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AWAKENING (C)

WHAT IS THIS “awakening” (egerthēnai) that describes the process by which the past and present are concentrated in “the now time”? I propose to investigate the process that Paul images as “awakening” by excavating, first of all, the antecedent stage of consciousness that Paul’s description invokes: namely, sleep (hupnos). While moral lethargy and even corruption and depravity are frequently represented as sleep in ancient literature,¹ there is a palpable density and gloominess about such images in the literature of the first century C.E.² In Seneca’s Hercules Furens,³ the characters move through “the desolation of everlasting night, and something worse than night.”⁴ “Sluggish Sleep” clings to the black, bedraggled foliage of the overhanging trees.⁵ “The air hangs motionless, and black night broods over a torpid world.”⁶ Seneca pictures “the great throng which moves through the city streets, . . . some slow with age, gloomy and sated with long life; others of happier years, still able to run, maidens and youths,”⁷ but all are “longing for sleep.”⁸ “All around is turbid emptiness, unlovely darkness, the sullen color of night, the lethargy of a silent world, and empty clouds.”⁹

The “sleep” by which Seneca images the condition of his contemporaries is described as the “languid brother of hardhearted Death,”10 from whom fearful humans “gain knowledge of the long night” that is to come.¹¹ Death inhabits the rhythms of everyday life: dawn and birdsong awaken “hard toil, bestir every care”; crowds in the cities are “conscious of fleeting time,” and seek to “hold fast the moments that will never return”;¹² among the throngs moving through the streets, “each has a sorrowful sense of being buried beneath the earth.”¹³ A similar picture of life as a procession toward death appears in Seneca’s Oedipus: “Each hour a new group files on toward Death, a long, sad column hastening in sequence to the shades; but the gloomy procession jams, and for the throng that seeks burial, the seven gates spread not wide enough. The grievous wrack of carnage halts, and funeral crowds funeral in unbroken line.”¹⁴ Seneca’s comparisons of the crowds of the dead to the throngs of the living are instances of a phenomenon noted in several recent studies of Silver Age literature: the number of characters who seem to be dead before actually dying.¹⁵ In this connection, we may observe that the infinitive egerthēnai that Paul employs in Romans 13:11 to describe the coming awakening (“to be roused, awakened”) is used elsewhere in the New Testament in speaking of the resurrection of the dead.¹⁶

If we now wish to diagnose the causes, both proximate and ultimate, of this tendency in the literature of the early Empire to represent consciousness as sinking ever deeper into sleep, we do not have far to look, since Seneca provides glimpses of the underlying social and political realities, and since Paul himself names the dissipative behaviors by which the trance-like state was maintained among his contemporaries. When these literary allusions are correlated with the evidence that archaeology provides, a picture emerges of the violent and dehumanizing forces by which sovereign power was constituted and reconstituted in the early Empire. From these forces, flight into unconsciousness was the natural response.

In Seneca’s account of life in the cities, “overweening hopes stalk abroad, and trembling fears.”17 As examples, Seneca adduces the anxious client who “haunts the haughty vestibules and the unfeeling doors of his rich patrons,”¹⁸ and the demagogue who is “dazed” by “popular acclaim” and “hoisted up by the mob, more shifting than sea-waves.”¹⁹ These and their like are “driven by the uncertainty of their fates to seek the Stygian waves of their own accord.”²⁰ Seneca’s gaze does not descend to the urban poor, whose living conditions had deteriorated sharply, owing to the rapid growth of Rome’s population, the inconstancy of the food supply, the lack of proper sanitation and effective medicine, and the routine nature of violence.²¹ Excavations outside the Esquiline Gate of Rome in the late nineteenth century revealed a mass grave that had been filled with twenty-four thousand corpses sometime in the late Republic, the dehumanizing end for thousands who had endured hard lives.²² Nor does Seneca contemplate the fate of slaves, whose numbers had grown substantially, and who might be beaten and killed at their masters’ discretion.²³ Along the road to Tibur, archeologists discovered a stone billboard advertising a torture and execution service operated by a group of funeral contractors who were open to business from private citizens and public authorities alike; there, slaves were flogged and crucified at a charge to their masters of four sesterces per person.²⁴

Poverty and violence were proximate forces. The ultimate source of the “sleep” that descended over the early Empire was the new structure of power that emerged with Augustus and his successors.²⁵ The consolidation of power in the person of the emperor created degrees of dependent subjecthood, variously represented in the literature of the period as slavishness, unconsciousness, and living-death.26 Seneca was all too aware of the transgressive pride that had plunged his world into a trance-like state. Seneca’s Hercules wishes “to seize the highest realms . . . and snatch the scepter from his father”;²⁷ he “seeks a path to heaven through ruin” and “desires to rule in an empty universe.”²⁸ It is difficult not to see the bleak world depicted in Seneca’s Hercules as anything other than a reflection of the macabre reign of Caligula,²⁹ who, according to Philo, “overstepped the bounds of human nature in his eagerness to be thought a god.”³⁰ Caligula’s megalomania and his unrestrained cruelty toward persons of all stations are vividly recounted by Suetonius.³¹ To mention only one incident recorded by Cassius Dio, “once, when there was a shortage of condemned criminals to be given to the wild beasts, he [Caligula] ordered that a section of the crowd be seized and thrown to them instead; and to prevent the possibility of their making an outcry or uttering any reproaches, he first caused their tongues to be cut out.”³²

It would be a mistake to regard such incidents as manifestations of the personal depravity and insanity of a Caligula. The phenomenon was structural: terror was the means by which sole sovereignty was constituted and reconstituted in the Roman Empire.³³ In his Res gestae, Augustus boasts of having given gladiatorial games in which ten thousand men did battle to the death, and of having sent back thirty thousand runaway slaves to their masters for punishment;³⁴ Cassius Dio adds that those for whom no masters could be found were publicly impaled.³⁵ Suetonius’s account of Claudius’s cruelty is hardly less chilling than his report of Caligula: “At any gladiatorial show, either his own or another’s, he [Claudius] gave orders that even those who fell accidentally should be slain, in particular the net-fighters [the retiarii, whose faces were not covered by helmets], so that he could watch their faces as they died.”36 Nor were such public dramatizations of the emperor’s power restricted to Rome. In provincial cities such as Corinth, with its large amphitheater,³⁷ gladiatorial shows were closely associated with emperor worship.³⁸

Consciousness sought refuge in spectacle entertainments.³⁹ The somnambulant throng moving through the city streets in Seneca’s Hercules is “eager to see the spectacle in some new theater.”⁴⁰ Tacitus complains: “There are special vices peculiar to this city which children seem to absorb, almost in the mother’s womb: a partiality for the theater, and a passion for horse-racing, and gladiatorial shows.”⁴¹ In one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca confronts the “compulsion” of his contemporaries “to watch the sufferings” of condemned criminals in the arena at Rome.⁴² More than a hundred years after Seneca, Tertullian offered an explanation of the psychic lure of the gladiatorial shows: “They [the spectators] found comfort for death in murder.”⁴³ But sometimes the mechanism failed to excite and distract. Seneca wrote to Lucilius that he went away from the staged execution of criminals feeling “more cruel and inhuman.”⁴⁴ Ordinary spectators were sucked into the violence. Seneca reports the shouts of the spectators seated around him: “‘Kill him!’ they shout, ‘Lash him! burn him!’ ‘Why does he meet the sword in so cowardly a way?’ ‘Why is he so frightened to kill?’ ‘Why so reluctant to die’ ‘Whip him to make him accept his wounds!’”⁴⁵ Sometimes the spectators turned the violence against one another, as one can see on the monument of Storax (figure 1), where a murderous brawl has broken out between ordinary people attending the munera,⁴⁶ and even more vividly on the large fresco that decorated the peristyle of a small house in Pompeii (figure 2), which depicts a full-scale riot that occurred in the amphitheater in 59 C.E.47 Paradoxically, the spectacles to which people fled for amusement served to alienate human sociality from itself, reinforcing imperial sovereignty over all of life.

In Romans 13:13, Paul describes the dissipative behaviors by which sleep secured its hold over the multitude of his contemporaries: “revelries and drinking bouts, sexual excesses and debaucheries, quarreling and jealousy” (kōmoi kai methai, koitai kai aselgeiai, eris kai zēlos).⁴⁸ Noting the association of these activities with Roman dinner parties, recent interpreters take this verse as a warning against nocturnal behaviors that might trouble the Christian love-feast.⁴⁹ But in my view, a more relevant context is supplied by a painted frieze in the little Caupona of Salvius at Pompeii, which depicts four scenes of tavern life: two men being offered wine by a waitress, a woman and a man kissing, two men arguing over dice, and two men fighting.⁵⁰ Captions above the characters and clues encoded in the images themselves make it possible to infer the messages that these scenes would have communicated to the nonelite viewers for whom they were painted.⁵¹ Two men, already intoxicated, compete for the wine that the barmaid carries, eagerly stretching out their hands (figure 3): the first man exclaims “Here!” (hoc), while his companion counters “No! It’s mine!” (non mia est).⁵² The image of the woman and the man kissing emphasizes the couple’s eagerness for sexual contact, by the way in which their bodies are pressed together (figure 4); the man announces his licentious intent in the caption placed above his head: “I don’t want to . . . with Myrtalis” (nolo cum Myrtale . . .), that is, he is done with Myrtalis and wishes to initiate a new sexual relationship with the woman he is kissing.⁵³ In the third scene, two men argue over gambling (figure 5): the man holding the dice-cup exclaims, “I won!” (exsi); the other insists, “It’s not three; it’s two” (non tria duas est). The disagreement turns violent on the final panel (figure 6), where the gamblers, now standing, come to blows. The men exchange insults: the first yells, “You nobody. It was three for me. I was the winner!” (noxsi a me tria eco fui); the other retorts, “Look here, cocksucker, I was the winner!” (orte fellator eco fui). The innkeeper intervenes: “Go outside and fight it out” (itis foras rixsatis).⁵⁴ The three behaviors (drunkenness, licentiousness, fighting) that Paul denotes by effective use of the trope of hendiadys⁵⁵ are vividly illustrated on the walls of the Caupona of Salvius; but while the tavern artist aimed to amuse,⁵⁶ Paul exposes, in melancholy earnest, “the works of darkness” (ta erga tou skotous) that must be “cast off,” like entangling bed-coverings,⁵⁷ if his contemporaries are to awaken from sleep (Rom. 13:12).

To summarize, we return to Seneca’s Hercules Furens, which has served so well as a cipher of sovereignty. After slaughtering his wife and children in an impious frenzy, Hercules falls asleep: “His eyelids fall in slumber, and his tired neck sinks beneath his drooping head; now his knees give way and his whole body goes crashing to the ground. . . . He sleeps; his chest heaves with measured breathing.”⁵⁸ Amphitryon prays, “Let him have time for rest, that deep slumber may break the force of his madness and relieve his troubled heart.”⁵⁹ And the chorus addresses a prayer to Sleep, with a voice that might have risen from the multitudes who endured the madness and crime of Caligula or Nero:⁶⁰ “And you, O Sleep, vanquisher of woes, rest of the soul, the better part of human life, . . . sluggish brother of cruel Death, . . . you who are peace after wanderings, haven of life, . . . who come alike to king and slave, hold him fast bound in heavy stupor; let slumber chain his unconquered limbs, and leave not his savage breast, until his former mind regains its course.”61 Yet, even as Hercules sleeps on the ground, “violent dreams are whirling in his fierce heart.”⁶² A “sleeping Hercules” is the emblem of the world that Paul and Seneca knew.

FIGURE 1

Detail of spectators fighting. Monument of Storax, pediment, left part

FIGURE 2

Riot in the amphitheater. House I, Pompeii, peristyle, northwest wall, 3, 23

FIGURE 3

Two male drinkers and a waitress. Caupona of Salvius, Pompeii

FIGURE 4

A woman and a man, kissing. Caupona of Salvius, Pompeii

FIGURE 5

Two men arguing over dice. Caupona of Salvius, Pompeii

FIGURE 6

Two men fighting. Caupona of Salvius, Pompeii