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On getting rid of kings: Horace, Satire 1.7

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

John Henderson
John Henderson
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

This satire has often been accounted a poor poem, repetitive, irrelevant and self-indulgent. Rather than recover one more cultured display of refinement as disguise, this essay explores instead the fall-out that radiates from a classic text's play with the ‘loose talk’ of plebeian gossip. The proposal here is that Horace and his intimates could, and can, easily share a view of the view of ‘their’ populace, but at the price of surrendering control over the import of their intervention. This claim turns on the figure ‘Brutus’, which noises a republican politics of resistance to tyranny through what linguists term nonphonation: as we shall find, Horace both tells a dummy tale about ‘przemilczenie’ (῾not speaking about something, ‘failing to mention something’) and at the same time performs a dumbshow of his own.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 146 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1994

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References

1 News clip quoted by Spacks, P. M., Gossip (Chicago, 1986), p. xiGoogle Scholar. ‘Gossip gets its power by the illusion of mastery gained through taking imaginative possession of another's experience. People use this pseudo-mastery for their own purposes.…Unlike joking…gossip involves unconcealed threat.’ (Ib. pp. 22f., 51). I would like to thank, among others’, CQ's brutologists for their efforts.

2 Jaworski, A., The Power of Silence. Social and Pragmatic Perspectives (London, 1992), pp. 108ffGoogle Scholar. Cf. ib. p. 47, quoting W. Enninger: ‘nonphonations…are speech segments of high uncertainty’. On political silence, cf. Brummet, B., ‘Towards a Theory of Silence as a Political Strategy’, The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980), 289–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and essays in Tannen, D. and Saville-Troike, M. (edd.), Perspectives on Silence (New Jersey, 1985).Google Scholar

3 The normative force that governs ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ are explored in J. Derrida's essay in Budick, S. and Iser, W. (edd.), Languages of the Unsayable. The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York, 1989), pp. 3–70, esp. p. 15Google Scholar, on ‘Comment ne pas dire…?’

4 ‘i.e. the set of ways that the meanings of texts are keyed in to structures of meanings outside them in such a way as to command or disclaim belief’, Hodge, R., Literature as Discourse (Cambridge, 1990), p. x.Google Scholar

5 The Bucharest shout of December 1989. Which echoes on, e.g. in Simpson, J., From the House of War (London, 1991) excerpted in The Observer Review for 27.7.91, p. 42Google Scholar, ‘Saddam…produced a picture of the executed Nicolae Ceausescu at a meeting of the Revolution Command Council to show his closest colleagues that what had happened in Romania could happen in Iraq as well.’ A World War calls for this exemplary mythologic of replicative dénouement, which historians cannot get rid of by assertion and foot-note relegation, but must only promulgate despite themselves: ‘Chapter Seven. The Death of Hitler. §When von Bulow left the bunker, Hitler was already preparing for the end. During the day the last news from the outside world had been brought in. Mussolini was dead. Hitler's partner in crime, the herald of Fascism, who had first shown to Hitler the possibilities of dictatorship in modern Europe,…had now illustrated in a signal manner the fate which fallen tyrants must expect.… If the full details were ever known to them, Hitler and Eva Braun could only have repeated the orders they had already given: their bodies were to be destroyed “so that nothing remains”; “I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle to divert his hysterical masses”. In fact it is improbable that these details were reported….* [*It has often been stated, by those whose imagination is stronger than their memory, that Hitler's decision was affected by the fate of Mussolini.…The Sunday Express, August 25th, 1946, even quotes Goering as saying: ‘You remember the Mussolini incident? We had pictures of Mussolini dead in the gutter with his mistress, and hanging in the air upside-down. They were awful! Hitler went into a frenzy, shouting: “This will never happen to me!”’ A glance at the dates disposes of this romance' (Trevor-Roper, H. R., The Last Days of Hitler (London, 1962), p. 226 and n. 1Google Scholar). Cf. Shirer, W. L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London, 1960), p. 1343Google Scholar, ‘Mussolini, Hitler's fellow fascist dictator and partner in aggression, had met his end and it had been shared by his mistress.…It is not known how many of the details of the Duce's shabby end were communicated to the Fuehrer. One can only speculate that if he heard many of them –’, Bullock, A., Hitler, A Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 798Google Scholar, ‘The Duce, too, had shared his fate with his mistress.…If Hitler made any comment on the end of his brother dictator it is unrecorded; but the news can only have…’. Evidently narration does not mean to get rid of this climactic moment of ultio/‘Brutus’, far from it.

6 Access to the scholarship may be found through these, the most important recent contributions, which I shall refer to by author's surname only: Fraenkel, E., Horace (Oxford, 1957), pp. 118–21Google Scholar, Rudd, N., The Satires of Horace (Bristol, 1982), pp. 64–7Google Scholar, Van Rooy, C. A., ‘Arrangement and Structure of Satires in Horace, Sermones, Book I: Satire 7 as related to Satires 10 and 8’, AClass 14 (1971), 67–90Google Scholar, Kraggerud, E., ‘Die Satire 1.7 des Horaz’, SO 54 (1979), 91–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Le, I. M.DuQuesnay, M., ‘Horace and Maecenas: The Propaganda Value of Sermones I’, in Woodman, T. and West, D. (edd.), Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 36–8Google Scholar, Connor, P., Horace's Lyric Poetry: The Force of Humour (Ramus Monograph 2 / Victoria, 1987), pp. 105ffGoogle Scholar. I shall use Rudd's, N.tour de force Penguin translation throughout (Harmondsworth, 1973).Google Scholar

7 See esp. Wendland, P., ‘Symbolische Handlungen als Ersatz oder Begleitung der Rede’, NJb (1916), pp. 233f.Google Scholar

8 See Jed, S., ‘The Scene of Tyranny: Violence and the Humanistic Tradition’, in Armstrong, N. and Tennenhouse, L. (edd.), The Violence of Representation (London, 1989), pp. 29ffGoogle Scholar. Discussion in this area centres on the work of Foucault (esp. ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Young, R. (ed.), Untying the Text (London, 1981), pp. 51ffGoogle Scholar.) and of Gramsci (Crowley, T., ‘Language and Hegemony: Principles, Morals and Pronunciation’, Textual Practice 1.3 (1987), pp. 278ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.; cf. Frow, J., ‘Discourse and Power’, in Gane, M.(ed.), Ideological Representation and Power in Social Relations (London, 1989), pp. 198ffGoogle Scholar.).

9 See Tannen, D., Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge, 1989), p. 44Google Scholar, citing Becker, ‘much of “apparently free conversation is a replay of remembered texts—from TV news, radio talk, the New York Times”…’.

10 Cf. Dunkle, J., ‘The Greek Tyrant and Roman Political Invective in the Late Republic’, TAPhA 98 (1967), pp. 151ff.Google Scholar

11 Cf. Clavel-Lévèque, M., L'Empire en Jeux (Paris, 1984), p. 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, de Rose Evans, J., The Art of Persuasion. Political Propaganda from Aeneas to Brutus (Michigan, 1992), pp. 145ffGoogle Scholar. Clarke, M. L., The Noblest Roman. Marcus Brutus and his Reputation (London, 1981), p. 140Google Scholar n. 40 warns that the scrapping of Brutus may be ‘simply a joke’ remark from Cicero (So not a simple joke). For ‘Brutus’ in the late 40's B.c.e., cf. esp. Cic. Epp. ad Brut. 1.15.6, consilia inire coepi Brutina plane (uestri enim haec sunt propria sanguinis) reipublicae liberandae, Dio 44.12, Boes, J., ‘A propos du De Divinatione, Ironie de Cicéron sur le Nomen et l'omen de Brutus’, REL 59 (1981), 164–76.Google Scholar

12 Cf. Stewart, S., ‘Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics’, in Morson, G. S. (ed.), Bakhtin. Essays and Dialogues on his Work (Chicago, 1986), p. 46Google Scholar, ‘Bakhtin is the master of what we might call “unhappiness conditions”.… Utterances are always preceded by alien utterances which face them in the form of an addressee or social Other and which surround them with an always significant silence.… Linguistic theory…must be grateful to Bakhtin for articulating the powerful force of the silenced in language use.’

13 Even a snuff-Tereus' Philomela can get rid of a king. That is what she means, her message. Her silenced charade never stops beaming this message from victims to their oppressors, at all Caesars. Philomela makes tongues wag, then knives, cf. Richlin, A., ‘Reading Ovid's Rapes’, in Richlin, A. (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford, 1992), pp. 162–5.Google Scholar

14 Cf. Vernant, J.-P., ‘From Oedipus to Periander: Lameness, Tyranny, Incest in Legend and History’, Arethusa 15 (1982), pp. 19ffGoogle Scholar., Sebeok, T. A. and Brady, E., ‘The Two Sons of Croesus: A Myth about Communication’, QUCC 30 (1979), pp. 18f.Google Scholar

15 Two instances—besides the canonical tale of Regifugium as in Ov. Fast. 2.685–852, with Brutus…stulti sapiens imitator (‘wise mock-fool’), v. 717 (cf. / Brutus…ut esset / tutus; and turba…Superbe…pronus…offenso procubuisse pede, vv. 716–20), Brutus adest.…animo sua nomina fallit (‘Brutus' big moment: belies his name with brute courage’), v. 837 (cf. edidit impauidos ore minante sonos; uirtus dissimulata; Brutus clamore, vv. 840–49, with Feeney, D. C., ‘Si licet et fas est: Ovid's Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the Principate’, in Powell, A. (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Bristol, 1992), p. 11)Google Scholar—:(1) Cicero motivates his discussion of the timeliness of death, the Tusculans, by the dedication to Brutus, as from the scion of Servius Tullius to that of the liberator(s) (Brutus and Ahala) (1.38, 88; cf. Brut. 331ff., where the text fades away in eloquent expectancy). (2) Ovid inaugurates (retitles?) his Epistulae ex Ponto, where the structure of address is on show (after the anonymity of Tristia) as the ‘failed tyrannicide’ Naso at length names names, by devoting 1.1 to one ‘Brutus’, so that he can write para-Ciceronian Epistulae ad Brutum (1.1, 3.9, 4.6 all explore the overt/covert force of Brutus, coming closest to remarking its ‘stupidity’ at 4.6.28–38). The anti-endoxal scattering of the puncept is explained by Ulmer, G., ‘The Puncept in Grammatology’, in Culler, J. (ed.), On Puns. The Foundation of Letters (Oxford, 1988), pp. 164ffGoogle Scholar.

16 Cf. Gordon, D. J., ‘Giannotti, Michelangelo and the Cult of Brutus’, in Orgel, S. (ed.), The Renaissance Imagination (Berkeley, 1975), 233–45Google Scholar, Clarke, op. cit., p. 90 and ch. 2, ‘The Reputation of a Tyrannicide’.

17 Is Rupilius mock-dignified with a para-epic circumlocution? Are Rupilius and Persius opposed in a telling formula of ‘othering epithet (/ Proscripti:/ hybrida) + proper name +defiling attribution of nastiness’ (pus atque uenenum: ultus [Cf. ulcus?])? IS this set off by chiastic abutting of p. atque u. / with / hybrida (Van Rooy, p. 74)?

18 Dylan, B., ‘Idiot Wind’, on Blood on the Tracks (1974).Google Scholar

19 ‘La raie de monfondement à été publique, donc je suis la République’ (‘The crack in my arse has been made public, and therefore I am the Republic’), as one patient later put it (Redfern, W., Runs [Oxford, 1984], p. 116).Google Scholar

20 Cf. Radermacher, L., ‘Horaz Satire 1, 7’, in Korzeniewski, D. (ed.), Die römische Satire (Darmstadt, 1970), p. 277.Google Scholar

21 Armstrong, D., ‘Horatius Eques et Scriba: Satires 1.6 and 2.7’, TAPhA 116 (1986), pp. 271fGoogle Scholar., comparing Tillius in Sat. 1.6.24ff.

22 Cf. Lecercle, J.-J., The Violence of Language (London, 1990), esp. pp. 242f.Google Scholar

23 See Henderson, J., ‘Be Alert (Your Country Needs Lerts): Horace, Satire 1.9’, in PCPhS 39 (1993), 67–93.Google Scholar

24 Siebers, T., The Mirror of Medusa (California, 1983), esp. pp. 2IffGoogle Scholar. powerfully arrays a (Girardian) world of accusation, ‘representations of difference’ seen as ‘the origin of representation’ which ‘seeks to conceal the violence of its origin’. I return to this briefly below.

25 Just as Horace and we manage to disown the humiliating power-play, the rapist violence of verbal ‘flashing’ that our priapric stand-in turns on 1.8's pair of ‘witches’, the ‘nuclear waste’ of the discursive stock-pile of a traditional society. (Cf. Henderson, J., ‘Satire Writes Woman: Gendersong’, PCPhS 215 [1989], pp. 57–63Google Scholar on the [violent] humanism modelled in 1.8 and Satires I as a whole.)

24 See White, A., ‘“The Dismall Sacred Word.” Academic Language and the Social Reproduction of Seriousness’, Literature, Teaching, Politics 2 (1983), pp. 4ffGoogle Scholar. So Ahl, F. M., ‘Ars Est Caelare Artem (Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved)’, in Culler, op. cit., p. 32Google Scholar, ‘Seriousness has become, as it were, the default drive of the Western mind’. For Satire's view of intent, cf. Swift, J., A Tale of A Tub (Oxford, 1958), p. 179Google Scholar, ‘“Heark in your Ear…”* (with the footnote:) ‘*I cannot tell what the Author means here, or how this chasm could be fill'd.’

27 Cf. Gowers, E. J., The Loaded Table. Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford, 1993), pp. 281–310Google Scholar, for the ‘love-hate relationship’ of (this) ‘Garlic Breath’.

28 Academic readings look their worst when they deal with writers who signal the cancellation of their writings' ‘seriousness’, see Almansi, G., The Writer as Liar. Narrative Technique in the Decameron (London, 1975), esp. ch. 1.Google Scholar

29 Cf. Wills, C., ‘Upsetting the Public: Carnival, Hysteria and Women's Texts’, in Hirschkop, K. and Shepherd, D. (edd.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester, 1989), pp. 130fGoogle Scholar., White, A., ‘Hysteria and the End of Carnival: Festivity and Bourgeois Neurosis’, in Armstrong and Tennenhouse, op. cit., pp. 157ffGoogle Scholar., on the civilised internalizing and inhibition of the festal repertoire as our pollutant/purgation.

30 The trimmed 1.2 and 1.8 palmered off in old editions stage violence committed on slang, forcible repression of obscene language. The convention of ‘obscenity’ once had its civilising way as the recognition, sanctification, of ‘obscene language’, masking what now it marks as the singular importance of veiling the hard-core of gender-discrimination in the economy of traditional culture. Both poems become through cutting, if c**t-less and f**t-less, nonetheless blatantly point-less. And that no longer becomes the Bard, the Classic-to-be, our ‘Horace’.

31 Ridd, pp. 66f., ‘Having paid for a ringside seat we feel like demanding our money back.’

32 Coffey, M., Roman Satire (London, 1976), p. 78Google Scholar: ‘not’ to be ‘uncharitable’, is his saving formula, the formula that would save him from his uncharity, if…

33 It is anticipated at v. 6, qui posset uincere regem/Regem (‘who had the beating of (a) king/King’), Van Rooy, p. 74 n. 24, cf. w. 29f., re-gerit conuicia…uindemiator…inuictus. For the currency of the pun in the late 40's B.c.e., cf. Cic. Ad Att. 1.16.10, Quousque, inquit, hunc [Marcium] regem/Regem feremus?, Matthews, V. J., ‘Some Puns on Roman Cognomina’, G&R 20 (1973), p. 23.Google Scholar

34 John Penwill reminds me to connect Persius' name with Herodotean flashbacks to Homer's Trojan War.

35 Along with the episode it climaxes, cf. Maftei, M., Antike Diskussionen über die Episode von Glaukos und Diomedes im VI. Buch der Ilias (Meisenheim am Glan, 1976), esp. pp. 52ff.Google Scholar

36 Cf. Benardete, S., ‘The Aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad’, Agon 2 (1968), esp. p. 29.Google Scholar

37 Lynn-George, M., Epos: Word, Narrative and the Iliad (London, 1988), p. 200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Lloyd-Jones, H. and Parsons, P., Supplementum Hellenisticum (Oxford, 1982), p. 120Google Scholar on Callimachus (?) 276.2, Heroa Lycium Lycio glossemate obiurgat; Otto, A., Die Sprichwörter der Römer (Hildesheim, 1971), p. 82Google Scholar, s.v. chrysius.

39 duo, discordia, disparibus, Diomedi, discedat, vv. 15–7, cf. diuideret, v. 13, vs. cum, confidens, cum, compositum, cum, conuentu, cohortem, comites, compellans, consueris, vv. 5–34.

40 Cf. Scodel, R., ‘Horace, Lucilius, and Callimachean Polemic’, HSCPh 91 (1987), pp. 199ff.Google Scholar

41 Cf. Marin, L., Le Récit est un Piège (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar, Palmeri, F., Satire in Narrative. Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon (Texas, 1990), esp. pp. 1–10Google Scholar, on ‘open-ended dialogicality’.

42 Anderson, W. S., Essays on Roman Satire (Princeton, 1982), p. 80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Van Rooy, p. 81. Insistence on ‘the fact of the matter’ betrays strain: this pun would matter to any Van Rooy from any Pretoria.

44 Goffman, E., ‘The Neglected Situation’, in Giglioli, P. P. (ed.), Language and Social Context (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 65Google Scholar, ‘The act of speaking must always be referred to the state of talk that is sustained through the particular turn at talking…and…this state of talk involves a circle of others ratified as co-participants’; cf. essays in Drew, P. and Wootton, A. (edd.), Erving Goffman. Exploring the Interaction Order (Cambridge, 1988).Google Scholar

45 Cf. Culler, J., ‘The Call of the Phoneme: Introduction’, in Culler, op. cit., p. 4Google Scholar, ‘The pun is the foundation of letters, in that the exploitation of formal resemblance to establish connections of meaning seems the basic activity of literature; but this foundation is a foundation of letters only, a foundation of marks whose significance depends on relations, whose own significative status is a function of practices of reading, forms of attention, and social convention’.

46 [Saleem, worried about getting the date of Gandhi's death wrong forever, in] Rushdie, S., Midnight's Children (London, 1981), p. 166.Google Scholar

47 Rudd, p. 65.

48 DuQuesnay, pp. 37f.

49 Ibid. p. 36; Rudd, p. 65.

50 Ibid.

51 Kraggerid, pp. 104f.

52 Ibid. pp. 92f.; DuQuesnay, p. 36.

53 Kraggerud, p. 95.

54 DuQuesnay, p. 37, punning on Persius' iugulas (‘Have you a dagger for the throat’), v. 35, to cover the text seamlessly with its interpretation.

55 By contrast, Rupilius' first effort is eclipsed by silence: its report even yields speech to the internal opponent, the ‘passer-by’ who before yielding to the ‘vine-dresser’, ‘shouts’ at him (vv. 30f.).

56 Tannen, op. cit., p. 99. The poem is an echo-text à la cu-culus (‘cuckoo’), cf. / conuentu…cohortem /; comites, conuentu…uenisse; inuis(um) agricolis sidus; inuis(um)…uenisse, vv. 23–6.

57 Ibid., pp. 25ff.

58 The passer-by could be a shadow for Persius, if Persius were just passing through Brutus’ camp, some trade-route bound, innocently stumbling upon Roman Civil War.

59 See Oliensis, E., ‘Canidia, Canicula, and the Decorum of Horace's Epodes’ Arethusa 24 (1991), esp. pp. 120f.Google Scholar

60 Tannen, op. cit., esp. pp. 11 Off.: ‘The act of transforming others’ words into one's own discourse is a creative and enlivening one…even if “reported” accurately. In many, perhaps most, cases, however, material represented as dialogue was never spoken by anyone else in a form resembling that constructed, if at all.’

61 Maclean, M., Narrative as Performance. The Baudelairean Experiment (London, 1988), p. 56Google Scholar, q.v.

62 Cf. The Pest's wrong-headed approach to Maecenas' good-books, ‘I'll bribe his servants’, 1.9.57.Google Scholar

63 See Armstrong, loc. cit., for the political dialectic of 1.6. Links with 1.7 include Barrus, 6.30, 7.8, and the motif of recursion, ad…redeo, 6.45, 7.9, cf. Van Rooy, p. 68 n. 3.

64 1.6 has articulated the force behind 1.1. l's titular ascription of the book to its controller, / Qui fit, Maecenas…(‘How is it, Maecenas…’), namely the entitlement of Horace to speak, to speak in the name of his (satirically caricatured) Iuppiter…iratus (1.1.20f., ‘Jupiter…in anger’).

65 Ahl in Culler, op. cit., p. 32.

66 RE 22.2, p. 1550, Bremmer, J. N. and Horsfall, N. M., Roman Myth and Mythography, BICS Suppl. 52 (1987), p. 60.Google Scholar

67 See Cic. Tusc. Disp. 1.104, where ‘Lord-of-Language’ Anaxagoras of Clazomenae dies in the ‘light’ of Lampsacus.

68 As in Auson. Epigr. 93, pace RE 11, pp. 554f.

69 Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech’, in Shapiro, M. (ed.), Language and Politics (Oxford, 1984), pp. 25ffGoogle Scholar., and Hampton, T., ‘Writing after History’ in Writing after History: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Cornell, 1990), p. 221Google Scholar, using the example of the stage Brutus.

70 So in Cic. Phil. 3.8ff., where D. Brutus and Antony replay L. Brutus and Tarquinius Superbus, tyrannous Antony ‘cut the throats and butchered’ surrendered citizens (iugulauit…et…trucidauerat, 10).

71 Cf. Plut. Brut. 1.2, Ogilvie, R. M., A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5 (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar, on Liv. 4.12–16; cf. DuQuesnay, p. 206 n. 89, RE 2A, p. 1771. He specially asked Atticus to trace the Iunia familia from stock to the present, Nep. Att. 18.3.

72 Serres, M., Rome. The Book of Foundations (Stanford, 1991), p. 135.Google Scholar

73 The inoculatory language of these ritualistic formulae (nb. ‘gods/dogs’) is undone by ‘these butchers’ at 3.1.255, cf. Sterling, B., ‘Ritual in Julius Caesar’, in Ure, P. (ed.), Shakespeare (London, 1970), pp. 160ff.Google Scholar

74 Mistaken ‘vengeance’, so not vengeance at all. Cf. Suet. Iul. 85, Hampton, op. cit., 213, Morgan, J. D., ‘The Death of Cinna the Poet’, CQ 40 (1990), 558–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

75 Girard, R., Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar: demystified by Gordon, R., ‘Reason and Ritual in Greek Tragedy’, in Shaffer, E. (ed.), Comparative Criticism 1 (1979), pp. 279ffGoogle Scholar. Cf. Serres, op. cit., p. 167, ‘Sextus Tarquinius is sacrificed at Gabii.…He is expelled from the City.…Here is the condition of the new liberty, history says. Here is the sacrificial mechanism of the social pact, the anthropologist would say. Here is the requisite for the constitution of the world, the philosopher said.’

76 Serpieri, A., ‘Reading the Signs: Towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama’, in Drakakis, J. (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London, 1985), pp. 126ff.Google Scholar

77 Cf. Henderson, J., ‘Lucan/The Word at War’, in Boyle, A. J. (ed.), The Imperial Muse, Volume 1, To Juvenal Through Ovid (Victoria, 1988), pp. 126ff.Google Scholar

78 Thus Plutarch's Life of Caesar culminates in Cassius' suicide ‘with his self-same tyrannicide blade’, and ends with Brutus’ assisted decease.

79 Pace M. Mahood, ‘Words and Names’, in Ure, op. cit., p. 78, who would hold that this superstition is only ‘for the ignorant and irrational’.

80 So Cic. De Off. 3.40, cognationem Superbi nomenque Tarquiniorum et memoriam regni esse tollendam, De Rep. 2.53, Collatinum innocentem offensione cognominis expulerunt et reliquos Tarquinios offensione nominis, Oglivie, op. cit., on Liv. 2.2. The myth requires that we keep mum about ‘the fact that Brutus is also a Tarquin, son of the king's sister Tarquinia’, cf. Kraus, C. S., ‘Initium turbandi omnia afemina ortum est: Fabia Minor and the Election of 367 B.c.’, Phoenix 45 (1991), p. 320 n. 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To prove the rule: how splendid that Cicero should contrive to unearth quidam L. Tarquinius ‘arrested on his way to join Catiline's bid for Rome’ (Sall. Cat. 48.3): McGushin, P., Sallust. Bellum Catilinae (Bristol, 1980)Google Scholar drily comments ad loc., ‘Nothing else is known about this man’. Nothing, that is, bar his name: but that is the force of his existence, his part is to play the last of the Roman Tarquins, true to pedigree to the end.

81 Heinemann, M., ‘How Brecht Read Shakespeare’, in Dollimore, J. and Sinfield, A. (edd.), Political Shakespeare. New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester, 1985), p. 220.Google Scholar

82 See Tyler, S., The Said and the Unsaid (New York, 1978), p. 465.Google Scholar

83 For the constitution of a régime of politesse through evasion of explicitation, see Brown, P. and Levinson, S., Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

84 Lloyd Bentsen.

85 1.6 has indeed just re-valorised through its repudiation ‘breeding’ as the yardstick against which self-worth can be measured: must the libertinus plead parity with the atavistically regal Etruscan, or is that the Ancient History of the populus Romanus? For the point, cf. esp. Greenblatt, S., ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Dollimore and Sinfield, op. cit., p. 29Google Scholar, quoting Kafka, ‘We identify as the principle of order and authority in Renaissance texts things that we would, if we took them seriously, find subversive for ourselves.… “There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us”’.

86 Caesar died in silence, or his last words were unRoman: καì σύ, τέκνον (‘“To hell with you, too, lad!”…In using this apotropaic expression, Caesar died with a curse on his lips’, Russell, J., ‘Caesar's Last Words. A Reinterpretation’, in Marshall, B. (ed.), Vindex Humanitatis. Essays in Honour of J. H. Bishop (New England, 1980), p. 128Google Scholar. Et tu Brute is first extant from 1595, ib. p. 124 and n. 7).

87 You may hear a sotto voce interfusion merge the satiric personae: / Proscripti Regis Rupili pus… / hybrida…pacto…Persius…opinor / …Persius…permagna…Rege…posset uincere…Regem / …Barros…praecurreret…Regent redeo. postquam…Priamiden…disparibus…pigrior…Bruto praetore…Rupili et Persi par pugnat…acres procurrunt…Persius exponit…ridetur…Brutum…Brutum…salubris…Rege…hibernum fertur…ruebat rara securis…Praenestinus…expressa regerit…compellans…postquam…perfusus…Persius…per…Brute…reges…tollere…Regem…oper(um)…tuorumst.

88 Shakespeare shows that the already silenced can't be silenced when he designs his Portia to figure the tyrannicides' suicides: ‘It is not necessarily a power to have a voice, not necessarily a sign of subjection to lose it.’ (Goldberg, J., ‘Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power’, in Parker, P. and Hartman, G. (edd.), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London, 1985), p. 130.)Google Scholar

89 On this load of old cobbler's puns, cf. Hampton, op. cit., p. 213, and Margolies, D., ‘Teaching the Handsaw to Fly: Shakespeare as a Hegemonic Instrument’, in Holderness, G. (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester, 1988), pp. 43–5Google Scholar, ‘Indirection still characterises the cobbler's response.…If the tribunes appear to have “won” from the standpoint of the action, in terms of style it is the cobbler who wins. His circumlocution is part of traditional popular humour. Like the clever stupidity of Brer Rabbit or the Arkansas Traveller, it expresses the ironic power of the politically powerless.…Only through insistence on the complete and general superiority of those who hold superior social position…’. Political reading regularly consists in realising and theorizing the mythic and historical specificities of ‘the crowd’, cf. Heinemann, loc. cit., p. 226: a Shakespearean ‘pre-industrial city crowd’ equates with ‘modern miners and dockers’ only as ‘stereotype’.

90 This is an aspect of the struggle for power over the dispersion of language through the populace, cf. Crowley, T., ‘Bakhtin and the History of the Language’, in Hirschkop and Shepherd, op. cit., pp. 68–90.Google Scholar

91 Leith, D. and Myerson, G., The Power of Address. Explorations in Rhetoric (London, 1989), pp. 36, 39.Google Scholar

92 Cf. Nash, W., The Language of Humour. Style and Technique in Comic Discourse (London, 1985), pp. 62ffGoogle Scholar., esp. pp. 70f. on the taking up of the anecdote into larger and higher forms.

93 Cf. Chambers, R., Story and Situation. Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Manchester, 1984).Google Scholar

94 Foucault, M., ‘The Order of Mimesis’, in Young, op. cit., p. 52Google Scholar (= Shapiro, op. cit., p. 109).

95 Serres, op. cit., p. 124.

96 Cf. esp. Van Rooy, pp. 71, 77ff.

97 See Rapport, N., Talking Violence. An Anthropological Interpretation of Conversation in the City (Newfoundland, 1987), pp. 174ffGoogle Scholar., tracing deployment of the concept ‘violence’ in the selffiguration of a contemporary citizenry.

98 As in ‘Where are you going?—To see a man about a dog’, Leith and Myerson, op. cit., p. 120.

99 Cf. Marin, L., The Discourse of the King (London, 1988), p. 61Google Scholar, ‘Thus the man of letters lures power with the lure of his instrument, discourse, meta-discourse, and its figures. Thus simultaneously, he obtains from power—and with his trap—the power of the power of the discourse that he holds.’

100 Serres, op. cit., p. 171. ‘For his Brutus begun in 1788, David did choose a Roman Republican theme—the expulsion of a tyrant—…. In the very same year Alfieri…in Paris dedicated his tragedy Bruto Primo to George Washington with the words: “Only the name of the liberator of America can stand on the opening page of the tragedy of the liberator of Rome.”…David was not the only genius, nor were his the only works, that were supposed to have anticipated the revolution. Voltaire also was hailed as a prophet and his tragedy of Brutus (first performed sixty years earlier) was revived in the autumn of 1790 with David's picture staged as a tableau vivant at its close.…In painting…the Brutus, David expressed the mood of those intellectuals who, like himself, were to be swept along on the wave of the Revolution.…Soon David…was to see Napoleon…as the one man capable of…’ (Honour, H., Neo-Classicism [Harmondsworth, 1968], 72–7).Google Scholar