Petronius as Massa?: Reading Virgil in Petronius' Satyricon
Susan Gorman, CTCWeb
Virgil and Empire
The Aeneid had a major influence on both the literary and imperial landscape of the Julio-Claudian Roman Empire. Virgil’s masterpiece provided a new version of history for the empire. The epic follows the journey of Aeneas from the burning wreckage of Troy through his troubled journey to find a place to establish a new homeland. Aeneas is a fascinating hero, constantly battling furor in his attempt to be a Stoic hero and establish a lasting city. Augustus required a new history in order to help legitimate his empire building; he finds it in Virgil who tears apart, reorganizes, invents and smudges existing history. He was able to create an acceptable genealogy for the new rule and its rulers that was able to present the new empire as inevitable and therefore more easily allowed by his audience.
Linking Augustus and Caesar to Venus and the Trojan War through the figure of Aeneas was part of Virgil’s project in his epic. Virgil was able to create in his work an acceptable genealogy for the new rule and its rulers and he links them to both a powerful governmental and artistic heritage. Therefore he was able to present the new empire as inevitable and therefore more easily allowed by his audience. By taking control of the past through its literature and thereby emitting its messages through culture and the written word, literature of the early Roman Empire created in its Roman readers passive subjects of empire. Thomas Habinek includes an interesting discussion concerning how Latin literature conditioned its subjects to accept this new subject position. He claims that access to written literature, since its circulation was so strictly controlled, required the authorizing presence of a performer to recite the text. The general audience’s reception of a literary work, therefore, needed a mediator to help them understand it and to a certain extent interpret that text for them. This dependence on the authoritarian figure of the performer therefore created a passive literary audience who gave up their own free interpretive will. Habinek claims that this process “helped to reconstitute the potentially free reader of the widely circulated literary text as a subject subject of an imperial regime.” When this audience was allowed access to the texts, they were still reliant upon an authorized interpretive presence. This situation, therefore, of waiting for another to interpret situations extended to their acceptance of the imperial government. Imperial ideology as it was contained in Latin literature was able to condition the subjectivities of its Roman readers in order to render them more quiescent and able to absorb the legitimacy of the empire.
The Aeneid is a prime example, as Habinek demonstrates, of how, if the Roman audience accepted Virgil’s influence, a subjectivity that would embrace empire would issue forth more easily. The genre itself through its characteristics of establishing distance, and drawing upon a national past accomplishes the work that empire needs completed so that it can constitute its own legitimacy. Importantly, the epic genre becomes equated with the winners of the struggle of imperialism - with the empire itself, according to David Quint in Epic and Empire.
