt from Xenophon (‘Err on the side of self-reliance’).13 Writings by Cicero and his brother are marketed by a university press with the titles ‘How to win an argument’ and ‘How to win an election’, with publicity that speaks of ‘timeless techniques of effective public speaking from Rome’s greatest orator’ and quotes a reviewer’s soundbite ‘I just hope my opponent in the next campaign doesn’t get a copy’.14 Exemplarity remains a popular, powerful and potentially complex model, even if within academic historicist thought it seems an anachronistic survival.
The notion of a modern crisis of exemplarity rests on the belief that exemplarity was a stable system of knowledge within antiquity. Recent treatments of exemplarity by classical scholars, however, have suggested that the notion of a crisis should be stretched back to include antiquity itself. Far from being the product of an enduring commitment to timeless truths, ancient exemplarity should rather, as Christina Kraus suggests, be located within ‘the ancient tradition of rhetorical persuasion’: ‘exempla are embedded in a system designed to argue both sides of a given question’, and ‘any exemplary story or figure can be itself the grounds of contested interpretation’.15 The idea that exempla are always open to contestation is supported, too, in recent work by Rebecca Langlands. Langlands aligns exemplarity with what modern philosophers term ‘situational ethics’, that is, with a sensitivity to the context of actions rather than with an inflexible application of absolute rules.16 Langlands is also alert to the rhetorical form in which exempla were transmitted, in volumes such as Valerius Maximus’ Memorable Doings and Sayings, a work written under the Emperor Tiberius that enjoyed great popularity during the Renaissance. Valerius’ method of grouping disparate anecdotes under the headings of traditional virtues is a way of telling Roman readers ‘not simply what to think but how to think ethically’.17 Exemplarity, on Langlands’ reading, demands ethical judgement.
Further complexity is introduced into ancient notions of exemplarity once the temporality of exempla is taken into account. Matthew Roller has probed the extent to which historicist assumptions can be detected in the Roman use of exempla. Roller allows that Roman culture was infused with ideas of development and decline, but suggests that exempla kept their power because the same moral framework was felt to obtain over time. He does, however, acknowledge some awareness that exemplary virtues could change with new circumstances: he suggests, for instance, that Roman debate during the Second Punic War over the delaying tactics of Fabius, which were presented as either a cowardly avoidance of battle or a prudent way of saving the state, led to a change in the terms in which military performance was assessed.18 Our analysis in this chapter will suggest that it may be better to see a dialogue rather than an opposition between exemplarity and historicism.
We can gain a stronger sense of the conversation between exemplary and historicist thought by returning to Arrian’s use of Xenophon. Arrian did not simply seek to be another Xenophon, he also attempted to surpass him, in part at least by reflection on his own positioning in time. This sort of reflection is particularly apparent in Arrian’s work On Hunting. Xenophon had written in his hunting treatise that the hare is ‘so graceful’ a creature ‘that there is no one who would not, at the sight of a hare being tracked, found, chased, caught, forget his own beloved’ (On Hunting 5.33). Arrian declared that ‘on this one point I do not agree with my namesake’: to see a hare caught is unpleasant, but ‘that other Xenophon should be forgiven if a hare being caught seemed a great sight to him, since he did not know of swift hounds’ (On Hunting 16.7). Arrian here reverts to one of his justifications for writing a new treatise, namely the fact that Xenophon was unaware of Celtic hounds, an especially fast breed (1.4). Though he implies that Xenophon’s treatise was, in our terms, an anachronism, he excuses Xenophon himself on the grounds that it was uncommon for a hare to be caught when he was writing. Rather than working with an unchanging moral compass, he is alert to the earlier conditions.
This chapter will claim that in many other settings, too, the ancient stress on exemplary models was able productively to co-exist with a sense of anachronism. We will explore the temporal complexity in ancient thinking about, and exploitation of, exempla as well as the dialectic of exemplarity and historicism. Throughout, we shall see that notions of anachronism affected both the way exempla were conceived in theory and the way they were deployed in practice.
The reason why the idea has taken hold that ancient exemplarity both rested on and inculcated a timeless set of values is not hard to see. It is not just that figures from the classical past are still often cited as exemplars of such values, typically for conservative or racially charged political agendas.19 An adherence to universal moral concepts is also suggested by programmatic statements in popular authors such as Plutarch, who declares at the start of his life of Aemilius Paullus that he began writing Lives to help others and kept at it to help himself, ‘trying through history, as with a mirror, somehow to arrange my life and make it resemble the virtues [of my subjects]’ (1.1). While Plutarch’s Lives can be considered biographical narratives, works such as Valerius Maximus’ collection presented exemplary anecdotes which operated outside the structures of historical narrative. Anthologies of deeds and sayings drew on great lives and events. Other works were more specialized, such as Frontinus’ Stratagems, which presented short Greek and Roman military narratives as ‘examples (exemplis) of counsel and foresight through which their ability to conceive and execute similar deeds may be nurtured’ (1.1).
The doctrine of gaining lessons from the past was theorized in many other settings in antiquity. That one could learn by copying an exemplum was a central principle of education. Educational examples need not, admittedly, be derived from the past: Horace affectionately portrays his father pointing to the good and bad examples set by acquaintances in his home town (Satires 1.4.105–26). But texts that dealt more formally with the moral instruction of the young tended to insist on training through remembering the past as the responsibility of good parents: Plutarch, for instance, argues that ‘the memory of past actions is a model (paradeigma) of good advice about the future’ (On the Education of Children 9f). At a later stage, exempla played an important part, too, in declamations and suasoriae (persuasive speeches), two components of rhetorical education. Speakers were expected to produce allusions to the past that were witty and pointed rather than historically plausible (‘but [we are] Spartans, but [we are] at Thermopylae’, the elder Seneca records one speaker as saying – an anachronistic appeal to the famous Spartan self-sacrifice placed in a speech encouraging the Spartans to remain at Thermopylae itself (Suasoriae 2.18)).
Exemplarity functioned within Roman families in the form of the imagines, ancestor-masks displayed in the house and paraded at funerals (Fig. 9).20 The historian Polybius describes how the funeral itself represents the deceased as an exemplum to those who succeed him (6.53.2–3); on other occasions, the family member who most closely resembles the commemorated ancestor wears the mask and the honours acquired by that ancestor (6.53.6). Nothing could be more inspiring for the young than the sight of these noble men, Polybius concludes (6.53.10).
Fig. 9 Elite Roman holding objects which may represent images of ancestors. Togatus Barberini, c. first century AD. MC 2392. Museo Centrale Montemartini, Rome. Alamy.
The use of exempla was explored in theoretical works such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1393a23–94a18). Aristotle divides them into ‘speaking of past events’ and ‘invention’, with the latter further divided into the forms of fable (parabolē) and comparison. The particular value of invoking past events, he thinks, is that they may provide a pointer to the future: if the King of Persia has previously invaded Greece after being defeated in Egypt, watch out for his activities in Egypt (1393a31–b4). Past events are more informative than fables and provide a better basis for deliberation (1394a5–7). Quintilian deals more directly than Aristotle with the practical steps the aspiring orator should take to achieve success, but he too lays stress on the usefulness of examples: students benefit from writing in praise of good men and from critique of the bad, learning case studies and building their own stocks of exempla; they should practice, too, the ability to spot and develop analogies (Oratorical Education 2.4.20, 5.11.1–6).
Exemplarity was an important component of historiography. We have already alluded to the famous Ciceronian maxim historia magistra vitae: ‘As for history, the witness of the ages, the illuminator of reality, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity, by whose voice but the orator’s is it entrusted to immortality?’ (On the Orator 2.36). In context, this maxim is from a self-aggrandizing speech by an orator, Antoninus, who deploys eloquence in favour of eloquence (as one of his interlocutors remarks in response). But it represents the sort of claims for utility regularly paraded by historians such as Polybius and Diodorus. Behind such statements lies Thucydides’ proud ambition that his work should prove ‘useful to all those who will want to see clearly what happened in the past and what will happen again at some time in similar or much the same form in accordance with the human condition’ (1.22.4) – a message summed up in a rhetorical treatise later in antiquity by the tag ‘history is philosophy through examples’ (Ps.-Dionysius, Rhetoric 11).
Many readings of literature in antiquity presuppose a timeless approach. There was, for instance, a strong tradition of reading Homeric narrative didactically, even though the lessons extracted are not explicitly foregrounded by the poet himself. Homer himself could be presented variously as a great teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of human affairs,21 as a proto-philosopher who encodes in his poetry a profound understanding of the cosmos,22 or as a master of rhetorical and political theory.23 Characters within the Homeric poems were similarly open to exemplary readings. Their exemplary status was determined partly by the stable qualities for which they were best known: testimony to the fact that Odysseus continued to be known for cunning (mētis) comes from a model speech written in the late fifth century BC by the Athenian philosopher and rhetorician Antisthenes, in which Odysseus extols the qualities he showed during the Trojan War by anticipating the future birth of a ‘clever poet’ who ‘will make me much-enduring (polutlas), master of cunning plans (polumētis) and full of tricks (polumēchanos)’ (SSR V A 54.14) – the epithets commonly applied to him in the Homeric poems.
There was, then, a widespread practice in antiquity of removing human actions and characters from their temporal nexuses and extracting supposedly timeless truths or models of action, and modern scholars have rightly stressed the divergence of this practice from the historicist awareness of distinctive historical periods. But it would be mistaken to assume that the sort of atemporal approaches outlined so far in this section can themselves be extracted as exemplary. The temporal landscape of exemplarity comes to seem a great deal more rugged if the available evidence is probed more fully.
Against attempts to draw timeless wisdom from the Homeric poems must be set approaches that stressed the contingency or primitivism of his poems. In many biographical traditions Homer was portrayed as a poet singing for his supper, naming characters after people he met during his travels.24 Within the exemplary realm, a more granular image emerges in the second-century AD moralist Maximus of Tyre, who claims in one of his essays that Homer was an admirable teacher in erotic matters, but ‘altogether simple and archaic’ in other areas of life, such as medicine, military tactics and chariot-racing (Dissertations 18.8). Departing from the view of Homer as a universal sage, he hives off a number of areas where technical advances have rendered the epic poet time-bound; that is, he historicizes the development of wisdom. Homeric examples were similarly dismissed as ‘stale and too archaic’ by the fourth-century AD rhetorician Themistius (16.205b);25 conversely, a speaker in Macrobius’ Saturnalia values the Homeric poems precisely for their age, praising Homeric repetition within catalogues for a ‘divine simplicity’ that is ‘somehow uniquely becoming to Homer … and worthy of the ancient poet’s genius’ (5.15.16).
Rhetorical treatises are similarly nuanced in handling the temporality of comparisons. Directly counter to many views of the ancients’ naive idea of historical iteration is Aristotle’s confession in the Rhetoric that ‘it is difficult to find similar historical incidents’ (1394a3); it is much easier, he writes, to develop likenesses with the current situation through fables or the philosophical use of analogy. Even the one example of a historical situation that Aristotle cites is worth exploring further. In discussing how a Persian attack on Egypt could be taken as a harbinger of an invasion of Greece, Aristotle cites two Persian kings: ‘previously Darius did not cross over [from Asia to Greece] until he had taken Egypt, but after taking it, he invaded; again, Xerxes did not attack until he took Egypt, but having taken it, he crossed: thus if [the present king] takes Egypt, he will cross’ (1393a31–b4). For modern readers, the allusion to Xerxes is straightforward, since Herodotus expressly states that he put off invading Greece until he had secured Egypt (7.5, 7). It is far from obvious, however, why Aristotle refers to Darius, and it is not likely that his contemporaries would have been any clearer.26
The rhetorical tradition was as alive to points of difference as to transhistorical continuities. The author of a fourth-century BC treatise preserved in the Aristotelian corpus writes that ‘most actions are partly like and partly unlike one another, so for this reason we shall have a good stock of paradigms and have no difficulty in countering those put forward by the other side’ (Rhetoric to Alexander 1430a9–11). Similarly, Quintilian suggests that rhetorical appeals to similarity can be met with an argument from dissimilarity, since ‘it is not possible that everything should correspond’ (Oratorical Education 5.13.24). As for the forms of dissimilarity, Quintilian specifies that they may turn on ‘kind, manner, time, place’ (genere, modo, tempore, loco), citing a speech by Cicero where most of these arguments are deployed (5.11.13). What Quintilian means by a difference of ‘time’ is not a disjunction of two historical periods, in the historicist sense, but rather a situational contrast: thus Cicero in the speech to which Quintilian alludes analyses the force of an exemplum in the light of a difference between a time (tempus) that was ‘quiet and peaceable’ and one that was ‘disturbed by all the storms of prejudice’ (For Cluentius 94). The type of difference Quintilian has in mind resembles a distinction made (according to Aulus Gellius 6.3.45–7) by the elder Cato between actions prohibited by the laws of nature or the nations and those prohibited ‘by reason of time’ (temporis causa), that is, in response to a temporary emergency. While differentiating examples by tempus may seem less historically nuanced than the historicizing demotion of their use, it is still robust enough to create a sense of anachronism in the deployment of a particular example.
A stronger sense of anachronism emerges from another of the rhetorical strategies that could be used against exempla. Quintilian recommends that exempla that are ‘old’ (vetera) can be dismissed as ‘fabulous’ (fabulosa); it is those that cannot be doubted on the grounds of antiquity that should be criticized for dissimilarities (5.13.24). Similarly Apsines, a Greek rhetorician of the third century AD, recommended that paradigms should be ‘well-known and clear, and not archaic and fabulous’ (Rhetoric 1.2). The underlying principle that exempla are time-bound is expressed by Polybius in a discussion of how speeches should be represented in historical works: he suggests that the historian should vary the sorts of arguments deployed depending on whether a speech was made by contemporaries or in the more distant past, just as he should use different arguments for speakers from different countries (12.25.i.4).
Ancient discussions often presented historia as a magistra from whom it was quite difficult to learn. Polybius himself was one of the most vocal exponents of the view that studying the past, and particularly the ‘calamities of others’ (1.1.2), was the best means of education, but he also argues that a broad survey of history, such as that which he constructs, is necessary, as knowledge of a limited range of examples can only provide a partial education (1.4.6–11). He was perhaps in some sense here responding to the distinction Aristotle made in his Poetics between history and poetry: history dealt with particulars (‘what Alcibiades did or experienced’), poetry with universals (‘the kinds of things which it suits a certain kind of person to say or do, in terms of probability of necessity’) (Poetics 1451b5–11). Polybius elsewhere, nonetheless, disputes whether historical events and characters necessarily generate useful exemplars. In an account of political turmoil in Egypt he describes how a certain Agathocles manoeuvred his way into power as regent for the young son of Ptolemy IV. But his fast rise was followed by a spectacular fall as the people rebelled and destroyed him, his friends and family. Polybius expresses reluctance to relate the events in detail: compared with the improving tale of the successes of Agathocles’ namesake, the tyrant of Syracuse, there is nothing to learn from the career of a man whose temporary success was due to the weakness of others rather than any merits of his own (15.34–6).
That the value attached to the past did not preclude complex reflections on temporality is clear, too, in the Roman discourse of exemplarity. The reservoir of past excellence contained in ancestral traditions could be contested; orators might make different claims about what constituted ancestral practice and excellence, while the development of the literary antiquarian tradition by Varro and others provided an alternative source for authoritative information on Roman culture and identity. The antiquarian interest in Roman tradition generated the potential for rupture and change.27
Particularly acute reflections on change can be found in the preface of Livy’s monumental history of Rome – one of the most famous expressions of an exemplary view of history-writing. Livy there expresses the awareness that he is himself following in the line of many earlier writers on Rome, all of whom hope to surpass their predecessors not just by correcting historical errors but also by improving on ‘crude antiquity’ (rudem vetustatem) in matters of style (Preface 2). Earlier writers, then, set an example for Livy in their eagerness to eclipse their less developed forebears, even as Livy hopes to eclipse them. Livy then goes on to praise the value of contemplating the past as a respite from current troubles and as a storehouse of exempla. But it is particularly in Rome prior to its moral decline that he claims the greatest treasures are to be found. Livy’s views on exemplarity are inseparable from his anxieties about ethical change.
The connection Livy draws in his preface between exemplarity and decline is taken further by Tacitus in a programmatic statement in his account of the civil war at Rome in AD 69 (the Year of the Four Emperors). After telling the story of a common soldier who claimed a reward for killing his own brother in action, Tacitus contrasts this grasping fratricide with the case of a soldier in an earlier civil war (fought between Sulla, Marius and Cinna in 88–87 BC) in which a soldier who had killed his brother by mistake committed suicide. He draws the following moral: ‘So much the keener among our ancestors was both the glory of good deeds and regret at disgraceful ones. I shall not unreasonably mention deeds like this, and others from ancient history, whenever the topic or situation demands examples (exempla) of the correct action or consolation for the wrong’ (Histories 3.51). Tacitus here implies that he will insert exempla in his work even though he is conscious that they will have no effect in the present. Rather than promoting an idea of timelessness, exempla accentuate a sense of difference over time. The past–present contrast is particularly cutting because the glorious past episode is from a civil war. Otho, one of the protagonists in the civil war of AD 69, is made by Cassius Dio (Roman History 64.13.2) to say that he ‘would choose to be a Mucius, a Decius, a Curtius, or a Regulus’ – great Republican exempla, known for their self-sacrifice for the state – ‘rather than a Marius, a Cinna, or a Sulla’ – symbols of the Republic’s slide into dissolution. Tacitus more sardonically applies the notion of decline to the participants in civil wars.
The Roman concern with how exempla function in times of political decline is matched by Greek authors reflecting on the advent of the pax Romana and the concomitant loss of Greek liberty. Acute reflections on the changes made by the Roman conquest can be found in Plutarch’s essay Precepts of Statesmanship. Plutarch advises that the great themes of the Persian Wars – ‘Marathon, Eurymedon, Plataea and other examples which make the masses swell up vainly with pride’ – should be left to ‘the schools of the sophists’. He does nonetheless recuperate for present use some seemingly less glamorous deeds by the Greeks of old: the statesman can still ‘form and correct the characters of contemporaries’ by recounting events such as the amnesty at Athens after the downfall of the Thirty Tyrants (814a–c). Just as the great examples of Republican Rome were reconfigured under the Principate, the paradigmatic use of the Greek past underwent a major change after the Roman conquest of Greece.28
Particularly penetrating analysis of the periodic impact of war on exemplarity is found in Thucydides’ History. Furthering his claim that his account of the Peloponnesian War will offer insight into similar events in the future, Thucydides offers a sketch of the harm inflicted by civil strife on the cities of Greece – ‘as happens and always will do so while human nature remains the same’. This universal claim is tempered by recognition that ‘the degree and kind of the damage may vary in each case according to the particular circumstances’. But a far greater threat to the exemplary model comes when Thucydides turns to the effect of peace and war on human character: ‘in peace and good circumstances cities and individuals alike show better judgement’ – but ‘war is a violent teacher’ which ‘takes away the ease of daily life’ and ‘assimilates passions to circumstances’ (3.82.2). Thucydides does not simply underline, like many historians after him, the difficulty of learning from the past. He roots that difficulty in a psychological model according to which human judgement is moulded by material circumstances and by the passions unleashed by conflict. If, as Thucydides asserts, ‘men exchanged the customary evaluation of words in relation to deeds’ (3.82.4), then the ethical system on which timeless paradigms were based was at the mercy of changing political pressures.
We have seen that in ancient theoretical writing on exemplarity, a conception of exempla understood as predicated on similarities, between one story and another, between past and present situations, is balanced by a sensitivity to the complex relations between exemplary narratives and temporal change. Similar balance is required to do justice to the subtlety with which exempla are employed in ancient literature.
Exemplarity often seems to function in a timeless way in ancient works which invoke specific examples as illustrations of general truths or else to recommend a certain course of action. Aristotle, for instance, lists numerous psychological or structural causes of civic conflict in his discussion in the fifth book of the Politics (fear or contempt of one group for another, for instance, or the presence of additional settlers), and for each type of cause he adduces a number of specific instances. What his dense argumentation lacks is any attention to the temporal setting of the various examples; his lack of attention to chronology itself supports his overall project of offering generalized political truths.
Similarly ahistorical in their presentation were the exemplary lists employed in the ethical essays of the younger Seneca and of Maximus of Tyre. In an essay on bodily and spiritual sickness, Maximus offers no chronological anchoring as he moves between characters from Homer, the supposedly debauched Assyrian king Sardanapallus, and figures such as Alcibiades and Critias who lived during the Peloponnesian War (7.6–7). As with Aristotle’s use of achronic political data, Maximus’ indifference to chronology seems to contribute to the use of such stories as examples to be imitated or avoided.29
The apparently timeless exploitation of exempla can be traced right back to the beginnings of Greek literature. The Iliad draws to a powerful close with the Trojan king Priam travelling to Achilles’ hut to ransom the corpse of his son Hector. Priam invokes Achilles’ absent father and the two men gaze at each other in mutual recognition of their suffering. Achilles then appeals to the old man to eat with him, drawing on an unusual paradigm: ‘Even lovely-haired Niobe was mindful of food, though her twelve children had been killed in her house, six daughters and six sons in the prime of youth’ (24.602–4). Niobe had boasted that she had more children than Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, and in due course was punished by the gods she had offended. Achilles’ use of Niobe as an exemplum follows the same structure of exemplarity we have observed in Aristotle and Maximus of Tyre. Although her story belongs in the past, there is no attempt to clarify how far in the past it belongs and no sense that its pastness detracts from its exemplary power.
The way Achilles’ rhetoric develops, however, suggests that exempla were employed not just as vehicles for unchanging truths, but as means of reflecting on and responding to the processes of temporal change. Niobe, Achilles continues, endures now in Mount Sipylus, where ‘though a stone, she nurses sorrows from the gods’ (24.617). Achilles here alludes to a geographical feature that would have been known by repute, if not by sight, to Homer’s audience: a distinctively shaped rock in Lydia which would seem to weep when rain water trickled down it. Niobe’s metamorphosis removes her from ordinary human experience. At the same time, the intensity of her pain is attested by its continuance even in her new rocky form. If Niobe, who grieves even as a rock, took food, all the more reason for Priam to do so.
The Iliad’s closing reflection on how temporal change can boost the logic of exemplarity returns to a theme established in its very first exemplum. Agamemnon demands that Briseis, an enslaved princess, be taken from Achilles and given to him. When Achilles objects, the two heroes flare into quarrelling. Attempting to conciliate, Nestor, the old king from Pylos, steps forward. Before advising them to patch up their dispute for their mutual benefit, Nestor reflects on his own position (1.259–62, 267–8): ‘But listen to me, since you are both younger than I. For once upon a time I associated with men greater than you, and they never made light of me. Such warriors I have not seen since and will not see again … mighty were they, and they battled with the mighty mountain-dwelling centaurs, and destroyed them terribly.’ Nestor’s assertion of his exemplary status as an ideal counsellor is based on his superior experience, but also on temporal change. Because men of the past were greater than those today, and because even they took him seriously, his present claim to respect should be heeded. Warfare in the past is also subtly differentiated from its present counterpart. Earlier men battled with centaurs rather than with other men. Together with the centaurs’ position beyond human society, the strong language used of this combat (the phrase ‘destroyed them terribly’ (ekpaglōs apolessan) occurs only here in the Iliad) suggests that it was more violent and less rule-governed than the fighting of the Trojan War. Both decline and development therefore inform the history that Nestor constructs, and give point to his argument. The former implies in passing that Achilles and Agamemnon should not think too highly of themselves, while the latter emphasizes the importance of the social codes that regulate human behaviour.
Nestor’s speech in the opening book of the Iliad points to a use of exemplarity as dynamic and open to change rather than as a static reification of an achronic historical field. In listening to Nestor mould his speech, we eavesdrop on the processes by which exempla are shaped to meet the demands of a specific situation; in listening to Achilles and Agamemnon reject his plea for reconciliation, we find that the present may not find exempla drawn from the past to its liking.
The workings of these specific exempla are true to the narrative logic of the Iliad as a whole. The poem presents a complex, temporally evolving mixture of actions, mistakes, evasions, changes of mind, and decisions. Characters are exemplary not as symbols, but as fully-fledged agents. Thus Aristotle commented that Achilles was a paradigm of both virtue and harshness (Poetics 1454b14–15), and numerous later writers, ranging from Sappho to Gorgias, responded to the ambivalent portrayal of Helen.30 Even before Aristotle and his contemporaries had formulated the notion of the ‘paradigm’, Homer created characters who transcend simple notions of what it is to be paradigmatic.
Homeric epic was itself a vital influence on the formation of historical writing in antiquity, and it is no surprise that the Homeric linking of exemplarity and change was picked up by the earliest practitioners of the new genre. A particular motif in the ancient historians is the malleability of exempla in rhetorical traditions. In Herodotus, the story of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton is invoked, with a self-conscious allusion to memorialization, in the Athenian general Miltiades’ appeal to the polemarch Callimachus before the battle of Marathon (6.109.3) – even though Herodotus’ own account had brought out that their actions, far from bringing an end to the tyranny, had in fact made it worse (5.55, 62.2). Later, in his account of the run-up to the battle of Plataea, Herodotus presents a debate over which Greek city should hold the left wing in which Athenian speakers invoke the battle of Marathon as a great victory won by themselves ‘alone’ (9.27.5–6). The Athenian speech is probably an anachronistic echo of the tradition of Athenian patriotic oratory that developed over the course of the fifth century (see p. 67). But again the exemplum deployed in the speech runs counter to Herodotus’ own account, which had mentioned the presence of the Plataeans at the battle (6.108). The changeability of the past in speeches boosts the authority and importance of the historian’s own account while hinting, too, at its fragility.
It is not just through rhetorical manipulation that exempla are subject to temporality. In that same debate at Plataea, the Athenians start by telling of the great deeds of their ancestors. They draw various examples from what we regard as myth: the Athenians saved the destitute descendants of Heracles, ensured that the Seven against Thebes received burial, and fought off an Amazon invasion; they were even, so they claim, as good as any who fought at Troy (despite Homer’s almost complete silence about their role). Herodotus’ Athenians go on to argue, however, that ‘there is not much point in mentioning these events’: ‘people who were good then might be worse now, and people who were bad then might be better now’ (9.27.4). Instead they appeal, as we have seen, to their recent achievements at Marathon. In keeping with the principles formulated by later rhetoricians, claims on the distant past are replaced by claims made on (a distorted version of) the more recent past.
Historians also explore how the wisdom of attempts to draw lessons from the past is subject to re-assessment with new circumstances. Livy, for instance, following the stress in his preface on the usefulness of his historical enterprise, continues to engage with exemplarity when he turns to describe Rome’s eventful history. He makes overt comments on the exemplary value of particular deeds and shows characters using the past in an exemplary fashion in both speech and action. If on the surface he seems to fit the model of historia magistra vitae, analysis of the way exempla are used over the course of his work cuts against this characterization. It is not just that they are subject (as we would expect) to rhetorical manipulation by speakers, it is also that they have a life span: speakers are consistently shown prioritizing recent over more distant exempla.31
Livy also probes the form in which exemplary models were relayed. A story about the early years of the Roman Republic that was much repeated in antiquity told how the patricians sent a spokesman, Agrippa Menenius, to conciliate the plebs, who had seceded to a nearby mountain. Menenius proceeded to tell a fable of how the other parts of the body revolted against the belly, aggrieved that they did all the work while the belly reaped all the rewards. In the version of this speech by Livy, Menenius’ use of a fable is described by the adjectives priscus and horridus, ‘old-time’ and ‘rough’ (2.32.8) – the former a word frequently applied to the old institutions of Rome, the latter (literally ‘bristling’) evoking an image of shaggy antiquity, the bearded figures on Roman imagines. Livy’s characterization of the speech is particularly striking after his explanation that Menenius was sent on the mission as an ‘eloquent’ speaker – a judgement that, like many in Livy’s account of early Rome, is presumably to be read against the standards of the time he is describing rather than those of his own day. The eloquent Menenius uses a mode of communication that is hardly to be taken as exemplary; citing his example, Quintilian regarded fables as suitable only for pleasing ‘uneducated rustics’ (Oratorical Education 5.11.19).
The contrast of past and present is central to the discourse of exemplarity in many other Roman authors. We noted above the important collection of exempla composed by Valerius Maximus in the first century AD. Throughout his work, Valerius plays on an (at times explicit but more often implicit) sense of contrast with the present. Tensions result, however, when the offsetting of past against present confronts the need to flatter the current regime: thus in his preface to his second book, Valerius promises an account of the ‘old and memorable institutions’ of Rome, with the aim of showing ‘the elements of this happy life we lead under the best of emperors, so that a retrospect of them may in some way profit present-day manners’. The conventional idealization of the present ruler is undercut by the potential for amelioration from exempla drawn from the Republican past.
Elsewhere Valerius Maximus draws attention to another way in which exemplarity is implicated in temporality – namely through the chronological gap between exemplary actions and the words which are required to commemorate them. ‘Overwhelmed by the weight of the praise which you have deserved,’ he writes at one point in one of his frequent addresses to dead heroes, ‘I represent more the weakness of my own talent than your virtue’ (2.7.6). (His addressees here, Postumius Tubertus and Manlius Torquatus, are both credited by Valerius with executing victorious sons for disobeying orders; Livy, by contrast, rejects the tradition about Postumius as an anachronism, on the grounds that the proverbial phrase ‘Manlian orders’ would not have arisen had there existed the prior example of Postumius (4.29.5–6).) Later Valerius notes the severity of the censors who struck the distinguished Cornelius Rufinus off the senatorial register for having ten pounds’ worth of silver plate: ‘Good lord! the very letters of our era seem to me to be astonished when they are forced to apply themselves to recording such severity, and to be afraid that they be thought to be commemorating the acts of a city that is not our own.’ The sense of the past as a foreign city is generated here by the relative scale of Rufinus’ luxury: the amount of silver that led to his expulsion would now be seen as ‘the most contemptible poverty’ (2.9.4).
The gap between Republic and Principate is fundamental to Roman authors’ exploration of the temporality of exempla. Evidence of the power of Republican exempla is offered by Cassius Dio’s account of an epochal event in Roman history: Octavian’s settlement of the constitution in 27 BC (the occasion when he took the name ‘Augustus’). Dio presents him making a long speech to the senate in which he hails his own renunciation of autocratic rule as more glorious than all the military conquests that either he himself or his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, achieved, and greater even than his resolution of the civil war against Antony. His speech nonetheless betrays an anxiety that he might be compared unfavourably with old-time Romans who laid down their lives for the good of the state (53.8.3–4):
If Horatius, Mucius, Curtius, Regulus, the Decii consented to face danger and die to gain the reputation of having done a great and noble deed, why should I not desire even more to do something through which I will surpass in glory while alive both those men and all others too? Let none of you think that the Romans of old desired excellence and renown, but that now manliness has become wholly extinct in the state.
Dio here pointedly makes Augustus use a word with a strong historiographical resonance: ‘extinct’ (exitēlon) occurs in Herodotus’ opening promise to preserve the great and admirable deeds performed by Greeks and non-Greeks alike (1 proem). Augustus adapts the Herodotean model by claiming that his own noble deeds militate against a sense of decay. The way he sets about combatting a spirit of defeatism about the present nonetheless confirms that the heroes of Rome exemplified as much an idea of past greatness as the particular qualities for which they were renowned.
It is not just the move from Republic to Principate that explains why the contrast of past and present is so powerful an element in thinking about exemplarity at Rome. Another distinctive feature of Roman exemplarity, as we have seen, is that it was tied closely with the histories of a limited number of families. The potential of these exemplary Roman families to inspire reflection on historical change was in turn brilliantly realized in Cassius Dio’s account of the reign of Nero. Dio reports that Nero forced senators and other high-class Romans to participate in games at Rome as actors and musicians or even as gladiators: ‘People at that time saw the great families – the Furii, the Horatii, the Fabii, the Porcii, the Valerii, all the rest whose trophies and temples were to be seen – standing below them and doing things some of which they would not have seen even being performed by others’ (61.17.4). Dio’s withering account of the sight of exemplary names in action in the arena reverses Polybius’ theoretical focus on the patriotic spectacle of the aristocratic funeral.
The preceding sections have suggested that exempla are not just exposed to the passing of time, but themselves often self-consciously invite reflection on the specific circumstances in which they are re-worked. They are as much subject to as shaped by a concern with historical change. A similar self-consciousness, we shall now see, can be found in relation to the times in which exempla themselves are located.
The status of exemplary heroes can be modified by suggesting that the qualities that made them exemplary are representative of the age in which they lived rather than indicative of virtues that distinguish the heroes themselves. A good example of this move is found in Cicero’s treatment in On Duties of Marcus Atilius Regulus, a Roman consul taken prisoner during the Second Punic War who was sent to Rome supposedly to negotiate peace, but when he got there argued against the peace and returned to die in Carthage rather than break his oath and stay in Rome (3.111):
That he returned now seems amazing to us, but in those times he could not have done otherwise. Therefore that praise belongs not to the man, but to the times; for our ancestors wanted no bond to bind faith more tightly than an oath. This is shown by the laws in the Twelve Tables, by the sacred laws and by the treaties by which our faith is pledged even with an enemy.
Here Cicero draws on surviving legal documents as evidence of the tenor of the times in which they were drawn up, while accentuating the sense of distance from his own present by the language of amazement (admiratione dignum), which is often found in ethnographic treatments of remote peoples.32
While Cicero re-directs praise from the exemplary hero to his times, a stronger form of historical relativism is used to deflate the famous exempla of the past in Lucan’s epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. Lucan concludes a catalogue of the luxuries of Alexandria, Cleopatra’s capital city, by berating the queen’s folly in putting on an elaborate banquet, with fine gold and silver dishes, for Caesar (10.149–54): ‘Even though it were not Caesar, prepared in abominable warfare to seek wealth by the world’s ruin – place here the old-time (priscos) leaders and the names of a poor age, Fabricii and stern Curii; or let that consul, brought dirty from his Etruscan plough, recline here, and he will wish to lead for his country a triumph like this.’ The two men named here were, as we saw earlier, renowned Roman leaders of the first half of the third century BC; they were often paired by Cicero as models of austerity. They are followed by an allusion to a figure from the early years of the Republic, Cincinnatus, who was ploughing his small farm when envoys arrived to summon him back to Rome in a crisis. The thrust of Lucan’s argument is that these exemplary figures were able to maintain their frugality only because they were not exposed to the temptations that Caesar encountered in Egypt.
Lucan’s argument is particularly cutting because both Fabricius and Curius were famous for resisting offers of lavish gifts. Pyrrhus admired Fabricius so much that he attempted to buy his services, while Curius told Samnite envoys who found him roasting turnips that he preferred ruling over people who possessed gold than possessing it himself. Even figures who could resist the wealth offered by Pyrrhus or the Samnites, it is implied, would succumb to the wealth of Cleopatra.
Lucan at the same time hints at a traditional picture of Roman decline by imagining Cincinnatus reclining at Cleopatra’s court. This anachronistic banquet evokes an ideologically charged narrative of Roman dining customs: according to Isidore of Seville (Etymologies 20.11.9), Varro reported that Romans did not eat reclining in the past. Isidore’s citation does not reveal whether Varro gave precise information on when or why the custom of reclining began – though it is likely that the influence of Greek customs was held accountable. The narrative’s ideological charge lies in the claim that Roman women still sat at dinner. The implication is that Roman men policed in women the retention of strict ancient customs they had themselves abandoned.33
The idea that the virtues of an exemplary hero may reflect the character of the times in which that hero lived is found in the satirist Juvenal. In one of his poems Juvenal depicts the misfortunes of the Roman nobility at the hands of tyrannical rulers such as Domitian. Seeing the wealthy condemned to an early death by avaricious emperors, one young noble, Juvenal claims, even became a gladiator in the hope that this career would increase his life expectancy – but his attempted deception proved futile. Juvenal then contrasts his misfortune with the ruse adopted by Lucius Junius Brutus, leader of the Romans’ uprising against their final king, Tarquin the Proud: ‘who marvels at that old-time (priscum) cunning of yours, Brutus? Fooling a bearded king is easy’ (4.102–3). The cunning to which Juvenal alludes is Brutus’ pretended dumbness: having avoided thereby making himself suspect to the ruling family, Brutus revealed his true character after one of the younger Tarquins raped Lucretia. The implication is that Brutus got away with his ruse only because of the naivety of his royal opponents – here symbolized by their beards.
Juvenal’s historicist slant is strengthened by his re-working of Livy’s narrative of Brutus’ conspiracy. The story told by Livy is that Lucretia commits suicide in front of her father and husband after making them promise to take vengeance on her behalf, and that Brutus then takes the lead while the others are overwhelmed by grief. The link with Juvenal comes through the language of the marvellous. Livy relates that Lucretia’s father and husband are ‘dumbfounded at this marvel (miraculo rei): where did this new spirit in Brutus’ breast come from?’; and that the people then gather in the forum, ‘attracted, as happens, by the marvellous new event (miraculo … rei novae)’ (1.59.2–3). For contemporaries, Livy suggests, the miracle lies in the change observable in Brutus. Juvenal’s riposte ‘who marvels (miratur) …?’ suggests that, from the perspective of his present, there is nothing surprising in the fact that Brutus got away with his deception.
The debunking of exemplarity at the hands of Lucan and Juvenal attests to a declamatory culture at Rome which took exempla as rhetorical material for displays of wit. But their reworking of the tropes of exemplarity does not just spring from a desire to seem clever. Serious thought about the operations of historical memory are compatible with (indeed, an essential part of) their cleverness. In the passages analysed above, the implication is that exemplarity is necessarily tinged with anachronism: Lucan suggests that the myth of Roman frugality arises retrospectively from the notion of decline, while Juvenal destabilizes conventional admiration for Rome’s liberator by framing his actions as time-bound. By showing exempla in their time, they suggest that those exempla are out of time now – and so no longer exempla at all.
We may conclude this section by looking at the complex engagement with the historicity of exempla found in a political case from the late Republic: Cicero’s defence speech for his former intern, the young Roman eques (knight) Marcus Caelius, which was delivered in 56 BC in front of seventy-five jurors and a crowded forum. The charges against Caelius (attempted murder and poisoning) related in part to the aristocratic Roman matron Clodia, whose lover he had at one time been. Cicero’s defence of Caelius is based on the insinuation that Clodia is the malicious inspiration for the prosecution. He proceeds to denigrate Clodia and defend Caelius by manipulation of the rhetoric of exemplarity.
Cicero’s engagement with exempla in For Caelius involves self-conscious exploitation of negative and positive gender stereotypes. Early in the speech, he hints at the presence of a ‘Palatine Medea’ controlling the case (18) – as if the barbarous poisoner familiar from Greek and Roman tragedy has relocated to Rome. Later, turning to Clodia, Cicero asks whether she prefers him to deal with her ‘severely, seriously and in an old-fashioned way (prisce), or in a relaxed, gentle and urbane manner’, and suggests that if she prefers the ‘austere way’, he ‘must summon from the dead one of those bearded men, not with the sort of small beard she delights in, but with that rough type we see on old statues and busts’ (33). He then addresses her in the voice of her ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus (an important political figure in Rome in the late fourth and early third centuries BC), who is indignant that Clodia has neglected the distinguished examples set by her male and female forebears.
Cicero places Caecus in his time by identifying him with one prominent physical characteristic, his beard (the feature Juvenal uses to mark out the simplicity of the regal period). By a cynical balancing act, Cicero condemns Clodia through Caecus’ assumed moral outrage while holding up Caecus himself to slight ridicule as an exponent of a rigid moral code that is as outmoded as his appearance.
Cicero then turns to defend Caelius from the implied charge that his associations with Clodia are a sign of degeneracy. He starts by suggesting that any man able to live without occasional relaxation must be endowed with ‘some sort of divine virtues’: ‘Of this sort I think were those Camilli, Fabricii, Curii and all those who made Rome so great from being so small. But virtues of this kind are now not found in our manners, and scarcely even in our books’ (39). Cicero here suggests that the great figures from the early Republic are no longer meaningful exempla, and perhaps even that the growth of Roman power that their virtues enabled renders those same virtues impossible. While Clodia is condemned for a luxuriousness that removes her from the revered simple past, Caelius is permitted to inhabit a different social regime from his ancestors without losing contact with their virtues.
The self-consciousness of Cicero’s historicizing of exemplarity is further shown by his distinction between theory and practice. The theory of exemplarity, Cicero suggests, is derived from books – and Greek books at that. And the reason the virtues of old-time austerity and poverty are no longer to be found in books is that Greek philosophy itself has changed: ‘precepts of another kind have arisen now that times have changed for Greece’ (40). The paradox is that the change in Greece to which Cicero alludes is its conquest by Rome. With some rhetorical bravura, Cicero allows a relativizing view of Greek moral philosophy to undercut further the moral virtues that supposedly ensured Rome supremacy over Greece. He hints that those austere Roman virtues are the creation of a theoretical framework derived from a subject people who no longer support that moral code themselves. It is but a short step from this assault on the Greek experts in exemplary theory to the final blow Cicero strikes against the timeless virtues of the Romans of old – the claim that dalliances with courtesans were not just the sort of behaviour tolerated in the permissive present but accepted among the ancestors too (48). So much for the quasi-divine Fabricii and Curii.
Cicero’s masterly exploitation of the temporal domain of exempla in his speech for Caelius gains further resonance when read alongside surviving representations of one of the speeches actually made by Appius Claudius Caecus, the bearded hero whom Cicero summons up to berate his descendant Clodia. Cicero makes Caecus proudly allude to a speech he made appealing against peace with Pyrrhus – a speech that received its canonical form in the Annales by the second-century BC poet Ennius. A section of the Ennian version of the speech (199–200 Skutsch) is quoted in Cicero’s treatise On Old Age, in a passage where the elder Cato holds Appius up as an example of the possibility of an old man pursuing a political life (16): ‘when opinion in the senate was inclining towards peace and a treaty with Pyrrhus, Appius did not hesitate to say what Ennius put into verse: “Where have your minds, that previously used to stand upright, turned aside in madness?”’ When we read this Ennian version alongside the rhetorical fireworks of Cicero’s invective against Clodia, we can see that the decline that the Appius of For Caelius sees between his own time and Clodia’s was already present in Appius’ own day. Even then Appius was in danger of seeming an anachronism.
Cicero’s misogynistic play with exemplary models in For Caelius confirms the picture we have seen throughout this chapter. The Greek and Roman devotion to paradigms and exempla did not presuppose a static or unchanging view of the ethical landscape. From the start, exempla were deployed flexibly and with sensitivity to the way in which past and present mutually define each other. Far from being a sign of temporal flattening or inert taxonomic thinking, Greek and Roman tropes of exemplarity were guided by a perception of contrast between past and present and by apprehensions of further change in the future. They were constantly re-moulded by self-conscious reflection about rhetorical principles and by the perpetual striving for innovation.
What of the opposition between exemplarity and historicism with which we began? One of the core features of historicism is generally thought to be an adhesion to the particular: Gelley, as we have seen, suggests that history in the post-classical sense ‘situates particular events in a totalizing schema’, while in a major study Frederick Beiser writes of the historicist’s belief that ‘the essence, identity or nature of everything in the human world is made by history, so that it is entirely the product of the particular historical processes that brought it into being’.34 Our analysis has shown that the ancient model of exemplarity, too, drew its power from the fact that it was rooted in the particular. It involved a careful scrutiny of points of difference and similarity between discrete historical events. This dialectical approach was fully compatible with a sense of anachronism: exempla could become out of date owing to their distance in the past or as a result of new political constellations. The particularity of the exemplary viewpoint also lent itself to relativizing or historicizing approaches; the virtues of exemplary figures could be seen as shaped not so much by their distinct choices as ethical agents as by the character of the age in which they lived, and the character of their times could be understood through models of historical development (above all, the move from simplicity to complexity discussed in Chapter 5). By contrast with modern historicisms, however, ancient exemplarity did embrace the possibility of renewal. Old exempla could become salient again with new twists in the order of things, sometimes at the very moment they were dismissed as antiquated. Rooted in the needs of the present, constantly re-shaping the past, projected towards the future, they provide eloquent evidence for an ancient sense of multitemporality whose contours will emerge in our next chapter.